By Achy Obejas. Tribune Staff Writer. The Chicago Tribune.
February 7, 2001
The spring of his last year alive, the writer Reinaldo Arenas cockily told
the El Nuevo Herald, The Miami Herald's Spanish-language sister paper, "My
death will make my works all that more popular because, after death, one's
defects are forgiven."
He couldn't have been more prophetic. At the time of his suicide -- Dec. 9,
1990 -- Reinaldo had five novels under contract and his autobiography, "Before
Night Falls," had been dictated as he succumbed to AIDS-related
complications and the knowledge that time was running out. By then, he was a
controversial figure, a man who could provoke conflict almost anywhere he went.
But the years have proven Reinaldo right: His books are literary hits,
steady sellers, and his autobiography has become the basis for Julian Schnabel's
film "Before Night Falls," a haunting tale of political repression,
sexual delirium and rage.
Augmented by scenes from Reinaldo's writings -- and including recitations of
his melancholy poetry -- the film does what Reinaldo himself did: It travels
back and forth between what was known fiction and possible fact; it plays with
the dividing line of what was and what might have been.
In the mid-'80s, I knew Reinaldo, sought him out because I thought we shared
a few things: We were both Cuban, both queer, both writers. I thought he and I
might have the same kinds of conflicts.
My exchanges with him -- mostly long, difficult late-night talks in New York
-- revealed something else, and in a 1993 review for The Nation of "Before
Night Falls," I wrote: "What I didn't realize was that our damage was
so different: His was based on too close an acquaintance with the (Cuban)
revolution, mine by rupture with it. His need to write was, as he put it, `a
scream,' a defiance against all who might suppress him -- it was his way of
staying alive; my need to write was a process of discovery and affirmation, but
it was quieter because my life has rarely been in danger."
What I found in Reinaldo was a man driven by demons and huge reserves of
resentment. His main obsessions were Fidel Castro and a loathing for Miami, the
Cuban exile capital, particularly its writers and intellectuals. I didn't share
either, and by the time he died, it had been years since we'd had contact. I
thought then, as now, that those twin hatreds made him a complex but ultimately
bitter and tragic figure.
Amazingly, especially since Schnabel's "Before Night Falls" has as
co-writer Lazaro Gomez Carriles, Reinaldo's companion in his later years, the
film managed to miss his two fixations. And by eliminating them, it also erases
the acerbic, acid-tongued Reinaldo of real life, the Reinaldo who could on
occasion be very cruel, even to the people he most loved.
Instead, the movie portrays a Reinaldo that the real life Reinaldo --
knowing all too well its irony -- would have loved: Played by Spanish actor
Javier Bardem, this Reinaldo is not just boyishly attractive, but cuddly. This
Reinaldo is charming and tender, a sensitive and willing acolyte to mentors such
as the writers Jose Lezama Lima and Virgilio Pinera, sometimes almost an
innocent. Yet, I confess that as I watched the film, I was moved by Bardem's
reincarnation of my friend, even in his small gestures -- the way he uses his
hands is particularly true.
But in the movie version of "Before Night Falls," there is no real
sense of Reinaldo's rabid denouncements of Castro, no mention of Miami at all,
and, at the very end, there's a mysterious letter to the media that Schnabel
doesn't explain. And to really understand Reinaldo, I think, both his
relationship to the exile community and that letter are crucial.
Reinaldo came to the world's attention for the first time in 1965, when his
novel "Singing From the Well" was awarded first honorable mention in a
literary contest in Cuba. "Singing From the Well" went on to win the
Prix Medici in France for the best foreign novel in 1969 but it was never
reprinted in Cuba because Reinaldo, like other gays, had fallen from favor. From
1965-'67, Cuba set up forced labor camps for gays and sympathizers, hoping to
re-direct their desire through work and re-education.
Sometime around 1974, Reinaldo was imprisoned at Morro Castle, some say on
trumped-up charges of child molestation because the authorities had had enough
of him. Back then, he was constantly smuggling out his writings and getting them
published abroad, including here in the U.S.
