A Gay Cuban Activist in Exile: Reinaldo Arenas (review)

No Latin American gay writer has attracted the critical attention that Reinaldo Arenas has; indeed, no Latin American gay writer has come to enjoy something of a public reputation beyond the realm of Latin American cultural studies. Julian Schnabel’s 2000 Before Night Falls, an iffy film version of Arenas’s posthumously published autobiography Antes que anochezca, with the double billing of Johnny Depp, is part of this cache, but it has also to do with the touting of Arenas by some as an icon of political persecution in Castro’s Cuba and by others as an icon of homophobia at the hands of both revolutionary Cuba and the Miami resistance community. And, too, a certain gypsyish quality of his life, abetted by Javier Bardem’s portrayal of him in Schnabel’s film, has also contributed to an Arenas persona unparalleled in the case of other major queer writers from Latin American, like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Gabriela Mistral, Manuel Puig, Severo Sarduy, Clarice Lispector, Fernando Vallejo, even when awardwinning films have been based on their writings (as in the case of Lispector, Puig, and Vallejo; Sor Juana does have some projection among feminist historians). Finally, his public suicide note, which appeared in the New York Times, certainly attracted much attention beyond the scholarly community.

Part of the reason for this enthusiasm has to do with the complexity of his queerness, which combines both traditional Latin American mariconería and the “ideologemes” that accompany it and a more innovative defense of a something like a pan-homoeroticism that goes far beyond dividing the world simplistically into straights and gays (the latter often seen as reduplicating, in a same-sex mode, patriarchal normativity). The latter proposition also has to do with Arenas’s interaction with gay life in America. Arenas was mostly unhappy with the white, middle-class quality of movement politics and public visibility in the 1970s and early 1980s, but there is no question that he intervened publically in debates in the United States, both in the denunciation of the homophobia of the exile community, which he insisted was no different from the homophobia in Cuba that had produced the Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción camps where he was imprisoned, and in various opportunities and contexts for activism during the ten years he resided in the United States.

Ocasio details with accuracy and eloquence these aspects of the ten years Arenas spent in the United States. The result is not only one of the few biographies in English of a contemporary Latin American writer but also one of the few dealing with a queer Latin American writer; the only other that I know of is Suzanne Jill Levine’s Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions (2000). Unquestionably, Ocasio has the greater grasp of queer scholarship than Levine.

Of particular note is the lexical segue that takes place in Ocasio’s book. I do not know whether the use of gay in the title was a marketing decision, because in the actual body of the text, queer is what is at issue, as in chapter 4, “The Sexual Life of a Queer Activist.” This segue is in line with the complexity of Arenas’s queerness I mentioned previously, and it is important to note that Ocasio’s characterization of Arenas is fundamentally in line with the farreaching questions of queerness that leave the tamer designation of “gay writer” significantly behind.