A01=Reinaldo Arenas
AIDS
Author_Reinaldo Arenas
autobiography
Category=DNBL1
Category=DSC
Category=JBSJ
cruising
Cuba
Cuban
dissident
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
exile
Fidel Castro
free speech
freedom of speech
gay
HIV
homophobia
LGBT
memoir
poet
Product details
- ISBN 9781781258682
- Weight: 240g
- Dimensions: 128 x 196mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jun 2017
- Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Reinaldo Arenas was born to a poverty-stricken family in rural Cuba. By the time of his death in New York four decades later, he had become one of Cuba's most important poets, an outspoken critic of Castro's regime and one of the leading gay voices of the twentieth century.
In Before Night Falls, Arenas tells of his odyssey from young rebel fighting for the Revolution, through his suppression as a writer, his disillusionment with Castro, his imprisonment and torture, to his eventual exile from Cuba to New York, where in 1987 he was diagnosed with AIDS. He committed suicide in 1990, ending a life of constant struggle against repression. In a farewell note, Arenas wrote:
Due to my delicate state of health and to the terrible depression that causes me not to be able to continue writing and struggling for the freedom of Cuba, I am ending my life ...
I do not want to convey to you a message of defeat, but of continued struggle and hope.
Cuba will be free. I already am.
(signed)
Reinaldo Arenas
Reinaldo Arenas was born in Holguín, Cuba, in 1943. His first novel, Singing from the Well, was awarded First Mention in Cuba's Cirilo Villaverde National Competition. It was to be his only book published in his native country. Both as a gay man and a writer, he found himself persecuted by the Cuban government, and had to smuggle his work out of the country for publication in France. He left Cuba in 1980 and settled in New York, where he lived until his death in 1990.
