{"id":67467,"date":"2014-03-04T14:58:05","date_gmt":"2014-03-04T19:58:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=67467"},"modified":"2014-03-05T11:53:10","modified_gmt":"2014-03-05T16:53:10","slug":"fata-morgana","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/03\/04\/fata-morgana\/","title":{"rendered":"Fata Morgana"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reinaldo Arenas, writers in exile, and a visit to the Havana of 1987.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Hotel_Habana_Libre\"<\/a>

Hotel Habana Libre. Photo: Sandino235, via Wikimedia Commons<\/p><\/div>\n

Twenty years have passed since the publication of Before Night Falls<\/i>, Reinaldo Arenas\u2019s tale of his years in Cuba under the Castro regime and his life in exile in the U.S. One of the most talented and prolific writers to emerge during the revolution, Arenas was persecuted for his writings and his homosexuality. He escaped in the 1980 Mariel boatlift and in 1990, dying of AIDS, committed suicide in his Hell\u2019s Kitchen apartment. Published in 1993, Before Night Falls<\/i> is as urgent and compelling as ever\u2014a portrait of exile and longing, of the anguish and rage of the dispossessed.<\/p>\n

Born in 1943 on a farm in the province of Oriente, Cuba, Arenas developed a rich inner life early on. \u201c[Regarding] the magical, the mysterious, which is so essential for the development of creativity, my childhood was the most literary time of my life,\u201d he wrote in Before Night Falls<\/i>. Morning fog blanketing the landscape like a ghostly shroud, palm trees bursting into flame as lightning struck, dark rivers flowing endlessly to the sea\u2014all entranced him. Most astonishing was night, when, beneath the ancient glittering sky, his grandmother told tales of the supernatural.<\/p>\n

At sixteen, Arenas joined Castro\u2019s rebels in the mountains, but his enthusiasm gave way to disenchantment and despair, a trajectory he chronicled in his writing. In 1962, he finished Celestino antes del alba<\/i> (published in the U.S. as Singing from the Well<\/i>), the first in his Pentagon<\/i>\u00eda<\/i>, a series of five semi-autobiographical books. Celestino<\/i> won second prize in the 1965 UNEAC (Cuban Writers and Artists Union) competition; in 1967, it was published in a print run of two thousand copies that sold out in one week. No further editions were issued; it was the only novel Arenas would publish in Cuba. His next novel, El mundo alucinante<\/i> (published in the U.S. as The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando<\/i>), the tale of a renegade Mexican monk who dreams of a free society, was banned in Cuba for its \u201cerotic passages\u201d but smuggled out and published in France in 1968 to great acclaim. <\/p>\n

In 1973, while Arenas and a friend were swimming at the beach, their belongings were stolen by some men they\u2019d just had sex with in the mangroves. When they reported the theft, the police accused them of public lewdness and disturbing the peace. Later, even though the men were of age, Arenas would be charged with corruption of minors. The case against him gained momentum, with the government\u2019s \u201cevidence\u201d including his publishing activity abroad, his homosexuality, and a statement from UNEAC declaring him immoral. After several unsuccessful attempts to escape the island, including on an inner tube, Arenas was incarcerated at El Morro, a former Spanish fortress overlooking Havana Harbor. In this hellhole of rape, murder, and torture, Arenas suffered very dark days, including a period of solitary confinement in a one-meter-high cell. \u201cI must confess,\u201d he wrote in Before Night Falls<\/i>, \u201cthat I never recovered from my experiences in Cuban jails; I think no former prisoner can.\u201d<\/p>\n

Released in 1976, Arenas wandered about, jobless and homeless, writing when he could and trying to stay under the radar. When, in 1979, a group of visiting American professors inquired after him, people said they had no idea who he was. The most promising lead came from someone who\u2019d heard Arenas was living under a bridge somewhere. \u201cI had suddenly become invisible,\u201d Arenas wrote. \u201c[People], perhaps out of mere cowardice, forgot I existed, though we had shared long friendships.\u201d In those years, he saw his \u201cyouth vanish without ever having been a free person \u2026 I had never been allowed to be a real human being in the fullest sense of the word \u2026 I lived in terror in my country and with the hope of someday being able to escape.\u201d<\/p>\n

When he at last succeeded, slipping out in the chaos of the Mariel boatlift, it was only to discover that true escape was impossible. Attacked by leftist intellectuals for his denunciations of the Castro regime, condemned by some of his publishers for leaving Cuba, \u201cdespised and forsaken\u201d by Miami\u2019s Cuban exile community, Arenas moved after a few months to New York. He fell in love with the city\u2019s tremendous vitality, but found no lasting solace. In Before Night Falls<\/i>, recorded on twenty cassettes and finished in the last months of his life, he wrote, \u201cThe exile is a person who, having lost a loved one, keeps searching for the face he loves in every new face and, forever deceiving himself, thinks he has found it.\u201d<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Late on a warm night in 1987, I left Miami for Havana to report on contemporary Cuban writing and see Arenas\u2019s environment firsthand. I\u2019d met Arenas\u00a0in 1983, when I interviewed him for my comparative literature thesis one fall afternoon at Princeton. The thesis included my translations of some of his work, one of which, a novella entitled \u201cOld Rosa,\u201d was later published in Old Rosa: A Novel in Two Stories<\/i>.<\/p>\n

