Before Night Falls II

So, after coming down pretty harshly on Before Night Falls, Reinaldo Arenas' controversial memoirs, in a seminar on the Cuban Revolution, I now think, having neared the end of the book, that Arenas may have swayed me. After a point his vanity, self-indulgence, and incessant "erotic adventures" -- the main themes of the first two-hundred or so pages -- faded into the background (perhaps I just learned to read through them) as a more powerful, and more harrowing, tale came to light: the story of his persecution, arrest, prison sentence, and flight from Cuba on the Mariel boatlift in 1980. The humanity and sincerity found in the introduction, written shortly before Arenas' suicide in 1990 and in which he describes in the most graphic and terrible detail what it is like to watch oneself waste away, dying from AIDS -- the pain, the weakness, the tubes coming into and out of the body -- returns as we near the end of the story. Even more powerful than his description of the abuse which he suffered under the Castro regime, however, is Arenas' incredible portrayal of the corruption of the human soul and heart under such a dictatorial system: his friends, mostly turned informers for State Security in an effort to protect themselves, are truly changed by the end of Arenas' "tale" (it is, after all, a stylized memoir replete with exaggerations and half-truths), and their betrayal pains him greatly. I think more than anything else, the story of figures such as Hiram Prado, the former friend instrumental in Arenas' arrest and subsequent ostracization, serves as a poignant warning of the dangers to the supporters, as well as the opponents, of the socialist experiment gone wrong. There is little left of my former enthusiasm for Cuba or my admiration for the successes of the Revolution, achieved at such a high price to freedom and the human spirit.