The Politics of Sexuality in Latin America: A Reader on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights

The Fight and Flight of Reinaldo Arenas

The Fight and Flight of Reinaldo Arenas Rafael Ocasio B  April , , thousands of Cuban emigrants began sailing in hundreds of small boats from Cuba, to seek greater freedom in Florida. Among them were significant numbers of what the Castro regime labeled“social misfits,”including people with criminal backgrounds and with records of mental hospitalization. The refugees’ major crime, however, seems to have been their desire to leave Cuba for the United States, as shown by the high number of refugees given immediate entry upon their arrival. At the end of a rather chaotic and highly controversial relocation process, Victor H. Palmieri, U.S. coordinator for refugee affairs for President Carter, indicated in a memo that , emigrants had sailed in small boats from the port city of Mariel, some twenty miles from Havana. By the end of the boatlift on September , , according to media reports, out of , refugees, , had been released to family, friends, or sponsors (Preston ). Among the “social misfits” expelled from their country were gays and lesbians, including the renowned novelist, short story writer, poet, and playwright Reinaldo Arenas (–). He was released within one day, perhaps because he was sponsored by an aunt who was living in Miami. He was lucky; many other single gays who 358 arrived without families in the United States were held in relocation centers and released only after gay associations served as sponsors. Arenas arrived on May , , in Key West, where he was processed at the Truman Annex of the U.S. naval facilities. He was penniless and, like all of his fellow travelers, he had been stripped of his material possessions,including his literary work in progress. In spite of his strong international reputation—particularly in France, where three of his novels published in French had received high critical praise—Arenas arrived, not as an intellectual seeking freedom of expression, but as a homosexual with a criminal record. The American reporter Marlise Simons (), writing from Havana for the Washington Post on May , reported Arenas’s arrival in the United States as the arrival of a writer with “a jail sentence for a homosexual offense.” Simons also stated that Arenas barely escaped the Cuban authorities once it was discovered that he had attempted to leave the island under a pseudonym. That incident would become one of Arenas’s most frequently narrated episodes of his hellish escape. According to his version, Arenas had changed the name on his passport to read Arinas, and, as his good friend Roberto Valero joked, like harina (the Spanish word for flour), Arenas flowed away from the island. Documents available at the Carter Presidential Library do not estimate the numbers of Marielito homosexual refugees. The reason, as indicated in a press release dated September , , was that: The Department of Justice has concluded it has the legal obligation to exclude homosexuals from entering the United States, but it will be done solely upon voluntary admission by the alien that he or she is a homosexual . . . To ensure a uniform and fair enforcement policy and to prevent invasion of privacy,  inspectors have been directed not to ask aliens questions concerning their sexual preference during the initial inspection process. However, if an alien makes an unsolicited, unambiguous admission of homosexuality he or she will undergo a secondary inspection. According to that statement, this policy had been in effect since August , , after the Public Health Service“announced it would no longer certify that homosexuality is a mental disease or defect”(records of the Cuban-Haitian Task Force-RG , Public Affairs File, box ). One assumes that no queer refugee volunteered that information . Even today there is no known concrete number of gay refugees, but the numbers were often characterized as “thousands.” Who was Reinaldo Arenas, and why did he choose to become one of the most vocal figures among activists in exile opposed to the Castro regime, to the detriment of his literary reputation? Arenas was born in  in a rural village in the remote eastern Provincia de Oriente. He became for a short period of time proof that the Cuban government’s literacy campaign, among the nation’s first openly socialist projThe Fight and Flight of Reinaldo Arenas / 359 ects, could produce literary jewels. Among the first generation of trained socialist students, the so-called Young Communists,Arenas witnessed in  one of the most controversial socialist projects of the Cuban Revolution: the nationalization of private...