More...

On May 10th, 1980, Reinaldo Arenas stepped of the deck of the “San Lazaro” and onto the shores of Key West. It was the first time in his life he had ever walked on land not owned and governed by a ruthless dictator.  He had virtually no possessions and no money, so it was a lucky turn of fate when Reinaldo met up with the son of a friend from Cuba. The young man took Arenas to a warehouse filled with donations designed to help the Mariel arrivals. Reinaldo received a batch of new clothes, food, and soap. He then met up with Juan Abreu and his dearest friend Lazaro Carilles and was able to contact the Camachos to ensure that his papers were safe. Finally, after so many years of running, hiding and exile, Reinaldo Arenas began to feel human again.

Reinaldo Arenas’ fame and talent had indeed preceded him, and he was invited to speak at a conference at the International University of Florida. Ironically, Herberto Padilla spoke before him; a drunk and stumbling shadow of his former self. Padilla had never been able to recover from the torture and imprisonment which Castro had imposed on him. The sight of this still-broken man fueled Arenas desire to let the world know about the atrocities being committed against artists and homosexuals in Cuba. But when Reinaldo took the stage and began denouncing Castro and his actions in Cuba, the public turned against him and an astonished Arenas was heckled off the stage.

This alarming trend continued as Reinaldo Arenas continued to speak out publicly against Castro’s regime. Arenas’ Mexican publisher told Reinaldo he should have stayed in Cuba and refused to pay him any of his royalties. A similar event happened in Uruguay where Arenas’ publisher not only denounced Reinaldo but published a letter stating that Arenas should be ostracized from the literary world. Despite the fact that Reinaldo Arenas’ works were published and read in dozens of languages all over the globe, he received almost no monetary compensation for it. Even though these events were a rude awakening to the capitalist system, Reinaldo still found it infinitely superior to communism:

None of this surprised me: I already knew that the capitalist system was also sordid and money hungry. In one of my first statements after leaving Cuba I had declared that “the difference between the communist and capitalist systems is that, although both give you a kick in the ass, in the communist system you have to applaud, while in the capitalist system you can scream. And I came here to scream.”

In the summer of 1980 Professor Reinaldo Sanchez offered Arenas a job as a visiting professor at the International University of Florida teaching Cuban poetry. Reinaldo happily accepted this offer while still communing with the plethora of Cuban writers now exiled in Miami. Most of these formerly great writers were living hand-to-mouth or on welfare. Almost none of them could get published. Arenas tried to use his influence to start a publishing house for these talented writers but could not get funding for the project. He was told “literature is not lucrative” – it seemed no one was ready to hear about life under Fidel Castro.

It was after all of this that Reinaldo Arenas realized life in Miami was simply not for him. He found Miami to be a sad caricature of Cuba, a plastic world with no real substance. So when Arenas received an invitation to speak at Columbia University in New York he left almost immediately. Reinaldo fell in love with New York City and its endless sidewalks, trains, theater and nightlife. A friend found him an apartment within blocks of Times Square and, after finishing his course at the University of Florida, Reinaldo Arenas and Lazaro Carilles moved to New York on New Years Eve of 1980.

1981 and 1982 were wonderful years for Reinaldo Arenas in New York. He began writing prolifically and joined a small group of other exiled Cuban writers who had moved to the big city. Just as they used to do in Cuba, the group met and shared their work with each other, eventually leading to the creation of a magazine called “Mariel”. “Mariel” was a defiant publication that spoke about great writers and unmasked the hypocrisy about Cuba, in particular the treatment of homosexuals by Castro. The magazine wasn’t well received and eventually folded, but Arenas felt it was a triumphant effort for it raised important issues about life in Cuba.

Reinaldo Arenas continued insistence on speaking about the horrors occurring in Cuba under Castro began to cost him both professionally and financially. His books were dropped from assigned reading lists at New York University as well numerous other colleges worldwide. This attitude wasn’t limited to Arenas’ work – it affected all Cuban exiled writers:

In exile we have no country to represent us; we live as if by special permission, always in danger of being rejected. Instead of having a country, we have an anti-country…

In the US these types of problems were particularly bad. Reinaldo Arenas found that the vast majority of US liberals were either supportive of Castro or simply overlooked the atrocities being committed in Cuba. Instead of discovering movements to overthrow Castro, Arenas instead found liberal groups wanting to negotiate with the communist dictator and demanding that dissidents remain quiet. To Reinaldo Arenas, who had spent his life fighting, hiding, and being tortured and imprisoned by Castro, this attitude of tolerance and silence was simply unacceptable:

I remember that after I arrived in the United States, a Cuban exile who lived in Washington said to me: “Don’t ever quarrel with the left.” For people like him, to attack Castro’s government was to fight against the left. But after twenty years of repression, how could I keep silent about these crimes? On the other hand, I have never considered myself as belonging to the “left” or to the “right”, nor do I want to be included under any opportunistic or political label. I tell my truth, as does the Jew who has suffered racism or the Russian was has been in the Gulag, or any human being who has eyes to see the way things really are. I scream, therefore I exist.

It took until 1983 for Reinaldo Arenas to obtain a UN document that classified him a refugee. This document allowed him to travel outside the United States and to finally see his good friends Jorge and Margarita Camacho for the first time since 1967. Arenas then embarked on a speaking tour of Europe beginning in Sweden. At the University of Stockholm he gave a lecture in which he simply read sections of the Granma – Castro’s official newspaper – in order to demonstrate what was really happening daily in Cuba. The audience’s response was pointed – they heckled Reinaldo continuously until he was forced to leave the stage. Indeed, Arenas met responses like this in many places along his tour, proving once again that people were either unwilling or unable to deal with the truth about Castro and Cuba.

Between 1980 and 1983 Reinaldo Arenas also appeared in three films: “In His Own Words”, “The Other Cuba”, and “Improper Conduct”. Arenas loved “Improper Conduct” as it was the first film to openly denounce Castro and the persecution of homosexuals in Cuba. The film contained footage of the UMAP concentration camps for gays and interviews with many survivors. The film attracted international attention and won the Human Rights Award in Europe.

During this time period Reinaldo Arenas accomplished a great deal. He wrote or re-wrote six books, was invited to speak at over 40 universities and gave lectures around the world. He was even able to get his mother out of Cuba to New York for a three month visit, sending her home with a huge sack of clothes for his still poor family. These years were among the happiest in Reinaldo Arenas’ life.

For the next few years Reinaldo Arenas devoted his time to fixing and translating his life’s work. He penned a book of essays on Cuban life called “A Need for Freedom” and a book of poetry called “The Will to Live Manifesting Itself”. He had not yet completed the last two novels of his “pentagonia” when Reinaldo became sick with repeated fevers.

In 1987 Reinaldo Arenas was diagnosed with AIDS. Feeling sure his death was now imminent, Arenas bought a plane ticket to Miami – he wanted to die near his beloved sea. Lazaro brought Reinaldo back to New York and checked him into a hospital despite his lack of money or insurance. Given only a 10% chance to live, Reinaldo fought for nearly four months and beat the odds. Upon his discharge from the hospital, although still quite ill, Reinaldo Arenas swore that he would not die until he had completed his life’s work. 

Now too weak to type, Reinaldo began dictating his autobiography “Before Night Falls”. In the spring of 1988 Arenas’ novel “The Doorman” was published in France to great critical and commercial success and was one of three finalists for the International Medici Prize. This tremendous success was eclipsed when Reinaldo fell ill again with PCP pneumonia. Despite also developing Kaposi’s sarcoma, phlebitis and toxoplasmosis, he once again beat the odds and lived to continue his work.

Reinaldo Arenas finished “Before Night Falls” in the hospital and began to write “The Color of Summer”, the critical fourth installment in his “pentagonia”. Simultaneously he was revising “The Assault”, the fifth and final piece of the “pentagonia” which had been hurried penned in Cuba. Friends helped to translate Arenas’ longhand and “The Assault” was finally completed. He was also eventually able to complete “The Color of Summer” – thus completing the “pentagonia” – and his poetic trilogy “Leper Colony”. Reinaldo Arenas had finally completed his body of work

In 1988 Reinaldo Arenas flew out to Spain to visit with the Camachos. It was there that Jorge Camacho and Arenas hatched an idea to publish an open letter to Castro requesting he hold a plebiscite similar to the one held in Chile by Pinochet. The idea blossomed, and the letter garnered thousands of signatures, including those of eight Nobel Laureates. The letter was published in newspapers around the world, enraging Castro to no end. Reinaldo hoped that Castro’s reaction to this letter would open the eyes of the world to the atrocities being committed in Cuba and that Cuba would someday soon be free.

In 1990, his body ravaged by disease, Reinaldo Arenas gave several sealed envelopes to his translator and friend Dolores M. Koch with instructions to deliver them at the appropriate time. Shortly after this, Reinaldo Arenas committed suicide, and his letter appeared in newspapers around the world:

Dear friends:

Due to my delicate date of health and to the terrible emotional depression it causes me not to be able to continue writing and struggling for the freedom of Cuba, I am ending my life. During the past few years, even though I felt very ill, I have been able to finish my literary work, to which I have devoted almost thirty years. You are the heirs of all my terrors, but also of my hope that Cuba will soon be free. I am satisfied to have contributed, though in a very small way, to the triumph of this freedom. I end my life voluntarily because I cannot continue working. Persons near to me are in no way responsible for my decision. There is only one person I hold accountable: Fidel Castro. The sufferings of exile, the pain of being banished from my country, the loneliness, and the diseases contracted in exiles would probably never have happened if I had been able to enjoy freedom in my country.

I want to encourage the Cuban people out of the country as well as on the Island to continue fighting for freedom. I do not want to convey to you a message of defeat but of continued struggle and of hope.

Cuba will be free. I already am.

--Reinaldo Arenas

It has been seventeen years since the death of Reinaldo Arenas. It has been seventeen years since he thought Cuba might soon be free. And it has been seventeen more years of persecution, oppression, imprisonment, disease and death for the Cuban people under the ruthless rein of Castro.

Now you have heard the story of Reinaldo Arenas, and what you have heard is indeed the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Reinaldo’s story is completely verified and vetted. Many of the people who knew him and saw the struggles he endured in Cuba escaped the island as well and have verified his accounts. He has many friends outside of Cuba who are still alive who also corroborate everything he says in his autobiography as fact. Indeed, Lazaro Carilles, Reinaldo’s dearest friend and love, was one of the screenwriters for the movie adaptation for “Before Night Falls”. Reinaldo Arenas’ life is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about life in Cuba and what Castro has done to the Cuban people.

So then, if Reinaldo Arenas is the truth – and a very moving and heart-wrenching truth at that – what then do we make of Michael Moore’s vision of Cuba in Sicko? According to Michael Moore, Cuba is a happy, sunny place where the people are blissful and everyone receives wonderful care by Castro, who isn’t a man deserving of the hate that America flings at him. How can we juxtapose these two diametrically opposing images?

The simple truth is we can’t and we shouldn’t. Reinaldo Arenas showed us the truth about Cuba. All Michael Moore showed us was a film segment full of lies and political propaganda.

By portraying Cuba as he did in Sicko, Michael Moore refused to acknowledge the life, struggle and death of Reinaldo Arenas and the true horror of life in Cuba. In order to advance his own political agenda Moore shows you the beautiful Cuban countryside, footage of well dressed people, cared for houses and, of course, the wonderful hospital system.

What Michael Moore does NOT show you is the Cuba in which real Cuba citizens are forced to live. These pictures from therealcuba.com show in a dramatic fashion the difference between the Cuba the world is allowed to view and the Cuba that really exists. These pictures, these stories, and the life of Reinaldo Arenas show you the real Cuba, not Michael Moore, who knowingly and willingly turns his back on the real Cuba. Michael Moore shows a complete lack of regard for the struggles of the Cuban people under Castro simply to further his personal agenda against the United States, and that, no matter how you look at it, is wrong.

But what Michael Moore has done is so much worse than a simple and willful denial of reality. By portraying Cuba as he did in Sicko, Michael Moore undoes and undermines all the years of hard and painful work Cubans have spent trying to tell the world about the atrocities that have been committed in Cuba. Reinaldo Arenas spent much of the last ten years of his life, many of them when he was extraordinarily ill, trying to educate the world about the tyranny of Castro. And yet because Michael Moore’s influence is so broad he has the ability to undo and undermine all the progress Reinaldo Arenas and so many countless others have made in trying to educate the world about the real Cuba and the horrors of Castro.

Michael Moore is supposed to be a journalist, a documentarian. His work is supposed to be the truth, but it isn’t. It is full of deception and outright lies about what life in Cuba is like and the reasons America “hates” Cuba. But yet the work of this “journalist” is at complete odds with the truth we know about Cuba, particularly Cuban hospitals. In point of fact, Michael Moore’s so-called “truth” is in direct contradiction to the truth of Reinaldo Arenas and the hundreds of thousands of people who have escaped and continue to escape from Cuba every year.

