Down (in) Fidel Castro’s Cuba
finally making contact with guerillas, he was told: “We have plenty of guerillas; what we need is weapons.”
Without a gun, he was excess to the needs of the revolution. After some days with the guerillas, he returned home. When his grandmother saw him, she let out a scream; Arenas had become a person of interest to Batista’s enforcers. On the day of his departure, Arenas had left a note, a kind of a manifesto, declaring that he was off to join the rebels.
Now Castro’s rebels in the mountains had to accept him — with or without a weapon. “During my whole time with the rebels I never took part in any battle” and “never even witnessed a battle”. Yet, within a year, to the rebels’ surprise, Batista fled, and the revolution was won. “There was a surge of enthusiasm, great fanfare” — but also “a new terror”.
The new terror was directed at soldiers of the defeated regime, its spies, and Masferrer “tigers” (a category of Cuban politician who could also be a gangster) who had defended the previous government. Because the targets were widely hated, there was no outrage against the summary justice.
Arenas, literally a child of the revolution, had much to gain from the new status quo, and soon got a place at a technical college, where he enrolled as a student of agricultural accounts, which he studied alongside texts by Marx, Lenin and other communist thinkers.
There was something else besides the bearded, erudite charm of these thinkers: what Arenas calls a “virile militancy”. But he was scared to explore this homoerotic zone, because the consequences were drastic: expulsion or even jail. “Being a faggot in Cuba was one of the worst disasters that could ever happen to anyone.”
It became clear early on that there would be no democratic elections, and that Castro would become a kind of “maximum leader”. Not only that, in cases in which Castro (a trained lawyer) had a vested interest, he could even play the role of prosecutor and judge. There was a case in which a court acquitted some airforce pilots who had been accused of bombing the city of Santiago de Cuba. However, Castro set himself up as prosecutor and judge and sent them away to more than 20 years in prison. “The judge, who had a long
rebel beard [and] had declared them innocent, shot himself.”
As Castro’s control over Cuba soon became entrenched, it was impossible to trust anyone, not even one’s friends, because of the bearded leader’s vast network of secret policemen and informers. “This was one of the vicious acts perpetrated by Castro: to break the bonds of friendship.”
However, Arenas is sympathetic and philosophical about it all: “Cuba is a police state,” he observes, and it follows that, “the most practical solution for many is to become policemen.” (Yet, as in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, the threat to Cuba wasn’t abstract: it was all too real.)
Even access to the beach was
policed. Not all beaches were open to ordinary Cubans and getting to the one beach that was allowed could take more than six hours for Havana residents. Arenas asks: “How could you live on an island and have no access to the sea?”
Arenas had a huge sexual appetite, and by his calculation, he might have had sex with about 5 000 men: random gay men, married men, fellow writers, Castro’s spies, sometimes even cops. One day he met a police officer in a toilet and after a “memorable” sexual encounter, the cop put on his officious tone. “Come with me. You are under arrest for being queer,” he said, after which he marched him to the police station.
Summing up the 1960s, when the laws against homosexuality were entered into Cuba’s statute books, Arenas writes: “I think that in Cuba there was never more fucking than in those years.” His conclusion was: “I think that the sexual revolution actually came about as a result of the existing sexual repression. Perhaps as a protest against the regime, homosexuality began to flourish with ever increasing defiance.”
It wasn’t just about sex, Arenas was also busy working. His break into the world of letters occurred when he won a literary competition that resulted in a transfer to the National Library. This is when his literary education began, and where he would meet his mentors and lifelong friends like the authors Virgilio Piñera Llera and José Lezama Lima.
The result of Arena’s literary travails were Singing from the Well, the award-winning The Ill-fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando and With My Eyes Closed, a collection of short stories published in Uruguay.
It wasn’t only the critics who were aware of the works and the important and fresh voice from Cuba; so were the mandarins at state security, who maintained a surveillance state on everyone and everything, including literary production. “By the year 1969 I was already being subjected to persistent harassment by state security, and feared for the manuscripts I was continually producing.”
The spies wanted to know how he had smuggled the manuscripts out, who his foreign connections were and what else he was working on. After finishing a novel, Arenas couldn’t keep it in the hovels in which he lived, but passed it on to friends. One of these friends had read one manuscript — “a gift from the sea, and the product of 10 years of disappointments endured under the Fidel Castro regime” — but misunderstood his backhanded tribute, and had destroyed it. Arenas was so distraught at the loss that he even considered murdering the friend.
In the end, state security got him, ostensibly for his homosexuality, although the real reason was his fiction. After failing to escape to Guantánamo, nominally Cuban territory but administered by the US (he would have had to swim through an alligator-infested river to reach freedom), Arenas was incarcerated at the El Morro prison, a key installation in Castro’s infrastructure of prisons and labour camps. He received his freedom only after signing a Sovietstyle confession, admitting he was a “counter-revolutionary”, and that he regretted his “ideological weakness”.
Arenas’s memoir is a hallucinatory account, spiced with tedious detail but also with the profound — a document that gives us an unvarnished peek into an alternative Cuba, the one menaced by secret policemen, full of suffering and, at the top of it all, Fidel Castro, the “maximum ruler”.