Memoirs of the author who transformed exile, desire, and rebellion into his own literary territory
14ymedio, Noemí Herrera, Miami, 7 December 2025 — This December 7th marks 35 years since Reinaldo Arenas decided to say goodbye to the world, and I still find it difficult to write the word “death” without feeling that it falls short. Arenas didn’t die in 1990, in that New York apartment where illness and poverty gradually consumed his body; what was left behind was the physical matter that could no longer accompany his voice.
The work of the Holguín native, however, continues to breathe with an almost ferocious intensity, untamed, that insists on relentlessly challenging the certainties of Cuban power. And it is that Arenas, even from beyond the grave, remains the regime’s bête noire: a writer they could never tame or reduce to an anecdote, and whose words still resonate with a freedom they have never been able to silence.
To write about Arenas from this distance is also to remember the man before the myth.
My first readings of Arenas were furtive, almost clandestine, as if the book feared being discovered. I remember opening Celestino antes del alba [Celestino Before Dawn] and feeling as if someone were tearing me away from the domesticated literature I had read until then. Everything in his prose was excess, delirium, defiance. He wasn’t trying to please, he was trying to break free. It was, for a young reader, like witnessing a fire: you can’t look away, even though what is burning frightens you.
I’m also told that he laughed with a disarming force, that even in the tightest spaces he found a glimmer for the ‘fiesta’
While studying Philology at the University of Havana, I had an opportunity denied to millions of Cubans: to learn of Arenas’ existence. No, I didn’t learn of him because his work was required reading in Cuban or contemporary literature courses, but because his books circulated from hand to hand in an essential initiation rite for anyone wishing to call themselves a student of the Faculty of Arts and Letters.
My readings of his work— his delusions, his irony, his depths —were also intertwined with accounts from friends who knew him in Havana, in the literary offices where he was viewed with suspicion, in the National Library where he worked among other’s manuscripts while his own was taking shape in the undertow. They always speak to me of his gaze: a flash of insolence that was continue reading
That freedom is, perhaps, the key to his writing. Arenas invented a prose that moved between fury and laughter, between baroque outburst and wounded confession. El mundo alucinante [The Hallucinatory World] and, of course, Antes que anochezca [Before Night Falls], form not only a literary body of work, but an emotional constellation where childhood, repression, eroticism, hunger, desire, guilt, laughter and revenge intertwine. In his pages, the Island appears as a territory of unbearable beauty and systematic violence; a place where the dream of freedom is always a struggle. Arenas understood, more than any other Cuban writer of his generation, that imagination could become a highly effective tool of resistance.
He continued writing even in the worst of times: persecuted for his homosexuality, imprisoned in El Morro, watched, silenced, driven into literary secrecy, forced to flee. But his work is not that of a victim; it is that of a rebel who made writing an exercise of insurrection. His prose, so marked by the political incorrectness of real life, anticipated a way of narrating the Cuban experience from the margins, far from the revolutionary solemnity that sought to monopolize the national narrative.
AIDS, which in those years was a silent and stigmatizing executioner, cornered him, but did not stop his creative impulse
When he arrived in the United States as part of the Mariel boatlift, he carried with him accumulated traumas but also an undiminished will to name the disaster he was leaving behind. New York was for him an ambiguous territory: refuge and exile, a space of freedom and also the stage for the disease that relentlessly advanced.
AIDS, which in those years was a silent and stigmatizing executioner, cornered him, but it did not stop his creative impulse. Antes que anochezca [Before Night Falls] —one of the most powerful memoirs in Latin American literature—was born from that urgency to tell everything before physical silence took hold. Those who were with him during those months have told me repeatedly that he wrote as if each sentence were a race against time, with the awareness that the truth had to be told forever.
Thirty-five years later, Arenas occupies a place that not even his enemies could deny him: that of a major writer in the Spanish language. His influence reaches generations who read in him not only a denunciation of totalitarianism, but also a celebration of desire, a radical approach to identity, and a stylistic freedom that transcends categories. Contemporary Cuban literature, fragmented and multifaceted, carries in its DNA something of his irreverence and his courage. In Latin America, his name has become synonymous with aesthetic and ethical resistance.
What is most surprising is that his work continues to be uncomfortable for those who govern Cuba. Arenas represents what they have been unable to erase: the memory of the free body, the imagination that knows no borders, the word that returns again and again to remind us that repression is never invincible. He himself knew that all censorship is useless in the face of a book that finds its reader.
Today, when I remember him, I don’t think about his death but about the power of his legacy. Arenas wrote to survive, and he survived through his writing. In a time when so many voices are still silenced, his work remains a fierce reminder that freedom begins with daring to tell one’s own story, even when the whole world conspires to prevent it.
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