Reinaldo Arenas had met men like Michael Moore when he arrived in the United States. He called them the “Communist Deluxe” – men and women who tolerated or even admired Castro while eating plates full of food and living free lives, refusing to acknowledge or understand that Cuban people couldn’t live like as they did:

I now discovered a variety of creature unknown in Cuba: the Communist Deluxe. I remember that at a Harvard University banquet a German professor said to me “In a way I can understand that you may have suffered in Cuba, but I am a great admirer of Fidel Castro and I am very happy with what he has done in Cuba.” While saying this the man had a huge, full plate of food in front of him, and I told him: “I think it’s fine for you to admire Fidel Castro, but in that case, you should not continue eating that food on your plate; no one in Cuba can eat food like that, with the exception of Cuban officials.” I took his plate and threw it against the wall.

If ever a man fit the description of “Communist Deluxe”, it would be Michael Moore. But, in fact, Michael Moore is so much worse than just this. He isn’t a man who simply denies or lies about the horrors of real Cuban life under Castro. In order to have filmed what he did in Cuba Michael Moore *MUST* have collaborated directly with Castro and his government. Michael Moore worked directly and willingly with the man – or at the very least, agents of the government - who destroyed the life of Reinaldo Arenas and all Cuban citizens. Michael Moore is a collaborator, pure and simple.

The evidence is undeniable. Entrance into Cuba is next to impossible without official permission. It is illegal for foreigners to film inside Cuba without official permission. One cannot even gain access to Havana Hospital – the hospital Moore displays grandly as an everyday example of Cuban health care – without official permission and, yes, without paying a very capitalist bill for your care.

Look at how wonderfully the government firefighters lined up for Moore’s group in Sicko! Look at how happy the men playing dominos in the street seem to be while extolling the virtues of Castro’s health care system! Never mind the man in black shadowing the filming from across the street – I’m sure he’s not with the government. And never mind the fact that, as a state run system, the firefighters would have had to do and say anything the government told them to do or say else face the same type of consequences Reinaldo Arenas faced.

All of this evidence, *all* of it, means that Michael Moore had to have worked directly with Castro’s government to shoot the Cuban portion of Sicko. He worked side by side with the same man who destroyed the life of Reinaldo Arenas. He worked hand in hand with the same man who has destroyed the lives of the Cuban people for 45 years. And he did it all knowing he wasn’t showing the real truth, knowing all he was going to show the world was a piece of Castro-loving propaganda that turns its back on everything for which the Cuban people have fought.

Michael Moore is a Castro collaborator. He has actively and knowing collaborated with a sociopath, communist, mass-murdering dictator and he shows no remorse for it. Reinaldo Arenas had some choice words for men like Michael Moore who chose willingly to collaborate with Castro:

One day, eventually, the people will overthrow Castro, and the least they will do is bring to justice those who collaborated with the tyrant with impunity. The one who promote dialogue with Castro, well aware that Castro will never give up his power peacefully and that a truce and economic assistance are what he needs to strengthen his position, are as guilty as his own henchmen who torture and murder people. Those who are not living in Cuba are perhaps even more to blame, because inside Cuba you exist under absolute terror, but outside you can at least maintain a modicum of political integrity. All the pretentious people who dream of appearing on TV shaking Fidel Castro’s hand and of becoming politically relevant should have more realistic dreams: they should envision the rope from which they will swing in Havana’s Central Park, because the Cuban people, being generous, will hang them when their moment of truth comes. The only consolation for them will be to have avoided bloodshed.

Michael Moore is not an innocent party. He knew what he was showing the world was not the truth about Cuba and he did it anyway. He lied to the world and desecrated the memory of Reinaldo Arenas and all the brave men and women who have fought for the truth to come out about the real Cuba like Reinaldo Arenas.  In his zeal to attack the United States government Michael Moore ignored the plight of the Cuban people and nullified their struggle for freedom. He twisted the truth to fit his agenda without any thought to those who might be hurt by this and ignored whatever facts didn’t fit with his agenda.

Michael Moore is a liar, a collaborator, and a maker of propaganda. He has shown no regard at all for the truly brave men like Reinaldo Arenas who spent their lives fighting for their art and their truth. It is Reinaldo Arenas we should respect and believe, not Michael Moore. It is Reinaldo Arenas we should honor for his fight for truth, not Michael More. And it is the work of Reinaldo Arenas that should live on in people’s minds and hearts, not the work of Michael Moore.

Shame on you, Michael Moore. Eternal shame on you for what you have done.

I rest my case.

* * * * * * * * * * *

A personal epilogue from the author to Reinaldo Arenas:

Look, Reinaldo, look! The moon is bright and full; she is back and smiling at you once again. Her light fills the breezeway and the shower of gold bush Adolfina planted there perfumes the air so sweetly. Celestino is calling you from the woods, Reinaldo. He is at it again, carving poems into the trunks of the almond trees and he wants you to help. Go to him, Reinaldo. Your work here is done. You have given me your gifts and your truths and I will hold these things dear to me for the rest of my life. Run to the woods and be free, Reinaldo. You have earned it. You are free.

Thank you, Reinaldo. 

Less...

More...

The sun was hot and the water was warm in the summer of 1973. Reinaldo Arenas and his friend Pepe Malas were enjoying a swim at Guanabo Beach when they discovered that they had been robbed off all their belongings, including their clothes and bags. Against Reinaldo’s protestations, Malas called over a nearby police officer and reported the theft. The young thieves were quickly apprehended by the police and both Arenas and Malas were requested to appear at the Havana police department the following day.

Reinaldo Arenas was filled with apprehension; he feared a police trap. Unfortunately for him, his premonition was correct. The young thieves accused Arenas and Malas of being homosexuals who had tried to fondle their genitals. Because under Castro’s law “in the case of a homosexual committing a sexual crime, anyone’s accusation was enough to prosecute”, both Reinaldo Arenas and Pepe Malas were immediately arresting for the corruption of minors and brought to the Guanabo jail.

After Reinaldo Arenas was released on bail he met with his appointed lawyer… and realized the situation was far more dire than he could have ever guessed. His terrified attorney showed him an overflowing file filled with information about Arenas’ illegal overseas publications and statements against him from some of his closest friends. Because Arenas had published overseas without Castro’s permission he was seen as a counter-revolutionary and a threat to Castro’s regime. Between these publications and the sworn statements by his friends against him, Reinaldo Arenas was now facing charges for political crimes and was looking at eight years or more in jail. 

Arenas was arrested again the next day and was taken to the Patu Miramar police jail. Shortly after his arrival at the jail, there was a brief commotion and his cell door was left unlocked. In an incredibly daring move, Reinaldo slipped the lock off the door, quietly left the station and dove into the water nearby. It was an amazing escape, and Arenas was able to swim to a distant beach where he wouldn’t be quickly apprehended.

His situation now turning more desperate by the minute, Reinaldo Arenas decided to risk an escape to Guantanamo Bay in the hopes he could reach US soil. He shaved off his long hair, donned a set of threadbare clothes and took a three day long train ride to Guantanamo. Under the cover of night, Reinaldo Arenas set out for the first river crossing that would take him to safety. However, when he reached the river he heard strange crackling noises in the water. Suddenly, bright green lights appeared around him and machine gun fire rang out in the night. The lights were infrared sensors – the Cuban border patrol had sensed an intruder and began hunting him. Terrified, Reinaldo scaled a tall tree and hid there for two days and nights until the search was over.

When Arenas finally descended from his hiding place in the tree he tried again to cross the river. It was only after he began his swim across the dark river that he discovered the source of those odd crackling sounds. The river was filled with alligators – the cracking sound was the gnashing of their teeth. With so many predators in the water there was simply no way to cross. Defeated, Reinaldo Arenas was forced to return to Guantanamo.

After wandering through Guantanamo for three days with no food or money, Reinaldo Arenas joined up with a group of draft dodgers who were planning on jumping trains to get to Havana. Upon his return to Havana Arenas hoped he would be able to find refuge with some of his friends and try to escape Cuba through the French Embassy.

Reinaldo managed to get his friends Juan and Jose Abreu to deliver a letter to the French Ambassador begging for asylum. The Ambassador refused to help, but Reinaldo’s loyal friends the Camachos sent Juan Lagaurde to try and smuggle Arenas out of Cuba. The plan failed as well, and a desperate Arenas began to write letters to the Red Cross, The UN, UNESCO and foreign dignitaries. Laguarde was able to smuggle these letters out of Cuba and they were published in newspapers around the world:

I wanted to report all the persecution I was being subjected to, and began as follows: “For a long time I have been the victim of a sinister persecution by the Cuban Regime.” I went on to list the censorship and the harsh treatment that we Cuban writers had suffered and to name all the writers who had been executed… In one paragraph I explained the situation I was in and how, as persecution was escalating, I was wiring those lines in hiding, while waiting for the most sinister and criminal state apparatus to put an end to my existence. And I stated: I want now to affirm that want I am saying here is the truth, even though under torture I might later be forced to say the opposite.

Yes, this is the Cuban regime Michael Moore praises. How wonderfully Castro treats his people! How kind and benevolent he is! Look at how well he treats his gifted writers and artists! Michael Moore, how can you read these desperate words and still find the gall to praise Castro’s regime that hunted this man simply for being a writer?!?

But I digress once again. Back to Reinaldo Arenas….

After the publication of his letters, Reinaldo Arenas found himself in a desperate situation. The majority of his friends either exiled or informed on him and one burned the whole of Arenas’ written work that he had been hiding. A total of twelve books were lost forever. The Abreu brothers remained allies and told Reinaldo that Castro had put out an order to have Reinaldo Arenas captured immediately due to the international scandal his letter had caused.

There was nowhere to hide anymore. After ten days without any real food or water, Reinaldo Arenas emerged from the ditch where he had been sleeping to try to buy a bite of ice cream. He was immediately apprehended by the police and was transferred immediately to the infamous and deadly El Morro Prison.

Morro Castle had been a medieval colonial fortress at Havana Port that had been converted into a hellish jail. The cells were huge wards where up to 50 prisoners were jammed into one cell. The toilet was a hole in the ground and with no toilet paper and everything and everyone was covered in feces. The smell and the noise were overwhelming. The treatment of homosexuals was abhorrent. They were held in underground wards that filled with water at high tides, starved, and treated like beasts.

Perhaps the most shocking fact about El Morro was that everyone from mere traffic offenders to mass murderers were stuffed together in the cells. Some of the crimes for which people had been imprisoned seemed simply insane:

There was, for example, an unfortunate father with all his sons, who had been sentenced to five years because they had killed one of their cows to feed the family, something Castro’s laws did not allow… Many inmates in my ward said there they were in jail because they had committed ‘penicide’. This was the name they had given to the rape of women and minors. But penicide included almost anything. For example, one of my fellow prisoners was there because some old ladies had seen him taking a shower, in the nude, in his own backyard and denounced him.

Terrified of torture and the prison conditions, Reinaldo Arenas took an overdose of pills in a desperate suicide attempt. He woke up three days later in the prison hospital – it was in fact a miracle he survived. Back in Ward 7, Reinaldo learned to survive the worst of El Morro by writing letters for prisoners and giving French lessons. He also quickly learned to hide and ration his meager food to avoid starvation when the guards neglected to feed the prisoners.

Indeed, the guards at El Morro were sadistic. They routinely gang-raped the young prisoners and those who fought back were mutilated. The guards regularly beat the prisoners for no reason and without any mercy. Needless to say, many of the inmates were driven crazy by the routine torture and conditions. They manufactured weapons from sticks, nails and razors to defend themselves from the guards and other prisoners. Suicides were all too common. The prisoners were allowed access to the roof about once a month, and many used that opportunity to throw themselves over the edge, dashing their bodies on the rocks. Others hung themselves, and still others would kill other prisoners simply so they would be executed for it.

The horrors and atrocities that occurred within the walls of El Morro cannot be conveyed with words. Indeed, I find myself now at a loss to continue to describe the beatings, torture, mutilation, isolation, degradation, and murder of all those poor souls. Reading these stories and thinking about these horror fills me with a rage and sadness I can barely contain.

But what I need to understand is how Michael Moore could know of such atrocities and *STILL* lavish praise upon Castro and his regime! Mr. Moore… how could you possibly condone such atrocities against humanity? Reinaldo Arenas was an artist, a writer. He was thrown into a hellish prison and subjected to incredible violence SIMPLY FOR BEING AN ARTIST.

Mr. Moore… do you not realize that if you were Cuban your work and actions would have you in the same place as Reinaldo Arenas? You take pride – as well you should – for being able to create art that makes political statements. Reinaldo Arenas and countless other artists, writers, and dramatists were thrown in jail, tortured, forced to recant their work and then executed for doing exactly that. Do you not see that if you were Cuban you would have suffered the same fate as these poor Cuban artists? You say you are a defender of humanity and that you want all humans treated with dignity and care. Why are you not denouncing these horrors? How could you possibly defend a system where you yourself would ultimately meet your death for the type of work you create? Do you not understand that if you were Cuban and made a version of Fahrenheit 9/11 about Castro you would have been executed? Knowing this… how can you possibly defend Castro in any way?