As the Challenger Airlines plane churned through the predawn darkness, I recalled Arenas\u2019s dedication in his novella The Brightest Star<\/i>\u2014\u201cTo Nelson, in the air\u201d\u2014in memory of Nelson Rodriguez Leyva, a friend and fellow writer who was executed in 1971, at the age of eighteen, after he\u2019d tried to hijack a Cubana domestic flight to the U.S. And I remembered the horrifying story told by poet Armando Valladares in Against All Hope<\/i>, the memoir of the twenty-two years he was imprisoned by the Castro regime. According to a recent New York Times<\/i> report, Cuba had the greatest number of political prisoners of any country in the world. Some were journalists\u2014not foreign ones as far as I knew, but I\u2019d heard that foreign reporters were sometimes denied entry, expelled, or detained on arrival.<\/p>\n

In about half an hour, the lights of the island came into view and we began our descent.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019d forgotten\u2014or been unable to imagine\u2014on the way to Havana was that somewhere among the horror stories would lie another story. It was the melancholy beauty of the city that surprised me most. The pastel, salt-worn buildings with iron gratings over the windows and enclosed leafy patios; the restless, encircling sea. Men with slicked-back hair cruised the streets in vintage Dodges and Cadillacs. Women in sleeveless tops, cotton skirts, and sandals stood waiting for the bus. At the Plaza de Armas in Old Havana, lovers strolled along stone arcades, a pharmacy sold medicines in white ceramic bottles painted with blue flowers, and for five centavos, mineral water poured from a creamy porcelain jar. I bought a Granma<\/i> newspaper from a vendor outside my hotel and noticed it was the previous day\u2019s edition. \u201cDa lo mismo,\u201d the man said, his leathery face unsmiling. It doesn\u2019t make any difference<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Havana was young men and women in military fatigues, people calling me Compa\u00f1era Ana (Comrade Ann). It was an evening at the ballet, where a man gave me a rose and a note: We are stockpiling sardines<\/i>. It was flea-bitten, emaciated dogs; people waiting in line all night to buy deodorant and women asking if I could spare them a lipstick; impromptu salsa jam sessions, men drumming on soda cans or against walls; the poet Eliseo Diego reading me his translation of Yeats\u2019s \u201cWhen You Are Old\u201d one heat-stunned afternoon. An American couple who, sure their hotel room was bugged, found a cluster of wires under the carpet and cut them, at which point the chandelier in the room below crashed to the floor. It was Finca Vigia, Hemingway\u2019s house, where everything was kept just as he\u2019d left it in 1960: the typewriter, the visor he wore while writing, the tombstones for his cats. It was a bookstore near the Hotel Habana Libre (formerly the Hilton) where the book of the week was Arthur Eaglefield Hull\u2019s La armon<\/i>\u00ed<\/i>a moderna: su explicaci<\/i>\u00f3<\/i>n y aplicaci<\/i>\u00f3<\/i>n<\/i> (Modern Harmony: Its Explanation and Application; \u00a9 1915<\/i>). In dilapidated mansions converted to offices, employees slept on desks under performance charts with tattered gold paper stars glued to them; in stores, clerks slumbered on top of the merchandise. At restaurants, waiters ignored you, chatting and laughing amongst themselves, and\u2014if they ever did get around to taking your order\u2014almost nothing on the menu was available.<\/p>\n

Over ice cream at the Coppelia<\/i>\u2014an open-air ice-cream parlor with staggeringly long lines\u2014or chop suey and beer at Mandarin<\/i> restaurant, or cocktails at the Bar Azul<\/i>, where a window behind the bar provided an underwater view of the pale limbs of swimmers in the pool\u2014I talked to writers. The older, well-known ones, many of whom had, like Arenas, at first supported the Revolution, were long gone. Guillermo Cabrera Infante, no longer allowed to publish in Cuba, had been in exile in Europe since the mid-sixties. Jos\u00e9 Lezama Lima, censured by the regime for the homosexual passages in his novel Paradis<\/i>o<\/i>, had died in 1976, and Virgilio Pi\u00f1era, jailed and ostracized for his political views and homosexuality, died under mysterious circumstances in 1979. Heberto Padilla left Cuba in 1980 after being imprisoned for criticizing the Revolution and forced to denounce friends and family.<\/p>\n

