<< 1

Filming in Mérida and Veracruz, Mexico, using snatches of archival footage from Cuba, Schnabel fashions a fusion of images that are lush, even breathtaking in their beauty, then graphic, harsh, and harrowing -- all in the service of the stylized, sanitized confection that Arenas becomes. As much as the book Before Night Falls is a tirade against the revolution, for Schnabel it lacks sufficient dramatic pop. To remedy this, he introduces further outrageous lies to propel the plot to its objective function: slandering all the Cuban the revolution was, and is. This method is hardly original, and parallels that employed by Arenas, who began the book while still in Cuba and finished it on his deathbed. (Before Night Falls was published in English three years later.) Arenas' memoir chronicles his own and Cuba's history, reconstructed and reinvented where necessary to conform to his hatred of the revolutionary government -- a position he did not always hold.

Javier Bardem, the Spanish actor who plays the adult Arenas and narrates the film, inhabits the role with exuberant talent and obvious sympathy. He eerily resembles the writer, who died penniless in a Hell's Kitchen apartment. Ravaged by AIDS, Arenas committed suicide in New York in 1990. His "farewell letter," sent to and published by the U.S. press, raised the "hope that Cuba will soon be free" and urged "Cuban people out of the country as well as those on the Island to continue fighting for freedom." At the "Before Night Falls" movie website, the letter is edited to omit the "only person" Arenas held "accountable" for his decision to kill himself -- you guessed it: Fidel Castro.

Bardem gets the politics of this. He told Interview magazine that he was "really proud" of the film because "it deals with intolerance" and is a protest against "totalitarianism in any country." Schnabel described how "very brave it was for [Bardem] to play Reinaldo, a role that so clearly defines the intolerance of Castro" because the actor "comes from a family of Communists."

Meanwhile the cinematic and technical qualities of the film raise it far above B-movie mediocrity. Progressive Hollywood drapes over this production, lending virtual pro bono proof that this isn't a rightist screed, but an exercise in the irrepressibility of the human spirit.

Johnny Depp does a star turn as an imprisoned transvestite and an over-the-top cartoon of a steely prison official who extracts a self-abnegating confession from the imprisoned Arenas, demanding the poet fellate the barrel of his .45 automatic. So what if this is pure invention by Schnable? So what if the official threatens Arenas with "disappearance" should he not sign, while the undisputed historical fact is that -- unlike numerous countries where governments count on U.S. support, military training, and torture instruction -- there has never been a "disappeared person" in Cuba? It's Johnny Depp.

Sean Penn has a cameo as a peasant who, unlike his brothers, doesn't join the rebels in the fight against the Batista dictatorship. And Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson contribute original compositions to the evocative score of Cuba music, which includes tunes by the legendary Benny More.

You get the picture. The film's target audience in not the right, but those possibly or already sympathetic to Cuba.

"Before Night Falls" reflects the dominant image of Arena's view of "horrific" state repression, particularly of gay Cubans. Brief symbolic allusion is made to the impact of Soviet advisers, whose presence signals the nullification of the revolution's original impulse. Newsreel clips of Fidel Castro -- with the Dictator's apparently harsh words narrating scenes of police and military brutality -- bracket scenes of personal betrayal and humiliating self-criticisms.

In a key episode, the film shows a group in an apartment watching a televised recantation, presumably by prize-winning poet Heberto Padilla. (His 1971 real-life arrest and public confession for insufficient commitment to the revolution represented a nadir in Cuban cultural life.) The scene ends with the suicidal leap of a woman in the group, apparently one of several politically incorrect writers and artists cited by Padilla in his apologia. Another Schnabel fabrication.

Time folds in on all these sketches, which hurtle forward after one another in defiance of any historical framework and in negation of historical accuracy.

Conditions that bred the revolution in the first place are unmentioned or, rather, animate Arenas' poetic claim that "the splendor of my childhood was unique because it was absolute poverty but also absolute freedom; out in the open, surrounded by trees, animals, apparitions." This would be news to the rural poor whose experience with bucolic super-exploitation convinced them to sustain the Rebel Army against Batista's guns, tanks, and bombers.