I have let my anger impede this story again. Back to Reinaldo Arenas….

It had been six months and Reinaldo Arenas had still not been brought to trial. One day he was abruptly taken to a “penalty cell” – a tiny box less than a meter high with a dirt floor and a hole for a toilet. He was held there for days without food or water before being brought before Lieutenant Victor, the man in charge of Arenas’ case.

Arenas’ often brutal interrogations began. He was grilled all day about how he got his work out of Cuba and sent back to the penalty cell at night. After a week of the interrogation and torture Reinaldo became afraid he might break and give up the names of his friends. Rather than risk that happening Reinaldo Arenas attempted to hang himself. He was saved and transferred to the State Security Headquarters as Villa Marista – Castro didn’t want Arenas dead before he confessed.

At Villa Marista Reinaldo was thrown into a small box of a cell with constant light and a hole in the ground for a toilet. He was starved for days before the interrogations began again. Lieutenants Victor and Gamboa told Arenas they could make him simply disappear. They were right and Reinaldo knew it – there was no way out anymore.

Reinaldo Arenas was questioned and tortured all day and night. He was often left without food or water and was subjected to steam burnings, what he called “torture similar to fire”. Neither Lieutenant would believe anything Arenas told them.

Finally, after weeks of endless torture and imprisonment, Reinaldo Arenas broke and confessed:

My confession was a long one; I talked about my life and my homosexuality, which I detested, about having ideological weaknesses and my accursed books, the likes of which I would never write again. I actually recanted all I had done in my life, my only hope for redemption being the possibility that in the future I could join and become part of the Revolution and work day and night on its behalf. Needless to say, I was requesting rehabilitation, that is, to be sent to a labor camp; and I committed myself to work for the government and write optimistic novels.

Once again I feel myself brimming with anger. Mr. Moore… read these words. Reinaldo Arenas, one of the greatest writers to ever emerge from Cuba, was tortured endlessly and forced to recant his life’s work because Castro demanded it. You have whined incessantly to the press about how the Bush administration has tried to oppress you and suppress your work. Tell me, Mr. Moore… how does it feel to read the words of an artist who was *truly* oppressed? Do you not feel shame in touting the wonders of Castro after reading about how Castro destroyed generations of great artists who, just like you, simply wanted to create art and speak openly about their government?

Back to Reinaldo Arenas…

Reinaldo Arenas’ confession appeased the Lieutenants. After four months in isolation Arenas was transferred back to El Morro to await his trial for the corruption of minors. The political charges were not taken to trial due to his confession. In a shocking turn of events, both men who Reinaldo was accused of “fondling” them recanted their testimony at trial, and Arenas was only sentenced to two years for “lascivious abuses”.

Shortly after the trial Lieutenant Victor paid Arenas a visit at El Morro. Reinaldo Arenas’ novel “The Palace of the White Skunks” – the second installment in his “pentagonia” – had just been published in France. Now the world knew Reinaldo still lived and Castro could not simply execute him. However, as punishment, he was transferred to Ward 1 – an underground dungeon filled with sewage and filth. The others in the ward were transferred out and Reinaldo Arenas – one of the greatest writers in Cuba – was left in squalor and in despair over his confession:

Before my confession I had a great companion, my pride. After the confession I had nothing; I had lost my dignity and my rebellious spirit… Now I was alone in my misery; no one could witness my misfortune in that cell. The worst misfortune was to continue living after all that, after having betrayed myself and after having been betrayed by almost everyone else.

Reinaldo Arenas was finally transferred to an “open prison” in Flores. It was an improvement over the hell of El Morro as you could at least be outdoors. The prisoners in Flores were forced to build houses and later schools from dawn until late at night. This intense forced labor had destroyed the body and health of most of the prisoners there, whose bodies were literally falling apart. Reinaldo himself could not obtain a simple dose of antibiotics to cure an infection because of the lack of medicine in Cuba.

Reinaldo Arenas was finally released in 1976 and briefly stayed with Norberto Fuentes, a State informant. Fuentes kept Arenas under constant watch and tested him repeatedly to see if he would break the promises he made in his confession. However, Arenas did manage to secretly make his way to his old house to attempt to retrieve his second version of “Farewell to the Sea”… only to find out it had been discovered by State Security and taken. Reinaldo would have to rewrite this critical third installment of the “pentagonia” for a third time.

After moving around a great deal, Reinaldo Arenas finally settled in a house with an odd woman named Elia de Calvo. She owned a typewriter – something Reinaldo had lost and desperately needed to work – and she agreed to allow Arenas to stay with her provided he fed her dozens of cats and write her memoirs. Reinaldo agreed, and while he typed Elia’s memoirs he secretly began rewriting “Farewell to the Sea” yet again.

Soon after settling in with Elia, Reinaldo learned his grandmother, who he loved deeply, had died. This news depressed him deeply, but a visit with his old mentor Lezama Lima raised his spirits. Virgilio Pinera also visited with Lima and Arenas that night and the three talked about literature for hours. Upon Reinaldo’s leaving, Lima took Arenas aside and told him that, no matter what happened to him or anyone else… keep writing!

Only a short time after this inspirational visit, Reinaldo Arenas was given a newspaper that simply read “Lezama Lima was buried today”. His friend and mentor had died and the public hadn’t even been informed of his death until after Lima’s funeral and burial. The death of both Lezama and his grandmother sent Reinaldo into a deep depression that lasted for months.

Reinaldo, hoping to find a new home, met Ruben Diaz who offered to sell Arenas a room at the Monserrate Hotel. The place was a dump; it was run down, had no toilets, water or electricity and was full of roaches. After coercing some money from his aunt Reinaldo bought the room and moved in. This was a dangerous move as Castro had forbidden the sale of property in Cuba, but Reinaldo simply wanted to be as free as he could be.

Arenas hadn’t been living at the Monserrate for long before receiving a visit from a couple from France sent by the Camachos to check on Arenas’ well-being. Needless to say, the couple was horrified to see the state in which Reinaldo was living, but the visit was a blessing. Arenas had finished rewriting “Farewell to the Sea” and the couple was able to smuggle it out of Cuba to France.

And then, something extraordinary happened to Reinaldo Arenas. He fell in love with a man named Lazaro Carilles. Lazaro had a terrible home life and had severe psychiatric problems for which he had been previously committed. Regardless, Reinaldo took him in to his home and Lazaro became Reinaldo’s friend and companion for the rest of his life.

In late 1978 Reinaldo Arenas made friends with an eccentric ex-prisoner named Samuel Toca. In a bold move in 1979 Castro decided to let some former political prisoners out of Cuba and Samuel Toca was one of them. Arenas gave Toca a secret message to deliver to the Camachos in France to try at all costs to get Reinaldo out of Cuba. Instead, upon his release Toca began to tell the foreign press all of Arenas’ secrets. A headline in a Spanish paper read “Reinaldo Arenas threatens suicide if not helped out of Cuba”. This scandal prompted a visit from Lieutenant Victor, who denounced Arenas as a counter-revolutionary and threatened him with arrest. Reinaldo Arenas was betrayed again.

In a horrible stroke of fate, Virgilio Pinera died shortly after this incident. Reinaldo was informed he wouldn’t be allowed to attend the funeral of his closest friend. Despite the warnings, he went anyway. At the funeral Arenas voiced the suspicions of many that Pinera’s death was suspicious, and these public pronouncements only tightened the security around him. Reinaldo Arena was facing imminent arrest simply for speaking his mind… and then his life changed forever.

In April of 1980 a bus full of passengers drove threw the gates of the Peruvian embassy begging for asylum. Castro of course demanded their immediate return but the embassy denied him. In an attempt to force the Peruvian’s hand, Castro withdrew his troops guarding the embassy. It did not have the effect Castro desired. Tens of thousands of Cubans flooded the embassy, all begging for help and asylum. This marked the first real uprising of the Cuban people against Castro.

A power struggle ensued between Castro and the Peruvians. Castro cut off the embassy’s food, water and electricity, but the Cuban people would not leave. There were 10,800 people locked inside the building and another 100,000 outside. The world press began to cover this incident in earnest, and Castro had many of the supplicants murdered or gunned down in the street.

Finally, after consultations with the Soviet Union, Castro decided to let some of his people go. He opened the port at Mariel and gave a speech vehemently denouncing those who wanted to leave:

I’ll never forget that speech – Castro looked like a cornered, furious rat – nor will I forget the hypocritical applause… The port of Mariel was then opened, and Castro, after stressing all those people were anti-social, said that precisely what he wanted was to have that riffraff out of Cuba. Posters immediately started to appear with the slogans LET THEM GO, LET THE RIFFRAFF GO.

Almost immediately thousands of boats began to leave Cuba for the United States, but the boats were mostly filled with common criminals, the insane, or spies. Because of his mental instability Lazaro got out quickly. Reinaldo applied for an exit permit at a local police station, hoping that the locals would not have his file from State Security. Reinaldo declared he was a homosexual and was granted an exit permit. He received a passport and, knowing his name would be on a list of those not to be let off the island, on his passport he changed the “e” in his last name to an “i”.

The ruse worked, and on May 4th, 1980, Reinaldo Arenas escaped Cuba on a ship called the “San Lazaro”. The ship’s captain got lost, and what should been a six hour voyage turned into a six day nightmare at sea. Nevertheless, on May 10th, the “San Lazaro” landed in Key West… and Reinaldo Arenas was at last free.

Reinaldo Arenas was finally free of Castro and was anxious to tell the world about the horrors of Cuban life. What Reinaldo Arenas never expected was that the world would not be ready to listen….

“Who would affirm that the light and the shadow do not speak? Only those who do not understand the language of the day and the night.” - Moursa-Ag-Amastan

… to be continued in part four….

Less...

More...

Reinaldo Arenas was born in 1943 in the Oriente Province of Cuba. His extraordinarily large family was led by his religious and domineering grandmother and his violent and turbulent grandfather. The couple shared their home with a rotating swarm of their eleven unmarried daughters – many with one or more children – and their three married sons. The family was extremely poor – they had a small farm full of rocks and not much else. The small bohio hut Arenas’ family inhabited was constantly full of people, noise, and a tremendous amount of violence.

Reinaldo Arenas had almost no literary influences as a child. He had barely any schooling; it was his mother who taught him to read and write. To escape his tumultuous home life Arenas spent his days outdoors where he realized he was an artist at heart. He pulled all of his boundless creativity from nature – in the woods around his home he used to sing and make up fantastical stories about witches, elves, and death. And it was at the young age of six – when Reinaldo came upon a group of men bathing in the nearby river – that he realized something else about himself. He was gay.

Cuba’s economy under Batista was deteriorating rapidly. Food was almost non-existent and there was an increasing amount of violence from Castro’s rebel forces. When Arenas was barely a teenager his family was forced to sell their farm and move to the small city of Holquin – a poor, barren and lifeless town. His grandfather opened a small fruit and vegetable stand and Reinaldo began working making boxes in a guava paste factory, thus solidifying the end of his childhood. His only escapes now were occasional movies on the weekends, the joy of which inspired him to begin to write novels and poetry.

After the infamous “Bloody Christmas” of 1957 when Castro’s rebels tangled with Batista’s military the city of Holquin fell into ruin. Most of the province hated Batista and Castro’s rebels were enmeshed in the nearby mountains. By 1958 the situation had become desperate. Holquin had no food, money or electricity and Reinaldo and his family were starving to death. Feeling trapped, at the age of fourteen, Reinaldo Arenas fled Holquin to join Castro’s rebel forces in the nearby city of Velasco. Though he never saw or fought in a single battle, he aided the rebels by doing whatever small jobs he could.

In 1959 Batista fled Cuba and Castro’s Revolutionary Government took over. Immediately Castro began to hunt down all traitors, informers, and former military personal. Most of those found were systematically executed without a trial. Indeed, more people died in this “cleansing” that in the entire revolution:

Why is it that we, the great majority of the people, and even the intellectuals, did realize that this was the beginning of a new dictatorship, even bloodier that the previous one? Perhaps we did realize it, but the enthusiasm of knowing that now one was part of a revolution, that a dictatorship has been overthrown and the time had come for vengeance, outweighed the injustices and the crimes that were being committed. Not only were injustices being inflicted; the executions were being conducted in the name of justice and freedom, and above all, in the name of the people.

As a reward for his service to the Revolution, at sixteen years Reinaldo Arenas was awarded a scholarship to La Pantoja to become an agricultural accountant in order to help Castro “oversee” Cuba’s land. Arenas was encamped with his classmates and was indoctrinated incessantly with Soviet philosophy and the ideas of Marx and Lenin. Ultimately, Reinaldo and his classmates were informed they were not simply students but the “vanguard of the Revolution” and soldiers for Castro. Instead of attending school they were forced into military training and were subject to quite severe indoctrination into communist philosophy. It was then that Reinaldo first learned that homosexuality was condemned by Castro and that “being a faggot in Cuba was one of the worst disasters that could ever happen to anyone.”

