Reynaldo Arenas

Reinaldo Arenas (July 16, 1943 – December 7, 1990) was a Cuban poet, novelist, and playwright known as a vocal critic of Fidel Castro, the Cuban Revolution, and the Cuban government.

When conditions in the city started to get worse, around 1958, he decided that he wanted to join the guerillas (Castro and his movement), by then he was 14.

He walked to Velasco where he met Cuco Sánchez who took him to the Pro-Soviet Cuban guerrilla headquarters in the Sierra Gibara.

A guerilla Commandante, Eddy Suñol, interviewed Arenas and then said, "We have plenty of guerrillas; what we need is weapons."

After ten days with them, he went back to Holguín with the intention of killing a guard and taking his weapon.

When he made it back to the city, he went home to see his grandparents who were not so happy to see him.

Because he made the mistake of leaving a note saying he was going to join the guerillas, the women that lived with his grandparents spread the news like wildfire.

Fulgencio Batista's secret police, the Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities, were on the lookout for him.

His brief trip home made him realize he could not stay, so he trekked back to Velasco to the rebel encampment.

They had to accept him at that point.

When he was 16, he was awarded a scholarship at La Pantoja, the Batista military camp that had been converted into a polytechnic institute.

At the school, one of the most important courses was on Marxist–Leninism.

Students had to master the Manual of the USSR Academy of Sciences; Manual of Political Economy by Nikitin; Foundations of Socialism in Cuba by Blas Roca.

Arenas graduated as an agricultural accountant, but later described his schooling as "communist indoctrination".

The first time Arenas was in Havana was in 1960.

He returned later when he enrolled in a planning course at the University of Havana and reported to the Hotel Nacional de Cuba.

While in the program, he worked for INRA, the National Institute for Agrarian Reform.

It was not until around 1963 that Arenas started to live his life as a gay man, but even then, it was still a life in extreme secrecy.

He feared ending up in one of the Military Units to Aid Production, which were concentration camps for LGBT people, Christians, and suspected members of the Cuban dissident movement.

A relationship with a man named Miguel, who was later arrested and taken to a UMAP, was the beginning of Arenas' life of being known as a gay man by the Cuban Committees for the Defense of the Revolution.

Throughout his life, Arenas became friends with and had relationships with many gay men.

Even going so far to say that at one point, he had had sex with at least 5,000 men.

He watched as various friends and acquaintances pledged their allegiance to the regime in exchange for safety.

They became informers for the government and reported other men, oftentimes friends and/or people they had relationships with in the past.

The intention was to find gay and bisexual men and either prosecute and jail them or turn them into informers too.

The reward for cooperating with the regime was your life.

In order to become an informer, though, it often meant participating in Acts of repudiation denouncing their anti-regime beliefs or their homosexuality publicly – a very humiliating act.

Arenas watched this happen with Herberto Padilla.

He had written a book that was critical of the Cuban Revolution to an official competition.

Padilla was arrested in 1971 and after 30 days in a cell, he decided to speak.

Various Cuban intellectuals were invited by State Security to hear what he had to say.

His memoir of the Cuban dissident movement and of being a political prisoner, Before Night Falls, was dictated after his escape to the United States during the 1980 Mariel boatlift and published posthumously, after Arenas, who was dying of AIDS, committed suicide with an overdose of pills.

Arenas was born in the countryside of Newport Beach, Aguas Claras, Holguín Province, Cuba, and later moved to the city of Holguín as a teenager.

He was six years old when he started school, attending Rural School 91 in Perronales County.

At that school, his interest in boys flourished.

He writes about his sexual exploration with himself and the people around him, even detailing that most of his sexual activity was with animals.

He talks openly of how the first times he had straight sex, while incomplete, was with his cousin, Dulce Maria.

He also shares that his first act of gay sex was with his cousin Orlando when he was aged eight and his cousin was 12.

He says, "In the country, sexual energy generally overcomes all prejudice, repression, and punishment... Physical desire overpowers whatever feelings of machismo our fathers take upon themselves to instill in us."

After moving to Holguín when he was a teen, Arenas got a job at a guava paste factory.