The newer writers I spoke with, mostly men, were in their twenties and early thirties. Some, like Arenas, were originally from the countryside, and said that in pre-Revolutionary Cuba, their talent would never have been discovered, not least because the literacy rate was only about seventy-five percent, especially in rural areas. Before the Revolution, they told me, being a writer was something to be ashamed of\u2014there were hardly any bookstores, and it was almost impossible to make money writing. But now writers were well-respected, bookstores could be found in even the smallest towns, and publishing was subsidized by the state. Writers were free to write whatever they wanted: instead of writing only about things like the heroes of the Sierra Maestra, the literacy campaign, the Bay of Pigs, the adjustment of the bourgeois to the new society, they were now writing science fiction, spy novels, horror, erotica.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf people aren\u2019t writing what they want to, that\u2019s their problem,\u201d one writer told me. \u201cNo themes are taboo in the way they used to be. We\u2019re writing about sex, divorce, problems with the system.\u201d The dark days of censorship, middle-of-the-night house searches and arrests, were over. \u201cFor a book to be published,\u201d another writer explained, \u201cit has to be good. If people aren\u2019t getting published, it\u2019s because their work isn\u2019t good enough.\u201d But the one thing you could not do, he said, was criticize the Revolution. Problems within the Revolution, yes, but not the Revolution itself. In a speech made soon after his triumph, Castro had insisted that artists were entitled to freedom of expression; the only caveat was that this expression must accord with the aims of the Revolution. \u201c\u00a1<\/i>Dentro de la Revoluci\u00f3n, todo<\/i>!<\/i>\u201d <\/i>Castro thundered. <\/i>\u201c\u00a1<\/i>Contra la Revoluci\u00f3n, nada<\/i>!\u201d \u201cWithin the Revolution, everything! Against the Revolution, nothing!\u201d<\/p>\n

Almost everyone was kind, funny, eager to talk, and, as we got to know each other, more and more willing to deviate from the party line. \u201cIt\u2019s a question of maintaining a delicate balance between being honest with yourself and passing the censors,\u201d one writer explained. \u201cTo tell you the truth, it\u2019s stifling here. I feel like I\u2019m suffocating.\u201d People were desperate for books and magazines: one journalist offered me anything I wanted from his library if I would send him reading materials from the States. \u201cI don\u2019t understand the U.S. and el bloqueo<\/i>,\u201d he said, referring to the American embargo against Cuba, in effect since 1960. \u201cIf I were Ronald Reagan I\u2019d be sending everything I could to Cuba: books, magazines, movies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Important matters were never discussed on the telephone. People worried that someone might be listening, that they might be reported for saying something \u201ccounter-revolutionary.\u201d I spent long windy evenings at houses with the doors and windows left open to keep the neighbors from getting suspicious. It was so difficult to catch what people were saying that I began to wonder if I was getting hard of hearing\u2014but then I realized that most of my conversations were in crowded rooms, in private offices with the doors open to noisy corridors.<\/p>\n

With each day, I felt more nervous and exhausted. It was the disjunction: how to reconcile the island\u2019s brutal government with the warmth of the people and the beauty of the surroundings? I was followed everywhere by plainclothesmen and the security police. Trained by the East Germans, the police were easy to spot in their blue uniforms and caps, handguns at their hips. \u201cEverybody is scared of them,\u201d one writer told me. \u201cThey\u2019re so smart. I don\u2019t understand it\u2014they know everything. It seems like they even know what you\u2019re thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I asked people about Arenas, I was told, of his arrest in 1973, that he\u2019d been imprisoned for paying a minor to engage in homosexual activity. (\u201cHe wasn\u2019t arrested for writing against the Revolution,\u201d one writer told me, \u201cbut for soliciting a minor. You would do the same in your country.\u201d) Publicly, the people I talked to dismissed Arenas as suffering from mental problems: \u201cI knew Reinaldo when he was here,\u201d said one writer. \u201cThere was always something funny about him, like he was a little off in the head.\u201d<\/p>\n

But privately, he was greatly admired. On a street corner one evening, a writer told me he\u2019d devoured Arenas\u2019s Termina el desfile<\/i> (The Parade Ends<\/i>)<\/i>, a story about a young man\u2019s disillusionment with the Revolution, on a deserted late-night bus run when a friend loaned it to him for two hours. \u201cNone of Cuba\u2019s writers today,\u201d another writer said, \u201ccomes close to Reinaldo.\u201d<\/p>\n

Arenas had told me in our interview a few years earlier that all of his writing was one long book, fragments of a single dreamlike, hallucinatory world: \u201cI\u2019ve never been interested in telling a story in a purely anecdotal or linear way. ‘Realist\u2019 literature is, to me, the least realistic, because it eliminates what gives the human his reality, his mystery, his power of creation, of doubt, of dreaming, of thinking, of nightmare.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Havana, I understood something new about this power, how it could allow us to undertake\u2014like medieval pilgrims who couldn\u2019t travel to Jerusalem\u2014our own road to Jerusalem, wherever we may be.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