Castro quickly began to seize more and more power. His next move was to destroy all Cuban currency and create new money, effectively cutting off Cuba’s economy from the rest of the world. With this one bold move Castro now controlled how much money any one citizen could have at a time and everything became rationed. After the Bay of Pigs in 1961 Castro revealed to the world that Cuba was a communist regime… and Reinaldo Arenas realized that everything he had done and fought for was in vain. In 1961 Arenas was assigned to work as an accountant at a farm that had been seized by Castro, and later transferred to the INRA (Institute for National Agragarian Reform). His pay wasn’t even enough to buy two meals a day.

By 1963 the persecution of homosexuals was rampant, with many being sent to “rehabilitation” camps or jail. Arenas was terrified that his homosexuality would be discovered and that he would meet the same fate as many of his friends – torture and forced slave labor, simply because he was gay. Although he was sexually active at the time, he lived in constant fear he would be discovered and shipped away, never to be seen again.

Yes… this, gentle reader, is the socialist paradise Michael Moore fawns over in Sicko. This is the dictator that we were only “taught” to be afraid of. I ask you, can you look at these atrocities – atrocities only beginning to manifest themselves I might add – and give me one good reason not to fear Castro? More importantly… can you see one good reason why anyone should defend such a tyrant?

However, I digress. Back to Reinaldo Arenas…

1963 marked a huge milestone in Reinaldo Arenas’ life. After composing and reciting a short story for a contest at the National Library, the competition committee was so impressed with Arenas’ work that they transferred him from the INRA to the Library. This move temporarily took Reinaldo away from the world of Castro and into the world of books. He began to read constantly, despite the enormous amount of censorship and the near constant destruction of any book seen as “deviant” in any way. It was Reinaldo’s extensive study of the written word in all its forms that shaped his innate gifts and forged him, at last, into a true writer.

In 1965 Reinaldo Arenas’ book “Celestino Before Dawn” won first honorable mention in a UNEAC (The Cuban Writer’s and Artists’ Association) competition. The book was published and sold out quickly, despite the fact that Arenas still had had no formal literary education. In 1966 Arenas submitted his new book, “Hallucinations” to the UNEAC competition and again won first honorable mention. However, no first prize was given – the prize committee was divided on Arenas’ submission due to the book’s political overtones. The first place prize was voided and through this odd struggle Reinaldo Arenas met and became friends with two extraordinary men – Virgilio Pinera and Lezama Lima.

Virgilio Pinera was an exceptionally talented writer who took Reinaldo under his wing. It was Pinera that taught Arenas how to edit by helping him revise “Hallucinations”. Lezama Lima was a literary giant whose work and attitude inspired Arenas to new heights. Pinera and Lima shared two things in common – they were both homosexuals and were being constantly persecuted for it, and they hated Castro and communism with great passion. Both men refused to support Castro and published works denouncing him. These tremendous acts of defiance inspired Arenas to continue writing as well as spurring on his own anti-Castro sentiments.

Pinera, Lima, and others frequently held gatherings where writers could congregate and discuss their work. These gatherings quickly turned deadly as Castro cracked down harder and harder on artists. Most of Reinaldo Arenas’ friends were either killed, committed suicide, or were turned through torture into government puppets due to Castro’s fear of the arts:

A sense of beauty is always dangerous and antagonistic to any dictatorship because it implies a realm extending beyond the limits that a dictatorship can impose on human beings. Beauty is a territory that escapes that control of the political police. Being independent and outside of their domain, beauty is so irritating to dictators that they attempt to destroy it whichever way they can. Under a dictatorship, beauty is always a dissident force, because a dictatorship is itself unaesthetic, grotesque; to a dictator and his agents, the attempt to create beauty is an escapist or reactionary act.

The almost painful irony here is that if he lived in Castro’s Cuba, Michael Moore would have been (and would be even today) interned at a work camp, imprisoned for his “counter-revolutionary” work, or worse, simply executed for his art. Back to Reinaldo Arenas…

By 1966 all homosexual acts were declared illegal and were punishable by jail time. To service these laws Castro opened concentration camps for homosexuals. By this time Reinaldo Arenas was living with his aunt Agata – a hard woman who openly worked for Castro and constantly threatened to turn her own nephew over to the police. Arenas was constantly harassed by State Security and was forced to hide both his work and his sexuality. The list of people Reinaldo could trust was growing smaller every day.

An important event occurred in 1967 - the “Solon de Mayo” art exhibition was moved to Havana in an attempt by Castro to white-wash Cuba’s image. Through this event Reinaldo met Jorge and Margarita Camacho, a couple living in France who began to smuggle Arenas’ work out of Cuba. Because of this extraordinary couple, Arenas’ novel “Hallucinations” was published and won Best Foreign Novel in France. Arenas’ previous novel “Celestino before Dawn” was republished as “Singing from the Well” as well as collections of essays, poetry, and stories. While this cemented his international career it also brought down an enormous amount of government surveillance on him – not just for the content of the books but for daring to publish them without Castro’s consent.

Because of this governmental oppression, Reinaldo decided to write his “pentagonia” – his “secret history of Cuba”. It was to be a series of five novels or “agonies” in which a writer lives, writes, suffers and dies… only to be “reborn” in the next book. “Singing from the Well” became the first book of the series, and “The Palace of the White Skunks” was smuggled out by the Camachos as the second installment. However the third and central piece, “Farewell to the Sea”, was destroyed by a close friend, who was both afraid to hide it as well as frightened by its content. Betrayed by his friend, Arenas had no choice but to begin writing his masterwork a second time. In order to avoid his work being destroyed again, he was forced to hide all his papers in a nook under his aunt’s roof.

In 1969 forced “voluntary” labor began and all the UNEAC writers were systematically sent to work in Cuba’s sugarcane mills. Reinaldo was sent in 1970 to both work in the fields and to write in praise of Castro. The workers were treated like beasts, called slaves, were starved, and any who tried to desert received between 5 to 30 years in jail. And the health care? Unlike the kind and gentle picture Moore paints of Cuban healthcare, this is the *real* care people received in Cuba at the mills:

During the day the barracks became sort of a hospital; the only people allowed to stay there were the sick and the head of the barracks, the one who watched over all the others. The patients were those who had lost an arm or were seriously ill and waiting for a transfer to a clinic or hospital, which sometimes took months, if it came at all.

I wonder why Moore failed to mention things like this in his rosy portrait of Cuban health care? Could it be that it destroys any and all case for the humanity of Castro and his social programs? In any case, Castro failed to meet his goal of ten million tons of sugar, and this failure destroyed the whole of the economy of Cuba, making it the poorest country in the Soviet Union.

In 1971 the dissident writer Herberto Padilla was captured, tortured, and forced to confess his “crimes” of writing and free-thinking. The “Padilla Case” led the formation of the First Congress of Education and Culture, an organization that made laws about everything from fashion to sex. The crackdown against homosexuality became unbearable and all gays who held positions in cultural organizations were immediately fired:

The system of parameterization was imposed; that is, every gay writer, every gay artist, every gay dramatist, received a telegram telling him that his behavior did not fall within the political and moral parameters necessary for his job, and that he was therefore either terminated or offered another job in the forced-labor camps… the island became a maximum-security jail, where everybody, according to Castro, was happy to stay.

Homosexuals were systematically arrested, publicly humiliated, forced to confess and degrade themselves and then sent for “rehabilitation” in the sugarcane mills or similar camps. Many were sent to jail for between 8 and 30 years, and some simply killed themselves from the pressure. Others became informers for Castro in order to save themselves.  On the other hand, Reinaldo Arenas refused to yield. Although he himself had been fired and was now destitute, he never ceased his writing. He continued to smuggle his work out of Cuba and he never stopped denouncing Castro with his words.

Reinaldo was a naïve adolescent peasant when he was taken in by Castro’s promises. Michael Moore is a world-savvy adult. How can he justify his praise of a murderous tyrant who enslaved, tortured, and demoralized his people? How can he excuse his portrayal of Cuba as an island paradise where Castro cares for all equally? Gentle reader, look back at Arenas’ tale thus far and answer me honestly… can there be any reasonable explanation for the praise Michael Moore heaps on Cuba and Castro’s programs?  The answer, of course, is no.

Reinaldo Arenas thought things were nearly intolerable. But then, in the summer of 1973, everything changed, and Reinaldo Arenas’ life turned from a vivid nightmare into a version of hell from which he barely escaped with his life. It all began one beautiful day at the beach….

“Here comes a candle to light you to bed. And here comes a hatchet to chop off your head.” - Children’s rhyme



…to be continued in part three…

Less...

More...

Perhaps you have heard his name. Perhaps you’ve heard him mentioned in passing as one of, if not the greatest writer to ever emerge from Cuba. Perhaps you know his books have been published in dozens of languages all over the world, or that he has won several awards, including Best Foreign Novel in France for his book “Hallucinations”. Perhaps you might have heard of his autobiography, “Before Night Falls”, and that the editors of The New York Times Book Review hailed it as one of the fourteen best books of 1993. Or perhaps you might have seen the movie adaptation of “Before Night Falls”, a gritty and almost hallucinatory film directed by Julian Schnabel which garnered several Oscar nominations, including a Best Actor nod to Javier Bardiem who played Arenas.

Or perhaps you are one of the lucky ones, the ones who have been blessed enough to read the work of Reinaldo Arenas. Perhaps you have felt yourself transported into one of Arenas’ worlds, worlds of such texture and color and majesty that they take your breath away. Perhaps you have read and smelled the tulips growing in the breezeway that Adolfina planted, or the felt the grit of the guava paste Fortunato made. Perhaps you, as I do, look at things like the moon and the sea in a different way now because of the sheer power of Reinaldo Arenas’ words.

I can hear the questions beginning already. Why, Donna? Why, on Moorewatch, are you talking about this Cuban writer? What could Reinaldo Arenas possibly have to do with Michael Moore?

The answer, of course, is abundantly simple. Reinaldo Arenas has a very important story to tell about what life was like for him in Castro’s Cuba, and it is a story we all need to hear. After seeing how Moore depicted Cuban life in Sicko, it has become vital that we know and understand what Cuban life under the nightmarish dictatorship of Fidel Castro is truly like. We need the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Reinaldo Arenas is that truth.

After nearly 15 years of hiding, exile, torture, work camps and prisons, Reinaldo Arenas managed to escape from Castro’s regime in the 1980 Mariel boatlift. He spent the next ten years of his life alternately finishing his tremendous body of work and denouncing the hellish Castro dictatorship to anyone who would listen. He wrote essays, letters, and lectured about life under Castro all over the world. In 1988 he wrote an open letter to Fidel Castro demanding that Castro hold a plebiscite similar to the one held in Chile by Pinochet. The letter drew thousands of signatures from around the world, including those of eight Nobel laureates. The letter was internationally published, drawing the wrath of Castro and his supporters.

When Reinaldo Arenas committed suicide in 1990 after a long and terrible battle with AIDS, he issued a suicide note that was published around the world. In that note, he wrote “you are the heirs of all my terrors, but also of my hope that Cuba will soon be free.” Seventeen years later, his dream remains unrealized. Cuba is not free and Castro still rules the island with an iron fist. He is aided every day both by those support Castro’s illusion that Cuba is free and unoppressed, but also by those who know and remain silent.

Reinaldo Arenas would not remain silent. For twenty-five years Arenas fought – first to stay alive and then to scream to the world about the horrors that were happening in Cuba under Castro. Death silenced Arenas’ voice but not his spirit. His spirit lives on through his words and his work. His spirit lives on in his friends, his family, his supporters. And his spirit lives on in me, I who have been so moved by his work.

I am not Cuban or of Cuban descent. I have no Cuban relatives nor have I a drop of Cuban blood in my veins. What I am is simply a woman who has been so moved by the words of Reinaldo Arenas that I feel compelled to tell his story to the world, to fight as he did, to show the world the truth, his story and his truth.

Reinaldo Arenas is now silent, but I am not. Over the next few weeks I will tell you the story of Arenas’ life in Castro’s Cuba. It will amaze you, terrify you, bewilder you and move you. I want to you to listen to his story and know that it is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This is what it was like for Reinaldo Arenas. This is what it was like in living in constant terror under Castro’s iron fist in Cuba. This is what it is still like in Cuba. And until we all stand up and begin telling the truth and denouncing Fidel Castro as the oppressor and murderous dictator that he is, this is how it will always be in Cuba.

This is the story of Reinaldo Arenas….