Reinaldo suffered plenty in Cuba but that persecution also made him
something of an international star. He appeared on numerous prisoners of
conscience lists (including PEN's), and he was praised for his courage in the
face of Castro's tactics by the Cuban exile community. The U.S. gay and lesbian
press, though not much concerned with Cuba or literary matters, hailed him as
something of a hero.
So imagine his surprise when he arrived in the U.S. during the Mariel
boatlift and discovered that his celebrity was so fragile. Once here, free and
unfettered, the Cuban exile community had little use for him. As hard as it may
be to believe now, back in 1980 there wasn't much of a Cuban cultural presence
in Miami -- indeed, it would be the Mariel refugees who would later establish
theaters, art galleries and magazines and help spark both the rebirth of South
Beach and the Cuban cultural renaissance in South Florida.
But when Reinaldo arrived, there wasn't really anywhere for him to hang his
hat. Being a bad boy in Havana was one thing, but being a bad boy in Miami had
different implications: Nobody really wanted to hear about his sexuality in the
exile community, and nobody wanted to hear his anti-Castro speeches in the gay
one.
Not only did Reinaldo write long, manic pieces against Castro in American
and European publications, but he was ferocious in his denunciations of other
exiles whom he perceived as not being anti-Castro enough. In New York and Miami,
Reinaldo disrupted conferences and public meetings, not politely, but by
screaming and throwing things. Though Reinaldo was notorious for his Castro
obsession, "Before Night Falls" doesn't touch it at all.
In addition, Reinaldo was also an outsider to the U.S. gay and lesbian
community, where his own archaic ideas about homosexuality -- including a strong
sense of dominance and submission that he explained in terms that echoed
heterosexual norms -- were viewed as quaint at best, and self-hating at worst.
If Reinaldo chafed under Castro's thumb, he was equally frustrated in exile.
Once in New York, when he ran into Pablo Armando Fernandez, a poet who has had
good and bad times in Cuba but has never defected, Reinaldo surprised everyone
by throwing himself in the older man's arms. "I've been banished," he
cried, using the Spanish word "desterrado," which means something
closer to "torn from my roots."
By the time of his death, Reinaldo was living in squalid poverty in a small
sixth-floor walkup in Hell's Kitchen. Schnabel's film does a fine job of showing
his isolation and loneliness, of illustrating his yearning for Cuba, but it
completely erases all the trauma contributed so much to his persona in those
last few days.
Curiously, the film also allows Gomez Carriles to literally straighten
things out: Though Reinaldo's own take on their relationship in the book is that
they're lovers, in the film version of "Before Night Falls," the
connection between the two men is more ambiguous. In addition, in the movie
Gomez Carriles hints that Reinaldo stole the idea for the novel "The Porter"
from him, an outrageous claim when one considers Reinaldo's prolific
imagination and Gomez Carriles' lack of literary output in the 11 years since
Reinaldo's death.
The film version of Reinaldo's death also positions Gomez Carriles at his
side, something which was never mentioned in the original news accounts. In that
final scene, Reinaldo hands him a mysterious letter to be mailed to the media.
In real life, the letter announced his suicide but blamed Castro for his
death. According to Reinaldo -- who had once boasted that he'd had more 5,000
sexual conquests before turning 25 -- if Castro hadn't come to power he would
have never left Cuba and so never contracted AIDS. Rather than die of AIDS,
Reinaldo felt compelled to do things his way at the end.
Since the movie's release, I've been amazed by the amnesia from all quarters
implicated in Reinaldo's life. In Miami, the movie had a special screening that
brought Schnabel and Gomez Carriles to a community forum followed by a
star-studded party. The people who once saw him as an embarrassment now fawn at
his name.
The U.S. gay and lesbian press celebrates "Before Night Falls" and
drools over Bardem's Reinaldo, just a year after a group of high-profile gay
intellectuals drew up a list of the 100 top gay novels and managed to ignore
every one of Reinaldo's.
In Cuba -- the only place Reinaldo really cared about -- his books still
aren't available but, even in the most official circles, his work is now an
integral part of the canonical discourse.
Yes, indeed, Reinaldo, all is forgiven.
Before
Night Falls (film's official site) | 