Before Night Falls

Content Warning: The source text contains descriptions of anti-gay bigotry, attempts at death by suicide, death by suicide, and acts of sexual and political violence.

Arenas exploits a lapse in guard to escape from jail. He attempts to flee the country on an inner tube a friend provides, but after a night on the rough ocean he is near drowning and barely manages to return to shore. He decides the only escape is death by suicide, and cuts his wrists. He awakes still alive and walks to La Concha beach, where he encounters his lover who suggested he escape to Guantánamo. Since the police are searching for Arenas, his lover disguises him and manages to buy two train tickets to Guantánamo. His lover accompanies him to Guantánamo where he tells him the route to swim across the river into the naval base.

That night, Arenas sneaks along the river. The Cuban border guards detect his movement with sensors and begin shooting. Arenas dashes to the top of a tree to hide from the soldiers and dogs. He remains in the tree for a day after they stop searching. He attempts to cross the river but finds it infested with alligators. Defeated, Arenas returns to the train station where he meets some draft evaders who show him how to stowaway on a train to Holguín. One of the men gives Arenas his extra ID with a blurry photo that resembles Arenas.

Arenas returns to his family’s home in Holguín in ragged shape. He recovers for a few days and sends a coded telegram to Jorge and Margarita asking them to smuggle him out of the country by any means. Armed with a letter to the French ambassador pleading for asylum, Arenas returns to Havana with his mother.

Two undercover cops immediately arrest Arenas in Havana, but with his fake ID he convinces them that he is someone else and they release him. The French ambassador denies Arenas’s request for asylum. Jorge and Margarita’s plan also fails when the Cuban authorities confiscate the sailboat their friend Joris Lagarde sails into Havana under the pretense of going to Mexico. Foiled, Lagarde returns to France with some of the Abreus brothers’ manuscripts, instructions to publish Arenas’s remaining manuscripts, and a communiqué in which Arenas details the persecution he’s suffering.

Upon receiving his communiqué, Jorge and Margarita launch a media campaign detailing Arenas’s persecution, igniting an international scandal. The Cuban police launch a nationwide manhunt for Arenas, who for two months hides in the woods in Lenin Park surviving on what little food the Abreus can smuggle to him and fish he catches in a stream. Despite his dire predicament, Arenas maintains some semblance of his old life. He continues reading and writing with materials the Abreus provide, starting the first manuscript of Before Night Falls (which the police later confiscate), so named because without a light he has to finish his daily writing before it gets dark. He takes hallucinogenic drugs Andreu gave him for his planned sailboat escape. He has sex with some of the young fishermen who come to fish the stream. Through one of them Arenas learns the police concocted a story about him murdering an old woman and raping a little girl to ensure that anyone will inform on him.

Immersed in reading The Iliad in Lenin Park, Arenas does not hear an approaching soldier. The young man identifies and arrests Arenas. A mob of people, incensed by the concocted story of Arenas’s “crimes,” forms outside of the police station demanding his execution. The police escort Arenas through the mob to El Morro prison.

The prison guards forbid the police from entering the prison with Arenas, allowing him to register under the name on his fake ID. El Morro is a former colonial fortress and the worst prison in Havana. Afraid that he might inform on his friends under torture, Arenas tries to overdose on his hallucinogenic pills. He awakes three days later in the prison hospital.

Prison kills Arenas’s passion for the sea and for sex, two of his main sources of life force. He does not vie for a view of the sea at the tiny windows like the other prisoners and, although sex in El Morro is common, Arenas avoids it because it is dangerous and degrading: “The beauty of a sexual relationship lies in the spontaneity of the conquest and in its secrecy. In jail everything is obvious and miserable; jail itself makes a prisoner feel like an animal, and any form of sex is humiliating” (330).

The police’s concocted story gives Arenas a reputation among the prisoners as a rapist, murderer, and CIA agent, protecting him from the prevalent violence. Since he registered under a false name, Arenas is not housed in the wards for gay men, and is thus spared the worse abuse and conditions those men suffer. Arenas spends his time reading The Iliad and teaching French lessons. Once the prisoners learn Arenas is a writer, they ask him to write letters to their girlfriends and wives (many of the prisoners are intellectually disabled and illiterate).

Conditions in El Morro are bad. There is little food and the sanitation is terrible: Arenas’s bunk adjoins the communal latrine that reeks of feces. Death by suicide is fairly common, as are political murders disguised as deaths by suicide by State Security officers posing as prisoners. Brutal violence between prisoners is common and most new prisoners are raped. In one instance, one of the porterettes—prisoners who specialize in smuggling contraband into the prison in their anuses—refuses to deliver one of these packages to a group of prisoners. The porterette slashes their faces with razor blades and the group subsequently decapitates him; the state later executes the group for the murder.