“I come to speak your name so I may begin this dream again.” - Garden of Caressess

---

“It all comes back to his memory now. Unable to stop himself, he sighs and weeps.” - Song of Roland”


Reinaldo Arenas was born in 1943 in the Oriente Province of Cuba. His extraordinarily large family was led by his religious and domineering grandmother and his violent and turbulent grandfather. The couple shared their home with a rotating swarm of their eleven unmarried daughters – many with one or more children – and their three married sons. The family was extremely poor – they had a small farm full of rocks and not much else. The small bohio hut Arenas’ family inhabited was constantly full of people, noise, and a tremendous amount of violence.

Reinaldo Arenas had almost no literary influences as a child. He had barely any schooling; it was his mother who taught him to read and write. To escape his tumultuous home life Arenas spent his days outdoors where he realized he was an artist at heart. He pulled all of his boundless creativity from nature – in the woods around his home he used to sing and make up fantastical stories about witches, elves, and death. And it was at the young age of six – when Reinaldo came upon a group of men bathing in the nearby river – that he realized something else about himself. He was gay.

Cuba’s economy under Batista was deteriorating rapidly. Food was almost non-existent and there was an increasing amount of violence from Castro’s rebel forces. When Arenas was barely a teenager his family was forced to sell their farm and move to the small city of Holquin – a poor, barren and lifeless town. His grandfather opened a small fruit and vegetable stand and Reinaldo began working making boxes in a guava paste factory, thus solidifying the end of his childhood. His only escapes now were occasional movies on the weekends, the joy of which inspired him to begin to write novels and poetry.

After the infamous “Bloody Christmas” of 1957 when Castro’s rebels tangled with Batista’s military the city of Holquin fell into ruin. Most of the province hated Batista and Castro’s rebels were enmeshed in the nearby mountains. By 1958 the situation had become desperate. Holquin had no food, money or electricity and Reinaldo and his family were starving to death. Feeling trapped, at the age of fourteen, Reinaldo Arenas fled Holquin to join Castro’s rebel forces in the nearby city of Velasco. Though he never saw or fought in a single battle, he aided the rebels by doing whatever small jobs he could.

In 1959 Batista fled Cuba and Castro’s Revolutionary Government took over. Immediately Castro began to hunt down all traitors, informers, and former military personal. Most of those found were systematically executed without a trial. Indeed, more people died in this “cleansing” that in the entire revolution:

Why is it that we, the great majority of the people, and even the intellectuals, did realize that this was the beginning of a new dictatorship, even bloodier that the previous one? Perhaps we did realize it, but the enthusiasm of knowing that now one was part of a revolution, that a dictatorship has been overthrown and the time had come for vengeance, outweighed the injustices and the crimes that were being committed. Not only were injustices being inflicted; the executions were being conducted in the name of justice and freedom, and above all, in the name of the people.

As a reward for his service to the Revolution, at sixteen years Reinaldo Arenas was awarded a scholarship to La Pantoja to become an agricultural accountant in order to help Castro “oversee” Cuba’s land. Arenas was encamped with his classmates and was indoctrinated incessantly with Soviet philosophy and the ideas of Marx and Lenin. Ultimately, Reinaldo and his classmates were informed they were not simply students but the “vanguard of the Revolution” and soldiers for Castro. Instead of attending school they were forced into military training and were subject to quite severe indoctrination into communist philosophy. It was then that Reinaldo first learned that homosexuality was condemned by Castro and that “being a faggot in Cuba was one of the worst disasters that could ever happen to anyone.”

Castro quickly began to seize more and more power. His next move was to destroy all Cuban currency and create new money, effectively cutting off Cuba’s economy from the rest of the world. With this one bold move Castro now controlled how much money any one citizen could have at a time and everything became rationed. After the Bay of Pigs in 1961 Castro revealed to the world that Cuba was a communist regime… and Reinaldo Arenas realized that everything he had done and fought for was in vain. In 1961 Arenas was assigned to work as an accountant at a farm that had been seized by Castro, and later transferred to the INRA (Institute for National Agragarian Reform). His pay wasn’t even enough to buy two meals a day.

By 1963 the persecution of homosexuals was rampant, with many being sent to “rehabilitation” camps or jail. Arenas was terrified that his homosexuality would be discovered and that he would meet the same fate as many of his friends – torture and forced slave labor, simply because he was gay. Although he was sexually active at the time, he lived in constant fear he would be discovered and shipped away, never to be seen again.

Yes… this, gentle reader, is the socialist paradise Michael Moore fawns over in Sicko. This is the dictator that we were only “taught” to be afraid of. I ask you, can you look at these atrocities – atrocities only beginning to manifest themselves I might add – and give me one good reason not to fear Castro? More importantly… can you see one good reason why anyone should defend such a tyrant?

However, I digress. Back to Reinaldo Arenas…

1963 marked a huge milestone in Reinaldo Arenas’ life. After composing and reciting a short story for a contest at the National Library, the competition committee was so impressed with Arenas’ work that they transferred him from the INRA to the Library. This move temporarily took Reinaldo away from the world of Castro and into the world of books. He began to read constantly, despite the enormous amount of censorship and the near constant destruction of any book seen as “deviant” in any way. It was Reinaldo’s extensive study of the written word in all its forms that shaped his innate gifts and forged him, at last, into a true writer.

In 1965 Reinaldo Arenas’ book “Celestino Before Dawn” won first honorable mention in a UNEAC (The Cuban Writer’s and Artists’ Association) competition. The book was published and sold out quickly, despite the fact that Arenas still had had no formal literary education. In 1966 Arenas submitted his new book, “Hallucinations” to the UNEAC competition and again won first honorable mention. However, no first prize was given – the prize committee was divided on Arenas’ submission due to the book’s political overtones. The first place prize was voided and through this odd struggle Reinaldo Arenas met and became friends with two extraordinary men – Virgilio Pinera and Lezama Lima.

Virgilio Pinera was an exceptionally talented writer who took Reinaldo under his wing. It was Pinera that taught Arenas how to edit by helping him revise “Hallucinations”. Lezama Lima was a literary giant whose work and attitude inspired Arenas to new heights. Pinera and Lima shared two things in common – they were both homosexuals and were being constantly persecuted for it, and they hated Castro and communism with great passion. Both men refused to support Castro and published works denouncing him. These tremendous acts of defiance inspired Arenas to continue writing as well as spurring on his own anti-Castro sentiments.

Pinera, Lima, and others frequently held gatherings where writers could congregate and discuss their work. These gatherings quickly turned deadly as Castro cracked down harder and harder on artists. Most of Reinaldo Arenas’ friends were either killed, committed suicide, or were turned through torture into government puppets due to Castro’s fear of the arts:

A sense of beauty is always dangerous and antagonistic to any dictatorship because it implies a realm extending beyond the limits that a dictatorship can impose on human beings. Beauty is a territory that escapes that control of the political police. Being independent and outside of their domain, beauty is so irritating to dictators that they attempt to destroy it whichever way they can. Under a dictatorship, beauty is always a dissident force, because a dictatorship is itself unaesthetic, grotesque; to a dictator and his agents, the attempt to create beauty is an escapist or reactionary act.

The almost painful irony here is that if he lived in Castro’s Cuba, Michael Moore would have been (and would be even today) interned at a work camp, imprisoned for his “counter-revolutionary” work, or worse, simply executed for his art. Back to Reinaldo Arenas…

By 1966 all homosexual acts were declared illegal and were punishable by jail time. To service these laws Castro opened concentration camps for homosexuals. By this time Reinaldo Arenas was living with his aunt Agata – a hard woman who openly worked for Castro and constantly threatened to turn her own nephew over to the police. Arenas was constantly harassed by State Security and was forced to hide both his work and his sexuality. The list of people Reinaldo could trust was growing smaller every day.

An important event occurred in 1967 - the “Solon de Mayo” art exhibition was moved to Havana in an attempt by Castro to white-wash Cuba’s image. Through this event Reinaldo met Jorge and Margarita Camacho, a couple living in France who began to smuggle Arenas’ work out of Cuba. Because of this extraordinary couple, Arenas’ novel “Hallucinations” was published and won Best Foreign Novel in France. Arenas’ previous novel “Celestino before Dawn” was republished as “Singing from the Well” as well as collections of essays, poetry, and stories. While this cemented his international career it also brought down an enormous amount of government surveillance on him – not just for the content of the books but for daring to publish them without Castro’s consent.

Because of this governmental oppression, Reinaldo decided to write his “pentagonia” – his “secret history of Cuba”. It was to be a series of five novels or “agonies” in which a writer lives, writes, suffers and dies… only to be “reborn” in the next book. “Singing from the Well” became the first book of the series, and “The Palace of the White Skunks” was smuggled out by the Camachos as the second installment. However the third and central piece, “Farewell to the Sea”, was destroyed by a close friend, who was both afraid to hide it as well as frightened by its content. Betrayed by his friend, Arenas had no choice but to begin writing his masterwork a second time. In order to avoid his work being destroyed again, he was forced to hide all his papers in a nook under his aunt’s roof.

In 1969 forced “voluntary” labor began and all the UNEAC writers were systematically sent to work in Cuba’s sugarcane mills. Reinaldo was sent in 1970 to both work in the fields and to write in praise of Castro. The workers were treated like beasts, called slaves, were starved, and any who tried to desert received between 5 to 30 years in jail. And the health care? Unlike the kind and gentle picture Moore paints of Cuban healthcare, this is the *real* care people received in Cuba at the mills:

During the day the barracks became sort of a hospital; the only people allowed to stay there were the sick and the head of the barracks, the one who watched over all the others. The patients were those who had lost an arm or were seriously ill and waiting for a transfer to a clinic or hospital, which sometimes took months, if it came at all.

I wonder why Moore failed to mention things like this in his rosy portrait of Cuban health care? Could it be that it destroys any and all case for the humanity of Castro and his social programs? In any case, Castro failed to meet his goal of ten million tons of sugar, and this failure destroyed the whole of the economy of Cuba, making it the poorest country in the Soviet Union.

In 1971 the dissident writer Herberto Padilla was captured, tortured, and forced to confess his “crimes” of writing and free-thinking. The “Padilla Case” led the formation of the First Congress of Education and Culture, an organization that made laws about everything from fashion to sex. The crackdown against homosexuality became unbearable and all gays who held positions in cultural organizations were immediately fired:

The system of parameterization was imposed; that is, every gay writer, every gay artist, every gay dramatist, received a telegram telling him that his behavior did not fall within the political and moral parameters necessary for his job, and that he was therefore either terminated or offered another job in the forced-labor camps… the island became a maximum-security jail, where everybody, according to Castro, was happy to stay.

Homosexuals were systematically arrested, publicly humiliated, forced to confess and degrade themselves and then sent for “rehabilitation” in the sugarcane mills or similar camps. Many were sent to jail for between 8 and 30 years, and some simply killed themselves from the pressure. Others became informers for Castro in order to save themselves.  On the other hand, Reinaldo Arenas refused to yield. Although he himself had been fired and was now destitute, he never ceased his writing. He continued to smuggle his work out of Cuba and he never stopped denouncing Castro with his words.

Reinaldo was a naïve adolescent peasant when he was taken in by Castro’s promises. Michael Moore is a world-savvy adult. How can he justify his praise of a murderous tyrant who enslaved, tortured, and demoralized his people? How can he excuse his portrayal of Cuba as an island paradise where Castro cares for all equally? Gentle reader, look back at Arenas’ tale thus far and answer me honestly… can there be any reasonable explanation for the praise Michael Moore heaps on Cuba and Castro’s programs?  The answer, of course, is no.

Reinaldo Arenas thought things were nearly intolerable. But then, in the summer of 1973, everything changed, and Reinaldo Arenas’ life turned from a vivid nightmare into a version of hell from which he barely escaped with his life. It all began one beautiful day at the beach….

“Here comes a candle to light you to bed. And here comes a hatchet to chop off your head.” - Children’s rhyme

---

“Come, demon.” - Arthur Rimbaud


The sun was hot and the water was warm in the summer of 1973. Reinaldo Arenas and his friend Pepe Malas were enjoying a swim at Guanabo Beach when they discovered that they had been robbed off all their belongings, including their clothes and bags. Against Reinaldo’s protestations, Malas called over a nearby police officer and reported the theft. The young thieves were quickly apprehended by the police and both Arenas and Malas were requested to appear at the Havana police department the following day.

Reinaldo Arenas was filled with apprehension; he feared a police trap. Unfortunately for him, his premonition was correct. The young thieves accused Arenas and Malas of being homosexuals who had tried to fondle their genitals. Because under Castro’s law “in the case of a homosexual committing a sexual crime, anyone’s accusation was enough to prosecute”, both Reinaldo Arenas and Pepe Malas were immediately arresting for the corruption of minors and brought to the Guanabo jail.

