“Grito, logo existo": Reinaldo Arenas, o rebelde (1943-1990)

Abstract

This dissertation examines the autobiographic work Before Night Falls, by the cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. Born in 1943, under the sign of Fulgêncio Batista’s ditactorship, saw the socialism being implemented on the island in 1943, being part of a target group that the Revolution wanted to reach: the youth. Under the precept of the New Man, which considered as a duty of the cuban man to be viril and strong defensor of the revolutionary ideas, the youngs were modeled to achieve this model of masculinity and guerrilla man. Writer and homossexual, faced it on two fronts, since the writer oppositors of

the regime were considered counterrevolutionaries and, therefore, intolerable; besides the persecution of homossexuals. Was exiled by the port of Mariel in 1980, in a migratory movement mostly forged by Young people who where coerced to support and sustain the Revolution, but who suffered persecutions for their convicctions against the regime and the prevailing morale. By its report, we identify two forms that Arenas used as resistance. For one, his own writing. For him, the literature was his forme of existence and acting in the world, both with the autobiography, a scream for freedom and against oppression, and his books that, even though ficcional, made clear allusions and harsh critics to Castrism. Second, Arenas used his homossexuality as rebellion against the cuban morale. Exiled and devastated by AIDS, the author judged that he didn’t have the recognition he deserved in life, and the autobiography emerge as a way to correct this neglect and a way to exist among the individuals once he was gone. All this questions were analyzed by the optics of Writing of the Self, focusing on the autobiographical subject in Before the Night Falls, principal source of this work. Estructured in three chapters, we will examine first Arena’s childhood and the idealization that he makes of this period from his life. Following chronology, in the second chapter appears a young Arenas, enthusiastic about the Revolution, where we also discuss questions like the cuban machista tradition, Arena’s literary life, the New Man Project of Che Guevara and the place of intelectuals and homossexuals within the Revolution. In the third chapter, we follow the author’s escape by Mariel and what he found in the United States of America, period where he meditated about himself and all the body of his work. Our main goal is to presente na rebellious individual, who judged never founding his place in the world and who suffered countless exiles during his life: be on the Island, by the repression of his sexuality and writing; be by his condition of marielito or by AIDS. Presented in Before the Night Falls, Arenas seeks for a post mortem justice he didn’t get in life, and all the arguments of this dissertation seek the comprehension of the message Arenas seeked to cristalyze in his autobiographic writing.