A brief scene of the teenaged Reinaldo hopping on the back of a truck full of triumphant combatants in Holguín is meant to give substance to the biographical assertion that Arenas "joined Castro's guerrillas." But being swept up into the mass enthusiasm unleashed by pending victory is a far cry from carrying out guerrilla actions or urban organizing -- against which the dictatorship extracted a price of 30,000 civilian deaths. Yet even Schnabel's filmed snippet is at odds with what Arenas states in his memoir.

When Arenas sought to enlist in the Rebel Army, he was told -- as was the norm -- that he had to obtain his own weapon, by a killing a Batista cop and taking it from him. Arenas failed in the mission, but still returned to the mountains. The guerrilleros couldn't return him to Holguín, for certain arrest and torture awaited. They allowed the teenager to stay. Arenas wrote that he ate occasional meals with a nearby aunt. "I never took part in any battle; I never even witnessed a battle; those battles were more myth than reality," he claimed. Two years of revolutionary battle against the tyranny was, according to Arenas, simply "a war of words."

As late as 1968, however, the Arenas who existed prior to his autobiographical revision was an ardent defender of the revolution. (He was interviewed as a revolutionary and widely respected poet/writer of the new generation by Harry Ring, a veteran socialist journalist who spent three months in Cuba reporting for the Militant.)

Missing entirely from the film are any of Cuba's social and economic transformations -- from the most extensive land reform in the history of the Americas to nationalization of the country's foreign-owned resources -- all forged by popular mobilization. About the historic literacy drive, the creation of medical services in the countryside, the elimination of Jim Crow-style discrimination, nada. The audience sees only the substitution of one barely mentioned tyranny to another -- now headed by, as Arenas wrote, "a dictator much worse than Batista."

Interventionist hostility from Washington that revolutionary changes incited -- from the generously financed terrorist bands to the U.S.-sponsored invasion at the Bay of Pigs, the imposition of the embargo, and the so-called Cuban missile crisis -- have no place in Schnabel's screenplay (co-written with Cunningham O'Keefe and Lazaro Gómez Carríles, Arenas' long-time friend).

The implication is unavoidable: the enemy of the Cuban people is at home, bearded, and in olive-green uniforms -- not in the United States.

The Cuban revolution's record on homosexuals' rights has been the subject of disinformation and misinformation for decades. Previous efforts by Cuba's enemies to make use of the government's 1960s and '70s deficiencies in this area were crowned by "Improper Conduct," Néstor Almendros' 1984 "documentary," which is laden with fabrications, distortions and half-truths.

But the campaign began to founder in the face of significant changes in Cuba. This evolution is symbolized in Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's landmark Cuban film, "Strawberry and Chocolate" (released in the U.S. in 1994), which skewered dogmatic features of the Cuban Communist Party and attacked anti-gay prejudices.

Still, back comes "Before Night Falls" as the slick, bionic offspring of "Improper Conduct" -- an attempt to revive the anti-Cuba crusade of its discredited forebearer. No surprise here. For while ultra-right ideologues simply deny the revolution's irrefutable gains, shrewder opponents of the Cuban government have long targeted its policies regarding gays as an opening for insidious attack. This serves Washington's central campaign against Cuba -- the government's alleged violation of "human rights"-- a campaign which began virtually with the victory of the revolution and has continued without pause ever since.

The extension of Cuban gay rights over the past decade and a half -- and the cessation of the most onerous policies befalling homosexuals another fifteen years earlier -- is a corollary to the expansion of working peoples' rights there. More and more taboos have crumbled under the impact of ever-widening debate and discussion over economic, political, and cultural questions.

A review of this process is useful for anyone who wants clarification of and answers to the issues raised in "Before Night Falls," particularly as they pertain to homosexuality.

Cuban Revolution Brings Freedom

The liberating results of the first socialist revolution in the Americas created an unprecedented climate of freedom in Cuba. Sweeping reforms -- from the dismantling of the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship's secret police to the abolition of racist laws -- unleashed a blossoming of the arts, culture, music, and popular access to them. As the priorities of the working people and the rural poor assumed precedence, a women's liberation movement was born. It challenged the reality and legacy of female oppression, sexual second-class citizenship, and discrimination. Child day-care became a right. Rigid divorce laws were dramatically eased. By 1963, laws criminalizing abortion were overturned, and the right to reproductive freedom was institutionalized.