After Reinaldo Arenas was released on bail he met with his appointed lawyer… and realized the situation was far more dire than he could have ever guessed. His terrified attorney showed him an overflowing file filled with information about Arenas’ illegal overseas publications and statements against him from some of his closest friends. Because Arenas had published overseas without Castro’s permission he was seen as a counter-revolutionary and a threat to Castro’s regime. Between these publications and the sworn statements by his friends against him, Reinaldo Arenas was now facing charges for political crimes and was looking at eight years or more in jail. 

Arenas was arrested again the next day and was taken to the Patu Miramar police jail. Shortly after his arrival at the jail, there was a brief commotion and his cell door was left unlocked. In an incredibly daring move, Reinaldo slipped the lock off the door, quietly left the station and dove into the water nearby. It was an amazing escape, and Arenas was able to swim to a distant beach where he wouldn’t be quickly apprehended.

His situation now turning more desperate by the minute, Reinaldo Arenas decided to risk an escape to Guantanamo Bay in the hopes he could reach US soil. He shaved off his long hair, donned a set of threadbare clothes and took a three day long train ride to Guantanamo. Under the cover of night, Reinaldo Arenas set out for the first river crossing that would take him to safety. However, when he reached the river he heard strange crackling noises in the water. Suddenly, bright green lights appeared around him and machine gun fire rang out in the night. The lights were infrared sensors – the Cuban border patrol had sensed an intruder and began hunting him. Terrified, Reinaldo scaled a tall tree and hid there for two days and nights until the search was over.

When Arenas finally descended from his hiding place in the tree he tried again to cross the river. It was only after he began his swim across the dark river that he discovered the source of those odd crackling sounds. The river was filled with alligators – the cracking sound was the gnashing of their teeth. With so many predators in the water there was simply no way to cross. Defeated, Reinaldo Arenas was forced to return to Guantanamo.

After wandering through Guantanamo for three days with no food or money, Reinaldo Arenas joined up with a group of draft dodgers who were planning on jumping trains to get to Havana. Upon his return to Havana Arenas hoped he would be able to find refuge with some of his friends and try to escape Cuba through the French Embassy.

Reinaldo managed to get his friends Juan and Jose Abreu to deliver a letter to the French Ambassador begging for asylum. The Ambassador refused to help, but Reinaldo’s loyal friends the Camachos sent Juan Lagaurde to try and smuggle Arenas out of Cuba. The plan failed as well, and a desperate Arenas began to write letters to the Red Cross, The UN, UNESCO and foreign dignitaries. Laguarde was able to smuggle these letters out of Cuba and they were published in newspapers around the world:

I wanted to report all the persecution I was being subjected to, and began as follows: “For a long time I have been the victim of a sinister persecution by the Cuban Regime.” I went on to list the censorship and the harsh treatment that we Cuban writers had suffered and to name all the writers who had been executed… In one paragraph I explained the situation I was in and how, as persecution was escalating, I was wiring those lines in hiding, while waiting for the most sinister and criminal state apparatus to put an end to my existence. And I stated: I want now to affirm that want I am saying here is the truth, even though under torture I might later be forced to say the opposite.

Yes, this is the Cuban regime Michael Moore praises. How wonderfully Castro treats his people! How kind and benevolent he is! Look at how well he treats his gifted writers and artists! Michael Moore, how can you read these desperate words and still find the gall to praise Castro’s regime that hunted this man simply for being a writer?!?

But I digress once again. Back to Reinaldo Arenas….

After the publication of his letters, Reinaldo Arenas found himself in a desperate situation. The majority of his friends either exiled or informed on him and one burned the whole of Arenas’ written work that he had been hiding. A total of twelve books were lost forever. The Abreu brothers remained allies and told Reinaldo that Castro had put out an order to have Reinaldo Arenas captured immediately due to the international scandal his letter had caused.

There was nowhere to hide anymore. After ten days without any real food or water, Reinaldo Arenas emerged from the ditch where he had been sleeping to try to buy a bite of ice cream. He was immediately apprehended by the police and was transferred immediately to the infamous and deadly El Morro Prison.

Morro Castle had been a medieval colonial fortress at Havana Port that had been converted into a hellish jail. The cells were huge wards where up to 50 prisoners were jammed into one cell. The toilet was a hole in the ground and with no toilet paper and everything and everyone was covered in feces. The smell and the noise were overwhelming. The treatment of homosexuals was abhorrent. They were held in underground wards that filled with water at high tides, starved, and treated like beasts.

Perhaps the most shocking fact about El Morro was that everyone from mere traffic offenders to mass murderers were stuffed together in the cells. Some of the crimes for which people had been imprisoned seemed simply insane:

There was, for example, an unfortunate father with all his sons, who had been sentenced to five years because they had killed one of their cows to feed the family, something Castro’s laws did not allow… Many inmates in my ward said there they were in jail because they had committed ‘penicide’. This was the name they had given to the rape of women and minors. But penicide included almost anything. For example, one of my fellow prisoners was there because some old ladies had seen him taking a shower, in the nude, in his own backyard and denounced him.

Terrified of torture and the prison conditions, Reinaldo Arenas took an overdose of pills in a desperate suicide attempt. He woke up three days later in the prison hospital – it was in fact a miracle he survived. Back in Ward 7, Reinaldo learned to survive the worst of El Morro by writing letters for prisoners and giving French lessons. He also quickly learned to hide and ration his meager food to avoid starvation when the guards neglected to feed the prisoners.

Indeed, the guards at El Morro were sadistic. They routinely gang-raped the young prisoners and those who fought back were mutilated. The guards regularly beat the prisoners for no reason and without any mercy. Needless to say, many of the inmates were driven crazy by the routine torture and conditions. They manufactured weapons from sticks, nails and razors to defend themselves from the guards and other prisoners. Suicides were all too common. The prisoners were allowed access to the roof about once a month, and many used that opportunity to throw themselves over the edge, dashing their bodies on the rocks. Others hung themselves, and still others would kill other prisoners simply so they would be executed for it.

The horrors and atrocities that occurred within the walls of El Morro cannot be conveyed with words. Indeed, I find myself now at a loss to continue to describe the beatings, torture, mutilation, isolation, degradation, and murder of all those poor souls. Reading these stories and thinking about these horror fills me with a rage and sadness I can barely contain.

But what I need to understand is how Michael Moore could know of such atrocities and *STILL* lavish praise upon Castro and his regime! Mr. Moore… how could you possibly condone such atrocities against humanity? Reinaldo Arenas was an artist, a writer. He was thrown into a hellish prison and subjected to incredible violence SIMPLY FOR BEING AN ARTIST.

Mr. Moore… do you not realize that if you were Cuban your work and actions would have you in the same place as Reinaldo Arenas? You take pride – as well you should – for being able to create art that makes political statements. Reinaldo Arenas and countless other artists, writers, and dramatists were thrown in jail, tortured, forced to recant their work and then executed for doing exactly that. Do you not see that if you were Cuban you would have suffered the same fate as these poor Cuban artists? You say you are a defender of humanity and that you want all humans treated with dignity and care. Why are you not denouncing these horrors? How could you possibly defend a system where you yourself would ultimately meet your death for the type of work you create? Do you not understand that if you were Cuban and made a version of Fahrenheit 9/11 about Castro you would have been executed? Knowing this… how can you possibly defend Castro in any way?

I have let my anger impede this story again. Back to Reinaldo Arenas….

It had been six months and Reinaldo Arenas had still not been brought to trial. One day he was abruptly taken to a “penalty cell” – a tiny box less than a meter high with a dirt floor and a hole for a toilet. He was held there for days without food or water before being brought before Lieutenant Victor, the man in charge of Arenas’ case.

Arenas’ often brutal interrogations began. He was grilled all day about how he got his work out of Cuba and sent back to the penalty cell at night. After a week of the interrogation and torture Reinaldo became afraid he might break and give up the names of his friends. Rather than risk that happening Reinaldo Arenas attempted to hang himself. He was saved and transferred to the State Security Headquarters as Villa Marista – Castro didn’t want Arenas dead before he confessed.

At Villa Marista Reinaldo was thrown into a small box of a cell with constant light and a hole in the ground for a toilet. He was starved for days before the interrogations began again. Lieutenants Victor and Gamboa told Arenas they could make him simply disappear. They were right and Reinaldo knew it – there was no way out anymore.

Reinaldo Arenas was questioned and tortured all day and night. He was often left without food or water and was subjected to steam burnings, what he called “torture similar to fire”. Neither Lieutenant would believe anything Arenas told them.

Finally, after weeks of endless torture and imprisonment, Reinaldo Arenas broke and confessed:

My confession was a long one; I talked about my life and my homosexuality, which I detested, about having ideological weaknesses and my accursed books, the likes of which I would never write again. I actually recanted all I had done in my life, my only hope for redemption being the possibility that in the future I could join and become part of the Revolution and work day and night on its behalf. Needless to say, I was requesting rehabilitation, that is, to be sent to a labor camp; and I committed myself to work for the government and write optimistic novels.

Once again I feel myself brimming with anger. Mr. Moore… read these words. Reinaldo Arenas, one of the greatest writers to ever emerge from Cuba, was tortured endlessly and forced to recant his life’s work because Castro demanded it. You have whined incessantly to the press about how the Bush administration has tried to oppress you and suppress your work. Tell me, Mr. Moore… how does it feel to read the words of an artist who was *truly* oppressed? Do you not feel shame in touting the wonders of Castro after reading about how Castro destroyed generations of great artists who, just like you, simply wanted to create art and speak openly about their government?

Back to Reinaldo Arenas…

Reinaldo Arenas’ confession appeased the Lieutenants. After four months in isolation Arenas was transferred back to El Morro to await his trial for the corruption of minors. The political charges were not taken to trial due to his confession. In a shocking turn of events, both men who Reinaldo was accused of “fondling” them recanted their testimony at trial, and Arenas was only sentenced to two years for “lascivious abuses”.

Shortly after the trial Lieutenant Victor paid Arenas a visit at El Morro. Reinaldo Arenas’ novel “The Palace of the White Skunks” – the second installment in his “pentagonia” – had just been published in France. Now the world knew Reinaldo still lived and Castro could not simply execute him. However, as punishment, he was transferred to Ward 1 – an underground dungeon filled with sewage and filth. The others in the ward were transferred out and Reinaldo Arenas – one of the greatest writers in Cuba – was left in squalor and in despair over his confession:

Before my confession I had a great companion, my pride. After the confession I had nothing; I had lost my dignity and my rebellious spirit… Now I was alone in my misery; no one could witness my misfortune in that cell. The worst misfortune was to continue living after all that, after having betrayed myself and after having been betrayed by almost everyone else.

Reinaldo Arenas was finally transferred to an “open prison” in Flores. It was an improvement over the hell of El Morro as you could at least be outdoors. The prisoners in Flores were forced to build houses and later schools from dawn until late at night. This intense forced labor had destroyed the body and health of most of the prisoners there, whose bodies were literally falling apart. Reinaldo himself could not obtain a simple dose of antibiotics to cure an infection because of the lack of medicine in Cuba.

Reinaldo Arenas was finally released in 1976 and briefly stayed with Norberto Fuentes, a State informant. Fuentes kept Arenas under constant watch and tested him repeatedly to see if he would break the promises he made in his confession. However, Arenas did manage to secretly make his way to his old house to attempt to retrieve his second version of “Farewell to the Sea”… only to find out it had been discovered by State Security and taken. Reinaldo would have to rewrite this critical third installment of the “pentagonia” for a third time.

After moving around a great deal, Reinaldo Arenas finally settled in a house with an odd woman named Elia de Calvo. She owned a typewriter – something Reinaldo had lost and desperately needed to work – and she agreed to allow Arenas to stay with her provided he fed her dozens of cats and write her memoirs. Reinaldo agreed, and while he typed Elia’s memoirs he secretly began rewriting “Farewell to the Sea” yet again.

Soon after settling in with Elia, Reinaldo learned his grandmother, who he loved deeply, had died. This news depressed him deeply, but a visit with his old mentor Lezama Lima raised his spirits. Virgilio Pinera also visited with Lima and Arenas that night and the three talked about literature for hours. Upon Reinaldo’s leaving, Lima took Arenas aside and told him that, no matter what happened to him or anyone else… keep writing!

Only a short time after this inspirational visit, Reinaldo Arenas was given a newspaper that simply read “Lezama Lima was buried today”. His friend and mentor had died and the public hadn’t even been informed of his death until after Lima’s funeral and burial. The death of both Lezama and his grandmother sent Reinaldo into a deep depression that lasted for months.

Reinaldo, hoping to find a new home, met Ruben Diaz who offered to sell Arenas a room at the Monserrate Hotel. The place was a dump; it was run down, had no toilets, water or electricity and was full of roaches. After coercing some money from his aunt Reinaldo bought the room and moved in. This was a dangerous move as Castro had forbidden the sale of property in Cuba, but Reinaldo simply wanted to be as free as he could be.

