![]() ![]() If Plath's nemeses were her parents and her husband, Reinaldo's were Communism and Fidel Castro. He shared with Plath a talent for self-dramatization and a fury that could scorch anyone who got too close. It's beginning to look like Reinaldo will become the Sylvia Plath of Latin American letters. He became a darling of academia, where several of his books are required reading and the object of much abstruse deconstruction. When Before Night Falls appeared in Latin America and Spain-despite glowing endorsements by Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Mario Vargas Llosa-it went mostly unread.įortunately, the appearance in English of the autobiography was treated as a major event, and Reinaldo was discovered by many gay readers who, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, found that the man's struggles, and his end, resonated with their recent experiences. After he died, I tried to communicate my excitement about the greatness of these late accomplishments, but my friends, Latin Americans and North Americans alike, dismissed my enthusiasm. "I'm glad you think so," he said, in a tone that suggested he realized the magnitude of his achievement. When I saw Reinaldo again I was able to tell him how utterly extraordinary I thought they were. Weeks before Reinaldo died, when I went to visit him at his apartment, he gave me a copy of his book of poems, Voluntad de Vivir Manifestándose, and a manuscript copy of Before Night Falls. The son of illiterate peasants, he had little formal education, and carved with a knife his first poems on tree trunks in the Cuban countryside. If ever there were a writer less destined to become one, it would be Reinaldo Arenas. By comparison, the heroic Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, who had to memorize her poems so they would not be found by Stalin's goons, had it easy. His epic poem, El Central, is dedicated to "my dear friend R., who made me a present of 87 sheets of blank paper." He penned the monumental The Color of Summer and his expansive autobiography while dying of AIDS. By his own account, Arenas rewrote three times his voluminous novel Farewell to the Sea, a work that kept being confiscated and disappearing from his and his friends' homes. He continued to write in El Morro prison, a fortress built by the Spaniards during colonial times that early in the revolution became a dungeon where homosexuals, political dissidents, and other undesirables were locked up. ![]() As a fugitive from the law, he wrote high up in the canopy of trees in Havana's parks, where he hid from the Cuban police. Arenas's life was about the act of writing-writing as salvation and, most important, writing as revenge. It was good training for what was to come. Walking out of the church, Tom Colchie, our mutual agent, said to me, "When he was alive, I couldn't give his books away." Who could have predicted it? His memorial service was attended by fewer than a dozen people. Last summer saw the belated publication of The Color of Summer (the final novel in Arenas's pentagonía about Cuban history), and Julian Schnabel has directed a powerful film based on his autobiography, Before Night Falls. Ten years after Reinaldo Arenas's grim ending-he killed himself in 1990 in his Hell's Kitchen apartment, where he lived in poverty, ravaged by AIDS, without health insurance-the exiled Cuban writer is in vogue. It is written by Jaime Manrique for the Village Voice. I bring you here the most complete article about Arenas that I have found online. After watching the film, Al Pacino called Bardem to congratulate him for the true spirit that he showed when portraying Arenas. Javier Bardem made his international breakthrough here, with this role. The film is visually stunning and the casting brings the plot to the very edge, delivering a very respectful effort that depicts the living hell of this man's life. How could I not merge these two columns when I deal with the underrated phenomenon of Reinaldo Arenas? The art of cinema pays tribute to poetry with Julian Schnabel's adaptation of BEFORE NIGHT FALLS, the autobiographic book by the most cursed of all Cuban poets. ![]()
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