After six months in El Morro, Arenas still has not received a trial date. Arenas’s mother is finally allowed to visit. Following his mother’s visit, Arenas feels desolate and terribly lonely.

The day following his mother’s visit, the guards transfer Arenas to solitary confinement, where a lieutenant from State Security named Víctor interrogates him about smuggling his manuscripts out of the country. After a week of refusing to answer Víctor’s questions, Arenas attempts to hang himself in his cell for fear that he will inform on his friends under torture. The cell is designed to thwart such attempts and Arenas survives. State Security secretly transfers Arenas to a cell in their headquarters, Villa Marista.

At Villa Marista, Arenas realizes that State Security imprisoned him in El Morro to convince his friends and family that he was not in their hands. If they subsequently murdered him during interrogation at Villa Marista, Arenas’s friends and family would think he died at the hands of another prisoner. The new interrogator, Lieutenant Gamboa, threatens Arenas with the fact that no one knows he is at Villa Marista.

Villa Marista is more hellish than El Morro. For over a month, State Security tortures a man in the cell next to Arenas’s by injecting steam into the tightly sealed enclosure. They spare Arenas the same torture because they fear the international outrage Jorge and Margarita sparked on Arenas’s behalf. Nevertheless, Arenas receives little food and has no contact with anyone other than the guards.

Gamboa wants Arenas to write a confession denouncing himself for having sex with men and criticizing Castro while promising to reform himself through agricultural labor. From Gamboa’s questions, Arenas deduces that Prado informed on him—a huge betrayal. After three months of interrogation, Arenas agrees to write such a confession. While he does not name any of his friends from Cuba or abroad, Arenas nonetheless is demoralized by this confession, seeing it as a fundamental betrayal of his principles: “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” (387). He consoles himself that in his communiqué he warned that if at any point in the future he made such a confession it would be under duress. Gamboa also forces Arenas to confess to corrupting the minors he and Malas had sex with at Guanabo beach: State Security intends to prosecute him for this serious crime as an excuse to imprison him for years to destroy his connection to the literary world.

State Security returns Arenas to El Morro, placing him in the workers’ ward for other “converts” to the revolution. Though less violent than the other wards, the workers’ ward is dangerous because everyone there is willing to inform on each other; Arenas can trust no one. Arenas works in the laundry which, though backbreaking, affords him the privilege of working outside.

Arenas’s trial arrives. Inexplicably, the two young men renege on their promise to testify against Arenas. Instead, both deny having sex with him. The judge sentences Arenas to two years in prison for “lascivious abuses” (402), unable to convict him on the more serious charge. Arenas, who expected a much longer sentence, is relieved.

The short sentence incenses State Security. Lieutenants Víctor and Gamboa demand Arenas list the counterrevolutionaries he knows. Arenas writes the names of everyone who informed on him (information he learned through his lawyer), but excludes Malas, Prado, and Agata, all of whom Arenas considers victims of the system. Jorge and Margarita have Arenas’s book The Palace of the White Skunks published in France, enraging Víctor and delighting Arenas.

Víctor and Gamboa transfer Arenas to the murderers’ ward in El Morro, where he suffers the worst months of his imprisonment. Conditions in the murderers’ ward are squalid and the guards tell the prisoners Arenas had sex with teenaged boys, stripping him of his protective reputation as a murder and CIA agent. The only small joy Arenas has is to occasionally visit the prison yard courtesy of an inmate with special privileges named Rogelio, who wants someone to listen to his poetry. Finally, State Security moves Arenas from El Morro to an open prison in Flores to perform forced labor.

In contrast to El Morro, no one tries to escape the open prison in Flores for fear of being returned to a maximum-security prison. The open prison affords some freedoms: Prisoners shower on a seaside platform and when the guards are not looking, they swim in the ocean. Most of the prisoners are men in their forties halfway through 30-year sentences; 15 years of forced labor has destroyed their bodies. Arenas works with one such man named Rodolfo building houses for Soviet advisers. Arenas befriends the cook, Gustavo, who teaches him which prisoners to avoid and helps him retrieve his false front teeth that he had lost under the shower. Gustavo dies in a construction accident.

Juan Abreu visits Arenas, bringing a copy of The Iliad and smuggling out a letter to Jorge and Margarita detailing his true situation. Meanwhile, Arenas agrees to Víctor’s requests to send letters to his publisher in Paris saying that he is practically free. Arenas’s friend-turned-informant Norberto Fuentes visits him regularly; Arenas suspects Fuentes of testing the sincerity of his conversion. One day, Arenas masturbates a man who approaches him in the shower. The following day the man is transferred, worrying Arenas that the man was an undercover agent sent to test his promise to abstain from sex with men.

At the end of 1975, Víctor tells Arenas they will soon release him and find him a job. Having lost most of his friends in Cuba as a result of his arrest, Arenas does not know what he will do with his freedom.