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.