Arenas hadn’t been living at the Monserrate for long before receiving a visit from a couple from France sent by the Camachos to check on Arenas’ well-being. Needless to say, the couple was horrified to see the state in which Reinaldo was living, but the visit was a blessing. Arenas had finished rewriting “Farewell to the Sea” and the couple was able to smuggle it out of Cuba to France.

And then, something extraordinary happened to Reinaldo Arenas. He fell in love with a man named Lazaro Carilles. Lazaro had a terrible home life and had severe psychiatric problems for which he had been previously committed. Regardless, Reinaldo took him in to his home and Lazaro became Reinaldo’s friend and companion for the rest of his life.

In late 1978 Reinaldo Arenas made friends with an eccentric ex-prisoner named Samuel Toca. In a bold move in 1979 Castro decided to let some former political prisoners out of Cuba and Samuel Toca was one of them. Arenas gave Toca a secret message to deliver to the Camachos in France to try at all costs to get Reinaldo out of Cuba. Instead, upon his release Toca began to tell the foreign press all of Arenas’ secrets. A headline in a Spanish paper read “Reinaldo Arenas threatens suicide if not helped out of Cuba”. This scandal prompted a visit from Lieutenant Victor, who denounced Arenas as a counter-revolutionary and threatened him with arrest. Reinaldo Arenas was betrayed again.

In a horrible stroke of fate, Virgilio Pinera died shortly after this incident. Reinaldo was informed he wouldn’t be allowed to attend the funeral of his closest friend. Despite the warnings, he went anyway. At the funeral Arenas voiced the suspicions of many that Pinera’s death was suspicious, and these public pronouncements only tightened the security around him. Reinaldo Arena was facing imminent arrest simply for speaking his mind… and then his life changed forever.

In April of 1980 a bus full of passengers drove threw the gates of the Peruvian embassy begging for asylum. Castro of course demanded their immediate return but the embassy denied him. In an attempt to force the Peruvian’s hand, Castro withdrew his troops guarding the embassy. It did not have the effect Castro desired. Tens of thousands of Cubans flooded the embassy, all begging for help and asylum. This marked the first real uprising of the Cuban people against Castro.

A power struggle ensued between Castro and the Peruvians. Castro cut off the embassy’s food, water and electricity, but the Cuban people would not leave. There were 10,800 people locked inside the building and another 100,000 outside. The world press began to cover this incident in earnest, and Castro had many of the supplicants murdered or gunned down in the street.

Finally, after consultations with the Soviet Union, Castro decided to let some of his people go. He opened the port at Mariel and gave a speech vehemently denouncing those who wanted to leave:

I’ll never forget that speech – Castro looked like a cornered, furious rat – nor will I forget the hypocritical applause… The port of Mariel was then opened, and Castro, after stressing all those people were anti-social, said that precisely what he wanted was to have that riffraff out of Cuba. Posters immediately started to appear with the slogans LET THEM GO, LET THE RIFFRAFF GO.

Almost immediately thousands of boats began to leave Cuba for the United States, but the boats were mostly filled with common criminals, the insane, or spies. Because of his mental instability Lazaro got out quickly. Reinaldo applied for an exit permit at a local police station, hoping that the locals would not have his file from State Security. Reinaldo declared he was a homosexual and was granted an exit permit. He received a passport and, knowing his name would be on a list of those not to be let off the island, on his passport he changed the “e” in his last name to an “i”.

The ruse worked, and on May 4th, 1980, Reinaldo Arenas escaped Cuba on a ship called the “San Lazaro”. The ship’s captain got lost, and what should been a six hour voyage turned into a six day nightmare at sea. Nevertheless, on May 10th, the “San Lazaro” landed in Key West… and Reinaldo Arenas was at last free.

Reinaldo Arenas was finally free of Castro and was anxious to tell the world about the horrors of Cuban life. What Reinaldo Arenas never expected was that the world would not be ready to listen….

“Who would affirm that the light and the shadow do not speak? Only those who do not understand the language of the day and the night.” - Moursa-Ag-Amastan

---

“For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard.” - Acts, 4:20


On May 10th, 1980, Reinaldo Arenas stepped of the deck of the “San Lazaro” and onto the shores of Key West. It was the first time in his life he had ever walked on land not owned and governed by a ruthless dictator.  He had virtually no possessions and no money, so it was a lucky turn of fate when Reinaldo met up with the son of a friend from Cuba. The young man took Arenas to a warehouse filled with donations designed to help the Mariel arrivals. Reinaldo received a batch of new clothes, food, and soap. He then met up with Juan Abreu and his dearest friend Lazaro Carilles and was able to contact the Camachos to ensure that his papers were safe. Finally, after so many years of running, hiding and exile, Reinaldo Arenas began to feel human again.

Reinaldo Arenas’ fame and talent had indeed preceded him, and he was invited to speak at a conference at the International University of Florida. Ironically, Herberto Padilla spoke before him; a drunk and stumbling shadow of his former self. Padilla had never been able to recover from the torture and imprisonment which Castro had imposed on him. The sight of this still-broken man fueled Arenas desire to let the world know about the atrocities being committed against artists and homosexuals in Cuba. But when Reinaldo took the stage and began denouncing Castro and his actions in Cuba, the public turned against him and an astonished Arenas was heckled off the stage.

This alarming trend continued as Reinaldo Arenas continued to speak out publicly against Castro’s regime. Arenas’ Mexican publisher told Reinaldo he should have stayed in Cuba and refused to pay him any of his royalties. A similar event happened in Uruguay where Arenas’ publisher not only denounced Reinaldo but published a letter stating that Arenas should be ostracized from the literary world. Despite the fact that Reinaldo Arenas’ works were published and read in dozens of languages all over the globe, he received almost no monetary compensation for it. Even though these events were a rude awakening to the capitalist system, Reinaldo still found it infinitely superior to communism:

None of this surprised me: I already knew that the capitalist system was also sordid and money hungry. In one of my first statements after leaving Cuba I had declared that “the difference between the communist and capitalist systems is that, although both give you a kick in the ass, in the communist system you have to applaud, while in the capitalist system you can scream. And I came here to scream.”

In the summer of 1980 Professor Reinaldo Sanchez offered Arenas a job as a visiting professor at the International University of Florida teaching Cuban poetry. Reinaldo happily accepted this offer while still communing with the plethora of Cuban writers now exiled in Miami. Most of these formerly great writers were living hand-to-mouth or on welfare. Almost none of them could get published. Arenas tried to use his influence to start a publishing house for these talented writers but could not get funding for the project. He was told “literature is not lucrative” – it seemed no one was ready to hear about life under Fidel Castro.

It was after all of this that Reinaldo Arenas realized life in Miami was simply not for him. He found Miami to be a sad caricature of Cuba, a plastic world with no real substance. So when Arenas received an invitation to speak at Columbia University in New York he left almost immediately. Reinaldo fell in love with New York City and its endless sidewalks, trains, theater and nightlife. A friend found him an apartment within blocks of Times Square and, after finishing his course at the University of Florida, Reinaldo Arenas and Lazaro Carilles moved to New York on New Years Eve of 1980.

1981 and 1982 were wonderful years for Reinaldo Arenas in New York. He began writing prolifically and joined a small group of other exiled Cuban writers who had moved to the big city. Just as they used to do in Cuba, the group met and shared their work with each other, eventually leading to the creation of a magazine called “Mariel”. “Mariel” was a defiant publication that spoke about great writers and unmasked the hypocrisy about Cuba, in particular the treatment of homosexuals by Castro. The magazine wasn’t well received and eventually folded, but Arenas felt it was a triumphant effort for it raised important issues about life in Cuba.

Reinaldo Arenas continued insistence on speaking about the horrors occurring in Cuba under Castro began to cost him both professionally and financially. His books were dropped from assigned reading lists at New York University as well numerous other colleges worldwide. This attitude wasn’t limited to Arenas’ work – it affected all Cuban exiled writers:

In exile we have no country to represent us; we live as if by special permission, always in danger of being rejected. Instead of having a country, we have an anti-country…

In the US these types of problems were particularly bad. Reinaldo Arenas found that the vast majority of US liberals were either supportive of Castro or simply overlooked the atrocities being committed in Cuba. Instead of discovering movements to overthrow Castro, Arenas instead found liberal groups wanting to negotiate with the communist dictator and demanding that dissidents remain quiet. To Reinaldo Arenas, who had spent his life fighting, hiding, and being tortured and imprisoned by Castro, this attitude of tolerance and silence was simply unacceptable:

I remember that after I arrived in the United States, a Cuban exile who lived in Washington said to me: “Don’t ever quarrel with the left.” For people like him, to attack Castro’s government was to fight against the left. But after twenty years of repression, how could I keep silent about these crimes? On the other hand, I have never considered myself as belonging to the “left” or to the “right”, nor do I want to be included under any opportunistic or political label. I tell my truth, as does the Jew who has suffered racism or the Russian was has been in the Gulag, or any human being who has eyes to see the way things really are. I scream, therefore I exist.

It took until 1983 for Reinaldo Arenas to obtain a UN document that classified him a refugee. This document allowed him to travel outside the United States and to finally see his good friends Jorge and Margarita Camacho for the first time since 1967. Arenas then embarked on a speaking tour of Europe beginning in Sweden. At the University of Stockholm he gave a lecture in which he simply read sections of the Granma – Castro’s official newspaper – in order to demonstrate what was really happening daily in Cuba. The audience’s response was pointed – they heckled Reinaldo continuously until he was forced to leave the stage. Indeed, Arenas met responses like this in many places along his tour, proving once again that people were either unwilling or unable to deal with the truth about Castro and Cuba.

Between 1980 and 1983 Reinaldo Arenas also appeared in three films: “In His Own Words”, “The Other Cuba”, and “Improper Conduct”. Arenas loved “Improper Conduct” as it was the first film to openly denounce Castro and the persecution of homosexuals in Cuba. The film contained footage of the UMAP concentration camps for gays and interviews with many survivors. The film attracted international attention and won the Human Rights Award in Europe.

During this time period Reinaldo Arenas accomplished a great deal. He wrote or re-wrote six books, was invited to speak at over 40 universities and gave lectures around the world. He was even able to get his mother out of Cuba to New York for a three month visit, sending her home with a huge sack of clothes for his still poor family. These years were among the happiest in Reinaldo Arenas’ life.

For the next few years Reinaldo Arenas devoted his time to fixing and translating his life’s work. He penned a book of essays on Cuban life called “A Need for Freedom” and a book of poetry called “The Will to Live Manifesting Itself”. He had not yet completed the last two novels of his “pentagonia” when Reinaldo became sick with repeated fevers.

In 1987 Reinaldo Arenas was diagnosed with AIDS. Feeling sure his death was now imminent, Arenas bought a plane ticket to Miami – he wanted to die near his beloved sea. Lazaro brought Reinaldo back to New York and checked him into a hospital despite his lack of money or insurance. Given only a 10% chance to live, Reinaldo fought for nearly four months and beat the odds. Upon his discharge from the hospital, although still quite ill, Reinaldo Arenas swore that he would not die until he had completed his life’s work. 

Now too weak to type, Reinaldo began dictating his autobiography “Before Night Falls”. In the spring of 1988 Arenas’ novel “The Doorman” was published in France to great critical and commercial success and was one of three finalists for the International Medici Prize. This tremendous success was eclipsed when Reinaldo fell ill again with PCP pneumonia. Despite also developing Kaposi’s sarcoma, phlebitis and toxoplasmosis, he once again beat the odds and lived to continue his work.

Reinaldo Arenas finished “Before Night Falls” in the hospital and began to write “The Color of Summer”, the critical fourth installment in his “pentagonia”. Simultaneously he was revising “The Assault”, the fifth and final piece of the “pentagonia” which had been hurried penned in Cuba. Friends helped to translate Arenas’ longhand and “The Assault” was finally completed. He was also eventually able to complete “The Color of Summer” – thus completing the “pentagonia” – and his poetic trilogy “Leper Colony”. Reinaldo Arenas had finally completed his body of work

In 1988 Reinaldo Arenas flew out to Spain to visit with the Camachos. It was there that Jorge Camacho and Arenas hatched an idea to publish an open letter to Castro requesting he hold a plebiscite similar to the one held in Chile by Pinochet. The idea blossomed, and the letter garnered thousands of signatures, including those of eight Nobel Laureates. The letter was published in newspapers around the world, enraging Castro to no end. Reinaldo hoped that Castro’s reaction to this letter would open the eyes of the world to the atrocities being committed in Cuba and that Cuba would someday soon be free.

In 1990, his body ravaged by disease, Reinaldo Arenas gave several sealed envelopes to his translator and friend Dolores M. Koch with instructions to deliver them at the appropriate time. Shortly after this, Reinaldo Arenas committed suicide, and his letter appeared in newspapers around the world:

Dear friends:

Due to my delicate date of health and to the terrible emotional depression it causes me not to be able to continue writing and struggling for the freedom of Cuba, I am ending my life. During the past few years, even though I felt very ill, I have been able to finish my literary work, to which I have devoted almost thirty years. You are the heirs of all my terrors, but also of my hope that Cuba will soon be free. I am satisfied to have contributed, though in a very small way, to the triumph of this freedom. I end my life voluntarily because I cannot continue working. Persons near to me are in no way responsible for my decision. There is only one person I hold accountable: Fidel Castro. The sufferings of exile, the pain of being banished from my country, the loneliness, and the diseases contracted in exiles would probably never have happened if I had been able to enjoy freedom in my country.

