‘Before Night Falls’: Reinaldo Arenas breaks down (in) Fidel Castro’s Cuba

. The mass exodus of Cubans to the US, which enabled Arenas to flee his persecution and surveillance by Castro’s secret police, happened by chance. .

To Africans, some of whom were recipients of Castro’s generosity, the Cuba Arenas invokes is scarcely believable. This can’t be the same Castro who sent Cuban soldiers in 1975 to shore up the MPLA government in Angola, and whose participation in the Cuito Cuanavale battle against apartheid South Africa’s army was a decisive move in the freeing of Namibia and the dismantling of legalised racism in South Africa.

Reinaldo Arenas was born in 1943 in Perronales County, in Oriente province, eastern Cuba, during the reign of the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista, and grew up in a home dominated by his grandmother. Arenas enjoyed his formative years: “I think the splendour of my childhood was unique because it was absolute poverty but also absolute freedom; out in the open, surrounded by trees, animals, apparitions and people who were indifferent toward me.

Without a gun, he was excess to the needs of the revolution. After some days with the guerillas, he returned home. When his grandmother saw him, she let out a scream; Arenas had become a person of interest to Batista’s enforcers. On the day of his departure, Arenas had left a note, a kind of a manifesto, declaring that he was off to join the rebels.

Arenas, literally a child of the revolution, had much to gain from the new status quo, and soon got a place at a technical college, where he enrolled as a student of agricultural accounts, which he studied alongside texts by Marx, Lenin and other communist thinkers. However, Arenas is sympathetic and philosophical about it all: “Cuba is a police state,” he observes, and it follows that, “the most practical solution for many is to become policemen.”

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