BEFORE NIGHT FALLS

Saw a beautiful painting of a movie last night – a sprawling, vivid, sensual, lung-filling account of the life of Reinaldo Arenas, the Cuban writer. The movie, directed by Julian Schnabel, is a delirious evocation of life before, during, and after the Cuban “revolution.” I have rarely seen a more searing anti-Communist statement. One of the most glaring ironies of the Left’s continuing soft spot for Castro’s dictatorship is Cuba’s own merciless persecution of homosexuals. Arenas was hounded, slandered, imprisoned, shoved in a cell so tiny he couldn’t stand up, raped, and sent to a concentration camp. What I admired about Arenas was not just his devotion to his writing, epitomized by the brilliant memoir, Before Night Falls, but his conviction that political freedom included the freedom to seek pleasure. We are so used in this culture to seeing the right as puritanical, we do not often see how adamant the far left has often been against sex, love, irreverence, rebellion of all kinds. Arenas was an unapologetic pursuer of sexual freedom. Even when he was essentially crushed, he never capitulated to the soulless, lifeless order that Communism imposed. It says something, doesn’t it, that the anti-communist right has barely mentioned this movie, and the cultural left has barely celebrated it. In the New York Times review, Stephen Holden put Arenas’ dissident witness this way: “When the Communist revolution on which he had pinned his inchoate boyhood hopes clamped down on Cuba’s free-for-all sexual climate and threw homosexuals in prison camps, Arenas began to throw a lifelong tantrum.” Tantrum? It’s a tantrum to protect your writing from censorship and your friends from concentration camps? Go see the movie. The truth is out there.