"BEFORE NIGHT FALLS" Starring Javier Bardem, Olivier Martínez, Andrea di Stefano, Johnny Depp, and Michael Wincott. Directed by Julian Schnabel. Based on the memoir by Reinaldo Arenas. Grandview Pictures, Fine Line Films 2000.

"Before Night Falls" has been widely praised by critics across the country. It has garnered numerous awards, particularly for Javier Bardem, who plays the self-exiled Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas.

In a phrase which captures the essence of the typical review, Newsweek's David Ansen raved that the movie is "lyrical, sensual and shattering... a devastating indictment of the Castro regime." This should alert activists as to what is coming. The purpose of this review is to sketch the political function of the film. (For a more detailed analysis of the lies and half-truths of "Before Night Falls," see The Sexual Politics of Reinaldo Arenas: Fact, Fiction and the Real Record of the Cuban Revolution, which also examines broader questions posed by the film, using extensive Cuban primary sources and other supporting documentation.)

Before Night Falls is the autobiography of Reinaldo Arenas, completed just before his death in New York City in 1990, ten years after he left Cuba during the Mariel departures. It was published in 1993 in English.

Arenas, a prize-winning poet of the younger generation in Cuba, came of age during the revolution, which he defended up until 1968. This is one of many facts he expunges from Before Night Falls, in an effort to seamlessly conform his reinvented life to the confection of defiant opponent -- and escaped victim -- of the "Castro dictatorship."

A gifted, talented writer lifted up and encouraged by the revolution, Arenas became embittered by abuses carried out under its banner. This set him on a lifelong trajectory that ended in the United States. Ravaged by AIDS, penniless, evicted from one apartment after another and lacking medical insurance, he committed suicide.

Arenas made use of policies and practices -- subsequently and widely regarded as errors, mistakes, and wrongs by the Cuban leadership -- carried out during the early years of the revolution, to press his charges against the government. These included the work camps known as UMAP (Military Units to Aid Production), which existed from 1965 until 1967 to compel "delinquents" -- many of them homosexual -- to fulfill their military obligation; repressive policies aimed at certain intellectuals, artists, and writers in the late 1960s and early 1970s; and formal discrimination against gays during that period.

Such practices flowed from a powerful combination of factors: the cultural legacy of Cuba's dependent capitalist economic and social relations, sometimes narrowly referred to as "machismo," the heritage of Spanish colonialism and the impact of Catholic Church sexual dogma. To this was added the then-standing Soviet wisdom that homosexuality was perverse, a form of "moral degeneration" and "bourgeois decadence." (Homosexuality was legalized in the earliest days of the 1917 Russian revolution, but was re-criminalized under Stalin in 1934.)

The extent, depth, and scope of events that took place in Cuba under this reactionary construct are exaggerated and exploited by Arenas in his memoir. Worse still, criticism and opposition to such measures, which led to their correction, have no place in the book. Before Night Falls is instead consumed with hatred for the socialist revolution, its undeniable accomplishments simply ignored.

The director of the movie version, Julian Schnable, goes Arenas a step further. He deliberately grafts outrageous lies, slanders and falsifications to the half-truths, distortions and fabrications that define the autobiography.

Arenas claimed, for example, that he and his circle of gay men fought repression against homosexuals by "having sex." In the book, he boasts of 5,000 such encounters by the time he was 25 in 1968. This assertion, and all that it implies, is left out of the film. However accurate Arenas' claim is, it's got nothing to do with opposition to repression, real or imagined. But such a belief informed his life. Schnable's portrait of Arenas, however, is one of a rural innocent who becomes a liberated flirt and a writer above politics.

Arenas' own words, and the record of his deeds, prove the opposite. His last years in Cuba were marked by tirades against the revolution and collaboration with foreign governments to enable his polemics to be published abroad. In the United States, he engaged in campaigns denouncing the "Castro dictatorship." Arenas collaborated with Néstor Almendros on the 1984 documentary "Improper Conduct," whose interviewees claim, among other things, that Cuba's policies towards gays were akin to Nazi atrocities against Jews in Auschwitz. He spoke widely against the revolution -- often challenged, to his great consternation, by its defenders.

Arenas dedicated his novella The Brightest Star to a friend whose failed attempt at an armed hijacking of a Cuban passenger jet resulted in arrest, trial, conviction and execution. In Arenas' "Farewell" letter, reproduced in the book Before Night Falls, he called for continued struggle in Cuba to overthrow the government. He also blamed his miserable personal fate on Fidel Castro, an accusation erased from a reproduction of the note on the "Before Night Falls" website.

Schnabel's deceptive and sanitized version of Arenas serves the larger purpose of the film. He describes it as a work "against totalitarianism in any country." Of course, the country in question is Cuba, the vehicle used to attack it is denial of gay rights, and the film is geared to a progressive audience. The cast includes Johnny Depp and Sean Penn. Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson contributed music. And leading man Javier Bardem is the son of members of the Spanish Communist Party. As well, the acting and cinematography of the film show talent and capacity.

This is not a "right-wing" movie aimed at the dwindling audience so-called gusanos. Indeed, Arenas publicly declared Miami's Cuban exile milieu as a "caricature" of Cuban "machismo." Life in Little Havana for him was "purgatory" compared to the "hell" that was Cuba. His brief stay in Miami, and his view of it, are omitted from the film.

The film dovetails nicely with Washington's cynical and unrelenting campaign against Cuba's supposed violation of human rights. In reality, the U.S. has a long record of mistreatment of and discrimination against homosexuals, creating the atmosphere ripe for thug and police violence against gay men and lesbians. The burden of scoring points against Cuba on this question has therefore been assumed by "volunteers." These include immigrant Cuban writers and other exiles and self-proclaimed, rightward moving liberals and former radicals, who seek to "set the record straight." They provide an indispensable service to the empire's long-standing anti-Cuba propaganda operation, whose Big Lie machine is permanently on.

The truth is that Cuba has made enormous strides forward in the field of gay rights since the 1960s and 1970s:

By 1997, the number of people diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in Cuba was one-tenth the incidence in Los Angeles County, which has a slightly smaller population than the revolutionary island. Health care in Cuba for people with HIV -- from outpatient to residential and hospice service -- is free and voluntary, just as it is for people with any other illness. State-sponsored education utilizes the skills of people with HIV to speak in Cuban schools about safer sex and HIV prevention. Cuba today has the LOWEST rate of increase in HIV/AIDS in the world.