Upon the death of Fidel Castro last month, President Obama remarked, “History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him.” The statement was cowardly in striving for judicious balance to describe the legacy of a dictator who jailed and murdered thousands over the course of five decades. It was also wrong: History has already judged Castro, and the verdict is damning.
This history is documented not in the cursory statements of presidents and prime ministers or the steady stream of tweets and other social media efforts soon destined, their authors may well hope, to dissolve into air. Rather, it is written in books, and perhaps one book in particular, Before Night Falls. Reinaldo Arenas’s autobiography is one of the 20th century’s most extraordinary political memoirs, even more powerful for the fact that its author did not consider himself political, neither of the right nor of the left, but simply a voice of freedom.
It was 26 years ago this week, December 7, 1990, that the Cuban writer took his life in a Manhattan apartment. He had escaped his native island as part of the Mariel boatlift in 1980. Ten years later, Arenas was dying from AIDS, in pain and distraught, but also grateful to have been granted the time he needed to finish his work, including his memoir, before he died. “Persons near me are in no way responsible for my decision,” he wrote in a letter he left to be found after his death and which is appended to the end of Before Night Falls.
Before Night Falls is a sustained indictment of Castro and perhaps the angriest book ever written about an authoritarian regime. It is in part a prison diary, an account of the actual prisons where Arenas was held for more than three years and the prison that Cuba became under Castro, a country of informants and suicides.
As Arenas’s story makes clear, there are essentially only two choices available under a Communist regime—collaboration or escape, even if it means death. In one of the book’s most horrifying scenes, Arenas recalls watching a prisoner trying to escape by climbing down a barbed-wire fence. Finding that his rope left him far above the ground, the prisoner jumped and broke both legs. As he crawled for freedom, or safety, or just a few more breaths, the guards shot him to death. Desperation and cruelty were durable features of the Castro regime.
Arenas was gay, and while the Castro regime persecuted homosexuals—save those close to the ruling clique—it was not primarily because of Arenas’s sexual orientation that the Communists hunted him. Arenas had sided with the revolution in his youth. As he shows in his memoir, there are plenty of Cuban intellectuals and artists who swallowed their pride and praised Castro or kept quiet, even as the vicious character of the regime became clear. Others were forced to denounce themselves, friends, and even spouses. What seems to have distinguished Arenas from so many others was not necessarily courage, but stubbornness. He was a simple peasant boy who grew up on a farm. When he came to see the regime as an enemy of freedom and beauty, he knew Castro was his enemy.
“A sense of beauty is always dangerous and antagonistic to any dictatorship,” he writes,
Thus the book is also a song to beauty and heroism—or the small gestures and actions that constitute the heroic under an authoritarian regime—written by a man who cherished his copy of the Iliad. Arenas was by most accounts a difficult man, but it is a sign of his generosity of spirit that the heroes of his own epic are modern Cuba’s two greatest writers, José Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera, both of whom die broken men on the island. Arenas even forgives some of those who betrayed him—he understands the Castro regime left them no other choice.
Arenas would not extend the same courtesy to those who had options, those who had eyes but chose not to see. After he made it to America, Arenas found that other writers and intellectuals waged a campaign against him to protect Castro’s reputation.
Some of his own book publishers denounced him and said he never should have left Cuba. Latin American intellectuals, like the novelist Eduardo Galeano, whom Arenas called a front man for Castro, attacked him, as did European academics. Arenas would not have been surprised to hear the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau praise Castro last week—and he would have known how to respond.
In power for 57 years, the 90-year-old Castro outlived the thousands he jailed, tortured, and murdered. In spite of the equivocations and the encomia of political officials, from the president of Iran to the president of the European Union, and the rest of the global elite, Castro’s reputation is not in dispute. Reinaldo Arenas’s words serve as a permanent witness of those victims of Castro’s cruelties, an enduring record and judgment of the dictator. And yet Before Night Falls is also a promise of liberty, pledged to the future. The letter he left to be found after his death concludes with what are apparently the last words the writer wrote:
Lee Smith is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
