Arenas Reinaldo - Before Night Falls: A Memoir

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The astonishing memoir by visionary Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas is a book above all about being free, said The New York Review of Bookssexually, politically, artistically. Arenass stunning odyssey, beginning with his poverty-stricken childhood and sensual awakening in rural Cuba through his adolescence as a rebel fighting for Castro, goes on to recount his eventual suppression as a writer and his imprisonment as a homosexual. Arenas details his harrowing escape from Cuba via the Mariel boat lift, as well as his subsequent life in New York Citys Hells Kitchen, including the disturbing events leading to his death. In what The Miami Herald calls his deathbed ode to eroticism, Arenas managed to forge his ultimate achievement as a writer. Its lucid, powerful prose reveals the true story of the iconoclastic life that inspired the authors internationally acclaimed novels.

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BEFORE NIGHT FALLS

REINALDO ARENAS was born in Holgun, Cuba, in 1943. In the 1970s, he was imprisoned multiple times for his openly homosexual lifestyle, which clashed with the beliefs of the Communist regime. Despite the hardships imposed during his imprisonment, Arenas produced a significant body of work, including his Pentagona, a set of five novels written between the 1960s and 1980s that comprise a secret history of post-revolutionary Cuba: Singing from the Well, Farewell to the Sea, ThePalace of the White Skunks, TheColor of Summer, and The Assault. In 1980, he was one of 120,000 Cubans who arrived in the United States on the Mariel boat lift. Arenas settled in New York where he lived until his death from AIDS ten years later.

JAIME MANRIQUE is a Colombian-born novelist, poet, essayist, and translator who writes both in English and Spanish, and whose work has been translated into fifteen languages. Among his publications in English are the novels Colombian Gold, Latin Moon in Manhattan, Twilight at the Equator, Our Lives Are the Rivers, and Cervantes Street; he has also published the memoir Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig,andMe. His honors include Colombias National Poetry Award, a 2007 International Latino Book Award (Best Novel, Historical Fiction), and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a distinguished lecturer in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures at the City College of New York.

Cuban-born DOLORES M. KOCH (19282009) held a Ph.D. in Latin American Literature. She also translated another of Reinaldo Arenass works, The Doorman.

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This English translation first published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 1993

Published in Penguin Books 1994

This edition with a foreword by Jaime Manrique published in Penguin Books 2020

English translation copyright 1993 by the Estate of Reinaldo Arenas and Dolores M. Koch

Foreword copyright 2020 by Jaime Manrique

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Originally published in Spain as Antes que anochezca (Autobiografa) by Tusquets Editores, S.A., copyright 1992 by the Estate of Reinaldo Arenas

ISBN 9780143134848 (hardcover)

ISBN 9780525507154 (ebook)

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the authors alone.

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CONTENTS

BEFORE NIGHT FALLS

FOREWORD

The Irrepressible Rhythm of Life

If Reinaldo Arenas had lived during the age of the Roman Empire, it might have been said about him that Fortuna, the goddess of luck, seldom smiled on him during his lifetime. But in the more secular twentieth century in which Reinaldo Arenas lived his life, he is one in a group of indispensable writers who endured censorship, persecution, and exile from the totalitarian ideologies of communism and fascism. Even in the context of Latin America, where many dissident thinkers are routinely jailed, killed, or exiled from their own countries (Im including here journalists too), Reinaldos case was extreme: copies of his 1982 novel Farewell to the Sea were confiscated and destroyed many times by the Castro regime when paper was a luxury in Cuba and making Xerox copies of a long manuscript meant financial hardship to a penniless writer.

Like the writings of the Russian poets Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, and Joseph Brodsky, who wrote under Stalinism, Reinaldos works were subject to confiscation and were smuggled off the island so they could be published in other countries.