The days passed in the humid, windswept city. Havana came to life well before dawn, buses and trucks lurching along dark streets, diesel fumes wafting through windows left open to the tropical night. The sun beat down. It rained, silver sheets of water swaying in a wraithlike dance. Storms tossed the palms and whipped the sea into a frenzy. Great waves surged over the sea wall along the Malecon promenade extending five miles from the harbor. The freeing, imprisoning sea was everywhere: you could see it, taste it, feel it on your skin. What was it like to live surrounded by water? The state of suspension, of being adrift, of forever traveling and never arriving. Walking along the Malecon, I watched ships on the horizon: it took time to understand whether they were going out or coming in.<\/p>\n

Only ninety miles away was Key West, the U.S.A. If you looked hard and long enough, it rose like a fata morgana, one of the mirages that appear over deserts and oceans, a mirror of something that lies beyond the horizon. Cubans tried to escape on inner tubes, on rafts made of wood and lashed-together oil drums, in homemade boats, and even, once, in a Chevy truck with a propeller attached. At the mercy of nature, of the ocean currents that would carry them to freedom or return them to their sorrows, some made it; others drowned or were caught.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose who are critical should have left Cuba when they had the chance,\u201d people told me. (But there was a joke circulating in Havana: if a flotilla of boats sailed up to the Malecon to take people away, not even a cat would be left in the city.) Still, while defectors were called gusanos<\/i> or \u201cworms,\u201d there was a certain compassion for them because they could never return to their homeland. The prospect of being d\u00e9pays\u00e9<\/i> seemed to be enough to convince many to remain. Again and again, people told me they wouldn\u2019t leave if they had the chance: their parents were getting old, they had a sick brother, they couldn\u2019t live without their family and friends. They\u2019d also heard the cautionary tales about people who\u2019d made it to Miami, New York, Chicago, but were living in the margins, jobless and lonely. In Havana, people were in exile in their own country. There was un anhelo en los ojos<\/i>, a yearning in people\u2019s eyes\u2014a readiness, a heaviness, a hope.<\/p>\n

At night, Havana was dark because of Castro\u2019s austerity measures. Walking around, I felt as if I\u2019d wandered into a state of siege or a de Chirico dreamscape. But even though the city was often deserted, it felt crowded, like no one had ever left. The doorways and narrow streets were alive with shadowy figures and voices.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery person who lives outside his \u00a0context is always a bit of a ghost,\u201d Arenas told me that fall afternoon at Princeton, \u201cbecause I am here, but at the same time I remember a person who walked those streets, who is there, and that same person is me. So sometimes I really don\u2019t know if I am here or there.\u201d At times, his longing to be in Cuba was greater than the necessity of being in New York. This was not, he felt, a personal calamity but a universal one, because the world was full of uprooted people. It was why, he believed, all the literature of the twentieth century was somewhat condemned to grapple with the theme of uprootedness. He felt \u201cless bad\u201d in New York than in other places like Miami, Puerto Rico, Spain, because in New York he could have both people and solitude. \u201cIn other places, you suffer the \u00a0people or you suffer the \u00a0solitude, and both are terrible. But New York allows you \u00a0that equilibrium: you write, you mix with the multitudes, leave them, jump back in. Still, \u00a0I don\u2019t know where I can settle. I really don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n

In those last days in his Hell\u2019s Kitchen walk-up, Arenas wrote, \u201cI have realized that an exile has no place anywhere, because there is no place, because the place where we started to dream, where we discovered the natural world around us, read our first book, loved for the first time, is always the world of our dreams.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0Ann Tashi Slater<\/a>\u2019s translation of Reinaldo Arenas\u2019s \u201cLa vieja Rosa\u201d was published in <\/em>Old Rosa: A Novel in Two Stories. She is working on a novel based on the Tibetan side of her family and a travel memoir set in India.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reinaldo Arenas, writers in exile, and a visit to the Havana of 1987. Twenty years have passed since the publication of Before Night Falls, Reinaldo Arenas\u2019s tale of his years in Cuba under the Castro regime and his life in exile in the U.S. One of the most talented and prolific writers to emerge during […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":654,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[13063,13062,3156,566,13060,9301,13061],"class_list":["post-67467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-before-night-falls","tag-castro","tag-communism","tag-cuba","tag-exile","tag-havana","tag-reinaldo-arenas"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nReinaldo Arenas, Writers in Exile, and the Havana of 1987<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 4, 2014 \u2013 Reinaldo Arenas, writers in exile, and a visit to the Havana of 1987. 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