While this sea change affected gays and lesbians, the Cuban revolution did not take the same pioneering steps as the Bolsheviks did in the first months of the Russian revolution. Indeed, it would have been virtually impossible for the new generation that assumed power in 1959 to know about such advances in the first place.

Pioneering Steps by Russian Revolution

In December 1917, the Soviet regime struck down the reactionary anti-homosexual laws of the Czarist tyranny. This unprecedented act flowed from the course of launching programs and policies aimed at the emancipation of the oppressed female sex. "The relationship of Soviet law to the sexual sphere is based on the principle that the demands of the vast majority of the people correspond to and are in harmony with the findings of contemporary science," wrote Dr. Grigorii Batkis, director of the Moscow Institute of Social Hygiene in his 1923 book, The Sexual Revolution in Russia.

"Soviet legislation bases itself on the following principle," Batkis stated, "the absolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters, so long as nobody is injured and no one's interests are encroached upon -- Soviet legislation treats [homosexual practices] exactly the same as so-called 'natural' intercourse. All forms of sexual intercourse are private matters."

"The [October] revolution let nothing remain of the old despotic and infinitely unscientific laws; it did not tread the path of reformist bourgeois legislation which, with juristic subtlety, still hangs on to the concept of property in the sexual sphere, and ultimately demands that the double standard hold sway over sexual life. These laws always come about by disregarding science," Batkis explained. Restating Bolshevik theory and practice, he located the liberation of women in the overthrow of capitalist property relations, and the super-exploitation of the oppressed female sex therein.

"No society in the world whole world set these goals, whose problems confronted no previous revolution," Batkis wrote.

Counter-revolutionary Retreat on Gay Rights

The Stalin-led political counterrevolution that enthroned bureaucratic reaction in the late 1920s and early 1930s necessarily targeted the most enlightened aspects of Soviet law to cement its unchallenged rule. As the conservative-minded regime consolidated its privileges by driving working people out of politics, it dismembered artistic and literary freedom, rolled back critical gains for women, and formalized restrictive cultural and social policies. Stalin's personal intervention led to the criminalization of homosexuality in 1934, imposing a federal penalty of five years imprisonment for consensual acts between adult males. In 1935, to further enshrine norms enforcing the "new family," the government outlawed abortion, which had been legalized in the earliest months of the revolutionary regime.

The noted Russian novelist Maxim Gorki, reduced to the status of literary shill for the ruling caste, announced in a state-sponsored tract that "in the fascist countries, homosexuality, which ruins youth, flourishes without punishment; in the country where the proletariat has audaciously achieved social power, homosexuality has been declared a social crime and is heavily punished." All this defined the "communist" position on gays -- a pitiful echo of capitalist reaction and prejudice, couched in the vocabulary of Marxism.

Stalinist pseudo-science maintained that homosexuality was a manifestation of "bourgeois decadence" and "moral degeneration." Freud, who counseled that homosexuality was a naturally occurring sexual phenomenon, was banned. Multiple births by women in the USSR were awarded with medals and money. As late as 1971, the newly published Great Soviet Encyclopedia defined homosexuality as "a sexual perversion consisting in unnatural attraction to persons of the same sex. It occurs in both sexes. The penal statutes of the USSR, the socialist countries, and even some bourgeois states, provide for the punishment of homosexuality." This, after New York City's 1969 Stonewall rebellion became the symbolic launching of the modern movement for gay liberation.

It was such "orthodoxy" that the Cuban revolutionaries who came of age in the 1950s met as they embraced Marxism, first in the pro-Moscow Popular Socialist Party which agreed to shoulder arms in the last year of the revolutionary war. Their leadership and several thousand cadres formed an important component of the series of united revolutionary organizations that emerged after power was taken in 1959, culminating with the formation of the Cuban Communist Party in 1965. This process led the new generation to subsequent relations with the USSR, China, and the "world communist movement." It was through this distorted lens that they viewed the march of history and the final word on questions once in dispute.

To arrive at a position "in harmony with the findings of contemporary science," Cuba's young revolutionaries would have to undertake the titanic task of cutting through the offal of "official Marxism" in all fields to find their way to the emancipating ideas and experiences from the early Soviet regime, led by Lenin's Bolshevik party. These rich debates, documents, resolutions, and records of events were entombed in historical solitary confinement by the infallible commissars of "developed socialism." Their instructors, catechisms and manuals -- backed by truncheon and boot -- brooked no question, let alone opposition.

