Before Night Falls

Arenas describes Cuba as a dissonant combination of paradise and prison. This dual-character conflicts Arenas: He loves Cuba as his home, for its natural splendor and beaches, but he also suffers greatly under Castro’s repressive regime. Though he is relieved to escape to the US, in exile he dreams (in both fantasy and nightmare) of returning to Cuba. This prison is cultural, political, physical, and economic.

Arenas first experiences this prison without being able to identify it as such during childhood—the most magical period of his life. His sexuality alienates him from his family and he feels trapped in loneliness. The surrounding natural beauty almost mocks his pain in its splendor: He feels imprisoned in a gilded cage. He longs for deliverance from his turmoil through destruction in the violent beauty of the jungle itself: “something was calling me to go with [the river], saying that I too had to throw myself into those raging waters and lose myself, that only in that torrent, always on the move, would I find some peace” (102). Arenas’s desire to find freedom in destruction reappears throughout his life and in the lives of those Cubans who also suffer persecution.

There is a physical element to Castro making Cuba a political prison: Surrounded by ocean, Cuba becomes after 1970 “a maximum-security jail, where everybody, according to Castro, was happy to stay” (430).