By Richard Cohen.
The Washington Post.
Tuesday, March 20, 2001; Page A27
In a letter explaining what he was about to do, the Cuban novelist Reinaldo
Arenas wrote that "persons near me are in no way responsible for my
decision. There is only one person I hold responsible: Fidel Castro." With
that, he killed himself.
That letter is reprinted at the very end of the paperback version of
Arenas's memoir, "Before Night Falls," which has become a movie. Its
star, Javier Bardem, is up for an Academy Award for his astonishing portrayal of
Arenas, but the movie itself has not been nominated. I can imagine no
explanation for this. It is an incredible film.
It is also a timely and, therefore, deeply ironic film. At the moment, Cuba
is undergoing something of a rehabilitation. Bergdorf Goodman's spring catalogue
was shot in Cuba. The Writers Guild, the union for screenwriters, sent a
delegation to last December's Havana Film Festival and reported back that the
question of artistic freedom there is "open to debate." A delegation
of Hollywood executives recently met with Castro and came away, as is almost
always the case, deeply impressed.
Castro's one clear success has been his incredible ability to charm
left-leaning intellectuals. To their mind, his enemies -- the arch
anti-Communist Cubans of South Florida and reactionaries in the U.S. Congress --
are somehow the real problem. The man himself is sometimes nearly idolized. The
writer Philip Weiss, while not altogether uncritical of what he sees in Cuba,
nevertheless writes in the March 5 New York Observer, "Fidel's dedication
and vision are staggering."
That staggering vision includes what Human Rights Watch characterizes as "a
highly effective machinery of repression." It means, among other things,
that if I did in Cuba what I do here, I would long ago have been thrown into
jail -- probably tortured, maybe killed. The government only recently freed the
journalist Jesus Joel Diaz Hernandez, who was arrested in 1999 and accused of
violating Article 72, a ghastly edict right out of Orwell that forbids "conduct
that is in manifest contradiction with the norms of socialist morality." In
other words, anything the state says it is.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least two other
reporters remain imprisoned, reportedly in harrowing circumstances. So do other
writers, intellectuals, dissidents. The fact remains that Castro runs one of the
most repressive regimes in the world. Freedom House rates the regime as
repressive as Libya's or Syria's and somewhat more repressive than even China's.
Cuba gets a 7.7; China, 7.6.
"Before Night Falls" explains where those numbers come from.
Arenas, born so poor he literally ate dirt, ed Castro's guerrillas as a
teenager and wound up in Havana. But he was no ordinary hero of the revolution.
Among other things, he was gay -- a "social misfit" in the parlance of
the regime -- and a writer who insisted on having his works published. When they
were smuggled out of Cuba and published abroad, Arenas was imprisoned. His
of his time spent in Havana's medieval El Morro prison is not bedtime
reading.
Back to the "irony" that I mentioned before. Castro has always
courted the famous -- the intellectual, the writer. Arenas himself records the
time, just before the 1980 Mariel boat lift, when he watched the Nobel laureate
Gabriel Garcia Marquez applaud a Castro speech. "I will never forget that
speech," he writes. "Castro looked like a cornered, furious rat. Nor
will I forget the hypocritical applause of Garcia Marquez."
Marquez could have neither known nor cared that Arenas was there that day.
Arenas was a nobody, and Marquez was world-famous -- and justly so, I might add.
He was so much like the other famous writers who could not hear the screams from
El Morro or notice the secret police everywhere. It was enough that health care
was universally available and that, for the most part, Cuba had attained
universal equality. Everyone was poor.
Now this obscure writer's book has been transformed into a brilliant movie
by Julian Schnabel, the artist and cinematic dilettante. In box office , "Before
Night Falls" is a virtual asterisk ($3.1 million so far), but it has
already reached more people than Arenas ever did, and now the book on which it
is based has been re-issued in paperback.
When Arenas killed himself, he was only 47, and Castro was not really the
proximate cause of his death. Arenas had left Cuba on the Mariel boat lift and
had been living in New York. He was dying of AIDS -- and also of El Morro
prison: the filth, the beatings, the malnutrition, the terror and, later, "the
suffering of exile." He blamed Castro for his death. That was his
privilege. Our obligation, though, is different. We must blame Castro for
Arenas's life.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company |