Lacking any living connection to the most advanced, scientific position taken by earlier generations of revolutionists, Cuba's militants emerged in an international setting in which homosexuality was severely repressed in the so-called developed world, unspeakably taboo in the Third World, and condemned as a crime against nature by those who, in the name of communism, held the reins of government in the rest of the planet.

Cuba Not Immune to Reality

The Cuban revolution neither then, nor in retrospect, could be expected to vault single-handedly over such international and historic obstacles. Further, some -- either from ignorance, demagogy, or both -- identified male homosexuality with the pornography and commercialization of sex endemic to pre-revolutionary Havana. The allure of illicit gay sex was a component of the prostitution industry that indentured and exploited 100,000 women (of a population of six million) to serve the tourist trade, and made Havana infamous as the biggest brothel in the Caribbean. And the sex business fit neatly into lucrative gambling, casino, and drug enterprises that befouled Cuba.

It would take time, and struggle, to unwind the contradiction between the profoundly progressive content of the changes shaped by the collective actions of the Cuban people, on the one hand, and -- on the other -- homophobia. This phenomenon based itself on a powerful combination of native machismo (anchored in capitalist colonial social and economic relations) and the cultural backwardness it nurtured, (reinforced by clerical reaction and the mysticism of the Catholic Church) -- all then buttressed by "scientific" tutelage from Moscow.

While allowing that "a homosexual" could exhibit a "correct political position," Fidel Castro told U.S. journalist Lee Lockwood in an extensive 1965 interview (published in book form as Castro's Cuba, Cuba's Fidel) "we would never come to believe that a homosexual could embody the conditions and requirements of conduct that would enable us to consider him a true Revolutionary, a true Communist. A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant Communist should be."

"But above all," the Cuban leader continued, "I do not believe anybody has a definitive answer as to what causes homosexuality. I think the problem must be considered very carefully. But I will be frank and say that homosexuals should not be allowed in positions where they are able to exert positions of influence on young people."

The Cuban leader located his approach in the context of "the conditions under which we live" -- while the impact of the Bay Pigs and the October crisis remained fresh -- and the necessity to "inculcate in our youth the spirit of discipline, of struggle, of work. This attitude may or may not be correct, but it is our honest feeling."

Military Units to Aid Production

In 1965, the Cuban government initiated the Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP), which "Before Night Falls" seizes upon to alleged sweeping antigay imprisonment. Cuban soldiers and police brought thousands of alleged delinquents, from gays and lesbians to Jehovah's Witnesses, to work camps to satisfy military obligations that the government determined could not take place in the regular armed forces. Duties of the UMAP focused on labor related to sugar harvests. Unlike other initiatives by the government, little was reported in the Cuban media about the UMAP. Nonetheless, the program sparked protest in Cuba by the National Union of Artists and Writers (UNEAC), as well as by prominent international allies of the revolution.

Cubans interviewed in 1970 and 1971 by Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal is his exhilarating book, In Cuba (dedicated to "the Cuban people and to Fidel") speak freely in opposition to the UMAP, with several offering opinions about their abolition in 1967. "I was in one," a young miliciano, a poet, tells Cardenal, "not as a prisoner but as a guard. Yes, a jailer. I saw the bad business, but we were just on guard. They told Fidel about what was going on. One night he broke into the camp and lay down in a one of the hammocks to see what kind of treatment a prisoner gets. The prisoners slept in hammocks. They were whacked with saber whacks if they didn't get up. The guards would cut their hammock cords. When one guard raised his saber he found himself staring at Fidel; he almost dropped dead." The youth went on to describe other abuses Fidel saw. "That's another of Fidel's exploits," he said, "Fidel is the man of the unexpected visits."

Castro, the miliciano told Cardenal, "suppressed" the camps, "but nobody mentions them."

Another youth who served in the camp explains that despite the experience, "we who were in the UMAP discovered that the Revolution and the UMAP were separable. And we said to ourselves: We won't leave Cuba, we'll stay and make what is bad not bad. After three years the UMAP ended with Fidel's speech."

A "young Marxist revolutionary" tells Cardenal a story. "A hundred boys from the Communist Youth were stripped of their identity cards and all other identification and delivered to the UMAP as prisoners, to see how they would be treated. It was a highly secret operation. Not even their families knew of this plan. Afterward the boys told what had happened. And they put an end to the UMAP."