I want to encourage the Cuban people out of the country as well as on the Island to continue fighting for freedom. I do not want to convey to you a message of defeat but of continued struggle and of hope.

Cuba will be free. I already am.

--Reinaldo Arenas

It has been seventeen years since the death of Reinaldo Arenas. It has been seventeen years since he thought Cuba might soon be free. And it has been seventeen more years of persecution, oppression, imprisonment, disease and death for the Cuban people under the ruthless rein of Castro.

Now you have heard the story of Reinaldo Arenas, and what you have heard is indeed the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Reinaldo’s story is completely verified and vetted. Many of the people who knew him and saw the struggles he endured in Cuba escaped the island as well and have verified his accounts. He has many friends outside of Cuba who are still alive who also corroborate everything he says in his autobiography as fact. Indeed, Lazaro Carilles, Reinaldo’s dearest friend and love, was one of the screenwriters for the movie adaptation for “Before Night Falls”. Reinaldo Arenas’ life is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about life in Cuba and what Castro has done to the Cuban people.

So then, if Reinaldo Arenas is the truth – and a very moving and heart-wrenching truth at that – what then do we make of Michael Moore’s vision of Cuba in Sicko? According to Michael Moore, Cuba is a happy, sunny place where the people are blissful and everyone receives wonderful care by Castro, who isn’t a man deserving of the hate that America flings at him. How can we juxtapose these two diametrically opposing images?

The simple truth is we can’t and we shouldn’t. Reinaldo Arenas showed us the truth about Cuba. All Michael Moore showed us was a film segment full of lies and political propaganda.

By portraying Cuba as he did in Sicko, Michael Moore refused to acknowledge the life, struggle and death of Reinaldo Arenas and the true horror of life in Cuba. In order to advance his own political agenda Moore shows you the beautiful Cuban countryside, footage of well dressed people, cared for houses and, of course, the wonderful hospital system.

What Michael Moore does NOT show you is the Cuba in which real Cuba citizens are forced to live. These pictures from therealcuba.com show in a dramatic fashion the difference between the Cuba the world is allowed to view and the Cuba that really exists. These pictures, these stories, and the life of Reinaldo Arenas show you the real Cuba, not Michael Moore, who knowingly and willingly turns his back on the real Cuba. Michael Moore shows a complete lack of regard for the struggles of the Cuban people under Castro simply to further his personal agenda against the United States, and that, no matter how you look at it, is wrong.

But what Michael Moore has done is so much worse than a simple and willful denial of reality. By portraying Cuba as he did in Sicko, Michael Moore undoes and undermines all the years of hard and painful work Cubans have spent trying to tell the world about the atrocities that have been committed in Cuba. Reinaldo Arenas spent much of the last ten years of his life, many of them when he was extraordinarily ill, trying to educate the world about the tyranny of Castro. And yet because Michael Moore’s influence is so broad he has the ability to undo and undermine all the progress Reinaldo Arenas and so many countless others have made in trying to educate the world about the real Cuba and the horrors of Castro.

Michael Moore is supposed to be a journalist, a documentarian. His work is supposed to be the truth, but it isn’t. It is full of deception and outright lies about what life in Cuba is like and the reasons America “hates” Cuba. But yet the work of this “journalist” is at complete odds with the truth we know about Cuba, particularly Cuban hospitals. In point of fact, Michael Moore’s so-called “truth” is in direct contradiction to the truth of Reinaldo Arenas and the hundreds of thousands of people who have escaped and continue to escape from Cuba every year.

Reinaldo Arenas had met men like Michael Moore when he arrived in the United States. He called them the “Communist Deluxe” – men and women who tolerated or even admired Castro while eating plates full of food and living free lives, refusing to acknowledge or understand that Cuban people couldn’t live like as they did:

I now discovered a variety of creature unknown in Cuba: the Communist Deluxe. I remember that at a Harvard University banquet a German professor said to me “In a way I can understand that you may have suffered in Cuba, but I am a great admirer of Fidel Castro and I am very happy with what he has done in Cuba.” While saying this the man had a huge, full plate of food in front of him, and I told him: “I think it’s fine for you to admire Fidel Castro, but in that case, you should not continue eating that food on your plate; no one in Cuba can eat food like that, with the exception of Cuban officials.” I took his plate and threw it against the wall.

If ever a man fit the description of “Communist Deluxe”, it would be Michael Moore. But, in fact, Michael Moore is so much worse than just this. He isn’t a man who simply denies or lies about the horrors of real Cuban life under Castro. In order to have filmed what he did in Cuba Michael Moore *MUST* have collaborated directly with Castro and his government. Michael Moore worked directly and willingly with the man – or at the very least, agents of the government - who destroyed the life of Reinaldo Arenas and all Cuban citizens. Michael Moore is a collaborator, pure and simple.

The evidence is undeniable. Entrance into Cuba is next to impossible without official permission. It is illegal for foreigners to film inside Cuba without official permission. One cannot even gain access to Havana Hospital – the hospital Moore displays grandly as an everyday example of Cuban health care – without official permission and, yes, without paying a very capitalist bill for your care.

Look at how wonderfully the government firefighters lined up for Moore’s group in Sicko! Look at how happy the men playing dominos in the street seem to be while extolling the virtues of Castro’s health care system! Never mind the man in black shadowing the filming from across the street – I’m sure he’s not with the government. And never mind the fact that, as a state run system, the firefighters would have had to do and say anything the government told them to do or say else face the same type of consequences Reinaldo Arenas faced.

All of this evidence, *all* of it, means that Michael Moore had to have worked directly with Castro’s government to shoot the Cuban portion of Sicko. He worked side by side with the same man who destroyed the life of Reinaldo Arenas. He worked hand in hand with the same man who has destroyed the lives of the Cuban people for 45 years. And he did it all knowing he wasn’t showing the real truth, knowing all he was going to show the world was a piece of Castro-loving propaganda that turns its back on everything for which the Cuban people have fought.

Michael Moore is a Castro collaborator. He has actively and knowing collaborated with a sociopath, communist, mass-murdering dictator and he shows no remorse for it. Reinaldo Arenas had some choice words for men like Michael Moore who chose willingly to collaborate with Castro:

One day, eventually, the people will overthrow Castro, and the least they will do is bring to justice those who collaborated with the tyrant with impunity. The one who promote dialogue with Castro, well aware that Castro will never give up his power peacefully and that a truce and economic assistance are what he needs to strengthen his position, are as guilty as his own henchmen who torture and murder people. Those who are not living in Cuba are perhaps even more to blame, because inside Cuba you exist under absolute terror, but outside you can at least maintain a modicum of political integrity. All the pretentious people who dream of appearing on TV shaking Fidel Castro’s hand and of becoming politically relevant should have more realistic dreams: they should envision the rope from which they will swing in Havana’s Central Park, because the Cuban people, being generous, will hang them when their moment of truth comes. The only consolation for them will be to have avoided bloodshed.

Michael Moore is not an innocent party. He knew what he was showing the world was not the truth about Cuba and he did it anyway. He lied to the world and desecrated the memory of Reinaldo Arenas and all the brave men and women who have fought for the truth to come out about the real Cuba like Reinaldo Arenas.  In his zeal to attack the United States government Michael Moore ignored the plight of the Cuban people and nullified their struggle for freedom. He twisted the truth to fit his agenda without any thought to those who might be hurt by this and ignored whatever facts didn’t fit with his agenda.

Michael Moore is a liar, a collaborator, and a maker of propaganda. He has shown no regard at all for the truly brave men like Reinaldo Arenas who spent their lives fighting for their art and their truth. It is Reinaldo Arenas we should respect and believe, not Michael Moore. It is Reinaldo Arenas we should honor for his fight for truth, not Michael More. And it is the work of Reinaldo Arenas that should live on in people’s minds and hearts, not the work of Michael Moore.

Shame on you, Michael Moore. Eternal shame on you for what you have done.

I rest my case.

---

A personal epilogue from the author to Reinaldo Arenas:


Look, Reinaldo, look! The moon is bright and full; she is back and smiling at you once again. Her light fills the breezeway and the shower of gold bush Adolfina planted there perfumes the air so sweetly. Celestino is calling you from the woods, Reinaldo. He is at it again, carving poems into the trunks of the almond trees and he wants you to help. Go to him, Reinaldo. Your work here is done. You have given me your gifts and your truths and I will hold these things dear to me for the rest of my life. Run to the woods and be free, Reinaldo. You have earned it. You are free.

Thank you, Reinaldo. 

Less...

More...

Perhaps you have heard his name. Perhaps you’ve heard him mentioned in passing as one of, if not the greatest writer to ever emerge from Cuba. Perhaps you know his books have been published in dozens of languages all over the world, or that he has won several awards, including Best Foreign Novel in France for his book “Hallucinations”. Perhaps you might have heard of his autobiography, “Before Night Falls”, and that the editors of The New York Times Book Review hailed it as one of the fourteen best books of 1993. Or perhaps you might have seen the movie adaptation of “Before Night Falls”, a gritty and almost hallucinatory film directed by Julian Schnabel which garnered several Oscar nominations, including a Best Actor nod to Javier Bardiem who played Arenas.

Or perhaps you are one of the lucky ones, the ones who have been blessed enough to read the work of Reinaldo Arenas. Perhaps you have felt yourself transported into one of Arenas’ worlds, worlds of such texture and color and majesty that they take your breath away. Perhaps you have read and smelled the tulips growing in the breezeway that Adolfina planted, or the felt the grit of the guava paste Fortunato made. Perhaps you, as I do, look at things like the moon and the sea in a different way now because of the sheer power of Reinaldo Arenas’ words.

I can hear the questions beginning already. Why, Donna? Why, on Moorewatch, are you talking about this Cuban writer? What could Reinaldo Arenas possibly have to do with Michael Moore?

The answer, of course, is abundantly simple. Reinaldo Arenas has a very important story to tell about what life was like for him in Castro’s Cuba, and it is a story we all need to hear. After seeing how Moore depicted Cuban life in Sicko, it has become vital that we know and understand what Cuban life under the nightmarish dictatorship of Fidel Castro is truly like. We need the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Reinaldo Arenas is that truth.

After nearly 15 years of hiding, exile, torture, work camps and prisons, Reinaldo Arenas managed to escape from Castro’s regime in the 1980 Mariel boatlift. He spent the next ten years of his life alternately finishing his tremendous body of work and denouncing the hellish Castro dictatorship to anyone who would listen. He wrote essays, letters, and lectured about life under Castro all over the world. In 1988 he wrote an open letter to Fidel Castro demanding that Castro hold a plebiscite similar to the one held in Chile by Pinochet. The letter drew thousands of signatures from around the world, including those of eight Nobel laureates. The letter was internationally published, drawing the wrath of Castro and his supporters.

When Reinaldo Arenas committed suicide in 1990 after a long and terrible battle with AIDS, he issued a suicide note that was published around the world. In that note, he wrote “you are the heirs of all my terrors, but also of my hope that Cuba will soon be free.” Seventeen years later, his dream remains unrealized. Cuba is not free and Castro still rules the island with an iron fist. He is aided every day both by those support Castro’s illusion that Cuba is free and unoppressed, but also by those who know and remain silent.

Reinaldo Arenas would not remain silent. For twenty-five years Arenas fought – first to stay alive and then to scream to the world about the horrors that were happening in Cuba under Castro. Death silenced Arenas’ voice but not his spirit. His spirit lives on through his words and his work. His spirit lives on in his friends, his family, his supporters. And his spirit lives on in me, I who have been so moved by his work.

I am not Cuban or of Cuban descent. I have no Cuban relatives nor have I a drop of Cuban blood in my veins. What I am is simply a woman who has been so moved by the words of Reinaldo Arenas that I feel compelled to tell his story to the world, to fight as he did, to show the world the truth, his story and his truth.

Reinaldo Arenas is now silent, but I am not. Over the next few weeks I will tell you the story of Arenas’ life in Castro’s Cuba. It will amaze you, terrify you, bewilder you and move you. I want to you to listen to his story and know that it is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This is what it was like for Reinaldo Arenas. This is what it was like in living in constant terror under Castro’s iron fist in Cuba. This is what it is still like in Cuba. And until we all stand up and begin telling the truth and denouncing Fidel Castro as the oppressor and murderous dictator that he is, this is how it will always be in Cuba.

This is the story of Reinaldo Arenas….



“I come to speak your name so I may begin this dream again.” - Garden of Caressess



…to be continued in part two…

Less...