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Cuba, Castro, and the not-so-secret history of Reinaldo Arenas, Part 4

PLEASE NOTE: This article is part one in a four part series about Cuba and the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. You can find part one of this series here, part two here, and part three here. If you have not read the previous parts of this series, please do so before reading this. The entire series is collected in one post here. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes contained within this series are taken from Reinaldo Arenas’ autobiography “Before Night Falls” translated by Dolores M. Koch.

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

Our journey here is almost at an end. There are only a few short years left in the life of the great Reinaldo Arenas, but there is much still to be learned from him and his struggle for freedom. I renew my promise that I made to you at the beginning of this journey now. By the end of this article you will understand why the life and death of Reinaldo Arenas is so important and how Michael Moore and his depiction of Cuba in Sicko connect to this tragic tale.

Let us begin again….

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. 

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