"We consider [the UMAP] a really sad thing in Cuban history," Monika Krause, one of revolutionary Cuba's pioneer sexologists told Boston's Gay Community News in a 1984 interview. "It was the expression of ignorance and unreasonable aversion to homosexuality -- we feel it has been an obligation of our system to change those attitudes which could have created UMAP. Because in a socialist society, there can be no discrimination."

Arenas' "Sexual Revolution"

In contrast, Arenas affirms in the film that his circle fought repression by "having sex."

In his book, he describes a conversation with a companion -- after a trip to the Isle of Pines, where he claims they had sex with "an entire regiment" -- as the two "take inventory of the men we had slept with until then; this was sometime in 1968. I came to the conclusion, after complicated mathematical calculations, that I had sex with about five thousand men." His partner arrived at a similar figure. They were not "the only ones carried away by this kind of erotic rage; everybody was: the [armed forces] recruits who spent months of abstinence, and the whole population." (All this, while an alleged island-wide pogrom against homosexual men had swept Cuba.)

"I think," Arenas wrote, "that the sexual revolution actually came about as a result of the existing sexual repression." Inasmuch as this nugget suggests a stab at politics by Arenas, it is wrong from all angles.

Women's Emancipation

The sexual revolution in Cuba began with the fight to emancipate women from centuries of oppression, exploitation, and backwardness wrought by colonialism and the country's dependence on the imperialist metropolis. The signal step in this process was the effort to incorporate women in productive economic activity; female toil prior to 1959 was mostly domestic servitude or prostitution in the gambling dens and brothels owned by U.S. investors and the Mafia. The forging of economic independence for women began to free them from compulsory marriage and their isolation and oppression in the home, center of their "free" toil.

Within this context, the new government abolished the sex trade, closed the whorehouses, and inaugurated a special program to educate and train Cuban prostitutes for real employment. It banned pornography, a prohibition enforced to this day. Divorce became easily obtainable, and birth control (like other medicines) was free of charge. Increasingly, informal marriage began to parallel civil marriage, with the government treating the children of such unions -- or those of single parents -- equally. Today, no child in Cuba is born "out of wedlock." This reactionary concept became superseded by social responsibility for child rearing, plus conditions and consciousness that eliminated the definition of woman, wife, and offspring as male property.

The growing self-confidence of Cuban women expressed itself in their participation in Cuba's internationalist missions, from teaching literacy in Nicaragua's mountains in the face of contra threats to engaging in combat in southern Africa against the troops of apartheid. Today, over half of the 1.1 million-member Territorial Troop Militia, Cuba's national defense force, is composed of women. Truly, the ancient, inhibiting strictures of sexual and gender stereotyping have begun to crumble under such revolutionary progress. Indeed, expressions of violence against women, based on millennia of oppression, such as rape and physical abuse, have qualitatively declined and are dramatically lower than elsewhere in the world.

The battle for women's equality is backed by the revolution and waged in the context of forging a new ethic of human solidarity in the work of building a free society. It provides keener focus for the explicit aim of the struggle that began in the Sierra Maestra mountains, that of creating new men and women transformed in the action of liberating their country and each other. This permanent effort has drawn as irreplaceable partners science and education in the fight to confront and conquer prejudice -- including in sexual matters.

In their struggle for equality, Cuban women and their allies initially and inevitably encountered resistance on questions ranging from employment in traditionally male occupations and the "double burden" of housework and jobs, to sexual freedom. "Women's participation in the revolution was a revolution in the revolution," Fidel Castro told a leadership meeting of the Federation of Cuban Women in 1966, "and if we were asked what the most revolutionary thing is that the revolution is doing, we would answer that it is precisely this --the revolution that is occurring among the women of our country."

In the course of such political mobilization and struggle, new values were being created as society was transformed --a stated goal of the central leadership of the revolution. This has generated a morality far surpassing the "ethics" that govern human relations in any other country. Accomplishments concretizing these core principles are the framework for the expansion of gay rights. (Many of the challenges women undertook and achieved in the early period of the new society are recorded in Women and the Cuban Revolution, by Elizabeth Stone, whose collection includes important speeches and documents; and Cuban Women Now, by Margaret Randall, with a range of informative first-person accounts.) To be sure, the struggle for women's emancipation is hardly complete. But it is waged by a people with a more advanced consciousness, and on a higher terrain of rights, than any country on earth.

