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Cuba, Castro, and the not-so-secret history of Reinaldo Arenas, Part 2

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

I’d like you to take a journey with me. Let me take you back in time and lead you through the life of the heroic writer Reinaldo Arenas. It is a difficult trip filled with great pain and sadness, but I will promise you two things on the outset. First, you will learn much about both Reinaldo’s life and the tyrannical dictatorship of Fidel Castro. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, you will learn beyond the shadow of a doubt why Michael Moore was so very, very wrong to portray both Castro and Cuba in the rosy light he did in Sicko.

Let us begin….

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…

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