Promiscuity vs. Self-Worth

For Arenas, the struggle for women's liberation did not exist. Numberless sexual encounters (in his case, between men) -- with the sole criterion of quantity -- is a version shared by many self-proclaimed advocates of "the sexual revolution." This definition has served only to gut the concept of its historic substance and curdle its revolutionary social content into an unrelenting search for individual sexual satiation as the center of life. There is nothing at all progressive about this -- it is the pornographic response to sexual repression that dehumanizes both genders, irrespective of sexual orientation. Contrary to poet William Blake's axiom of self-indulgence, the "road of excess" does not "lead to the palace of wisdom." The consequences of such a belief are documented in Randy Shilts' groundbreaking narrative on the HIV pandemic, And the Band Played On.

Arenas' sexual credo was the opposite of the central element the revolution sought to inculcate in the free women and men who discovered their talents and capacities in responding to complicated challenges -- self-worth. Human sexual liberation, freed from the fetters of repressive norms, requires such a dignified starting point as negation of the alienating and abusive fetishism that defines sex and sexuality.

Origins of Sexist Ideology

Patriarchal ideology, the product of millennia, had as its genesis the triumph of men over women in the battle for the surplus society produced. This world-historic defeat of the matriarchy put the family in the center of the rise of private property and the state -- as described by Frederick Engels in The Rise of Private Property, the Family, and the State.

"What we can conjecture at present about the regulation of sex relationships after the impending effacement of capitalist production is, in the main, of a negative character, limited mostly to what will vanish," Engels wrote. "But what will be added? That will be settled after a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in all their lives had had occasion to purchase a woman's surrender either with money or with any other means of social power, and of women who have never been obliged to surrender to any man out of any consideration other than that of real love, or to refrain from giving themselves to their beloved for fear of the economic consequences. Once such people appear, they will not care a rap about we today think they should do. They will establish their own practice and their own public opinion, conformable therewith, on the practice of each individual -- and that's the end of it."

Economic compulsion for marriage, the subordination of the woman to the isolated unpaid labor of household drudgery and "maternal" tasks, and her domination by the patriarch are material foundations for the sexual ideology that oppresses her -- an ideology that necessarily places homosexuality beyond the pale. How consciously these matters are understood and confronted determine just how emancipating "the sexual revolution" will be as it inevitably emerges from the broader, more decisive revolutionary struggle to overturn capitalism and begin building socialism.

Arenas Reinvented

"Three passions ruled the life and death of Reinaldo Arenas," the anti-communist Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante stated glowingly in the Spanish newspaper El País, reviewing the book Before Night Falls. These were "literature (not as a game, but as a consuming fire), passive sex, and active politics. Of the three, the dominant passion was evidently, sex. Not only in his life, but also in his work. He was the chronicler of a country ruled not by the already impotent Fidel Castro, but by sex -- he lived a life whose beginning and end were indeed the same: from the start, one long, sustained sexual act." Like others who renounce Cuba, Cabrera Infante fixates on the personal figure of Castro to deny the revolution's popular base, without which Fidel and the leadership of which he is part, would have been overthrown long ago. Interviewed in "Improper Conduct," he claimed Cuba's treatment of gays was comparable to the Nazi extermination of Jews at Auschwitz.

But while Arenas reveled in boasting of his sexual prowess and profligacy, Schnabel, cognizant of current frowning upon such promiscuity, employs a director's sleight of hand to clean up Arena's act. He refurbishes the writer's frenetic, anonymous coupling as cute, pouting lustiness, tinged with enduring rural innocence.

Arenas as Writer

In 1963, Arena's prize-winning novel, Singing from the Well (still available in Cuba) was printed. His work had been favorably judged by Alejo Carpentier, a key figure in the emerging school of magical realism, whose work influenced and presaged Gabriel García Márquez. But unlike Carpentier, Arenas' embarked on a trajectory that placed him on a collision course not only with erroneous policies of the revolution, but the ongoing struggle of the Cuban people for their liberation that would find a remedy to such practices. Had Arenas' been able to hew to this complex process, his talent -- on display in such vibrant works such as "Old Rosa," which recalls the young García Márquez and the outstanding Portuguese novelist José Saramago -- might have been inoculated from the debilitating poison of the obsessive bitterness that so defined and disfigured his later work. He was unable to realize, as the young Cuban ordered to an UMAP to Ernesto Cardenal, that "the Revolution and the UMAP were separable. And we said to ourselves: We won't leave Cuba, we'll stay and make what is bad not bad."

Examples of Endurance and Abandonment

The life and status of José Lezama Lima, author of what is arguably Cuba's greatest novel, Paradiso -- who was vilified by assorted hacks in 1960s for being a "dissident," and the lyrical tome's homosexual subtext -- likewise presents an alternative to Arenas, despite the film's attempt to portray him as a cosmopolitan foe of the revolution. Lezama Lima, who was gay, defended the Cuban government and Castro to Ernesto Cardenal in 1970, while explaining he was not a "political animal." He remained in Havana until his death. A young member of Cuba's Ministry of Foreign Relations told me last year he, like other students of Cuban literature, had read Lezama Lima's lush, extraordinary book in high school. "It's my favorite novel," he said.

Paradiso "had never been censored," Cuba's leading filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea told Cineaste in 1995. "What happened was that after the book was published, the entire printing was withdrawn from publication because the book contained a chapter with references to homosexuality. Such a repressive action was idiotic. Later, however, the book did circulate freely."

Pablo Armando Fernández, who "confessed" his alleged ideological weakness during the Padilla events, and was for a period deprived of the ability to publish his poetry -- he learned the printer's trade to survive -- also refused the temptation to abandon ship. Today he has achieved Cuba's highest awards for poetry, and argues for his country's sovereignty in presentations and readings in the United States.

Meanwhile, Padilla emigrated to the United States in 1979 and became rental property for anti-Cuba propagandists. This included collaborating on "Improper Conduct." In that film, Padilla embarrassed himself by charging that "the Cuban leadership," while persecuting "gay men," avoided harassing lesbians because they "excite them. Nothing excites the primitive Cuban mind like two women in bed."

Identifying and Assessing Errors

Notwithstanding Padilla's departure and subsequent rightward evolution, his mistreatment -- and the maltreatment that other intellectuals and artists faced -- became the subject of condemnation by Cuba's leaders. Abel Prieto, at the time of this mid-1990s interview with Cuba's Contrapunto magazine president of UNEAC (the Artists and Writers Union) and the youngest member of the Communist Party's Politburo, put it this way: "I am sure the Padilla case was an error," referring to the exile as "a good poet."

"Padilla's famous self-criticism was a ridiculous trap into which fell the comrades involved in this. Very brave, revolutionary, and intellectual people believed this theater, this self-criticism," Prieto noted. Referring to a documentary made at the time of the events, hailing the confession, Prieto termed the film "very sad, because it's a sort of caricature of the Moscow proceedings" -- caricature being the operative word here. After all, had a real "Moscow-type" regime existed in Havana, today Cuba would be a tropical Bulgaria and history would have transpired far differently, leaving the people of the world in a far more difficult place. The filmed record, Prieto noted, was in reality, an expression of "buffoonery." It was not an account of actions imposed by a hardened, reactionary bureaucratic layer intent on driving working people from politics to cement their cushy existence by abandoning the practice of international solidarity.

Precisely because Cuba was never a "satellite" of the USSR -- much to Washington's regret -- its leadership was capable of leading a struggle to reorient the revolution from detours to its original revolutionary course. Such political advances in Cuba enabled the contemporary observer to understand that the Padilla events transpired in, as Prieto told in contrapunto, "a climate of myopia or delirium."

Prieto is currently Cuba's Minister of Culture.

"Before Night Falls" uses a voice-over -- which the moviegoer is supposed to believe is that of Fidel Castro -- to justify previous mistreatments. The unidentified narrator intones the words from a speech Castro made to Cuban intellectuals at the time, "within the revolution, everything; outside the revolution, nothing." In fact, what the Cuban leader stated was substantially different: "against the revolution, nothing."

Just how this would be applied has always been the subject of constant elaboration, practice, and debate -- all within the permanent environment of unrelenting U.S. hostility, which has continued to ratchet up throughout the 1990s.