Translation Rights TQE / Before Night Falls

Only one year after the death of Reinaldo Arenas in New York (December 6th, 1990) we received the terrible memoirs of the well-known Cuban writer.  We knew he had committed suicide during the terminal phase of AIDS, months after finishing his last novel El color del verano (The Colour of Summer), however we did not know that he had left behind this personal and political testament, whose introduction entitled The End was written a few short days before his death.  This is without a doubt one of the most heart-rendering and sincere private confessions, and moving historical documents that we have ever read - and we have read many - about Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

The reader, whether disillusioned with Castro’s regime or a believer in it, can easily see that Arenas had three qualities that turned him into a real pariah in Castro’s Cuba:  He was a writer, a homosexual, and a dissident.  One can no longer ignore what he/she did not know - or did not want to know - about the inquisitorial hell condemned to be suffered by those who are unwilling to comply with the rules of Fidel Castro’s patriarchal Caribbean Paradise.  For this reason, and though we cannot endorse some of the criticisms Arenas makes about well-known figures, we felt that it was our duty as publishers to print this autobiography (as Arenas himself subtitled it).

With the presence of this book in bookshops, and having reached the seventh edition, we hope that fewer will claim to know nothing about what the totalitarian regime of Fidel Castro covered or covers up, as some did and continue to do, depending on their beliefs and ideologies, with respect to the genocides perpetrated by the dictatorships and totalitarian regimes of the right and left.

Drawing from Arenas’ novels and poetry as well as from his posthumous memoirs (1993), Antes que anochezca fits into Arena’s writing due to its beauty, force and multiplicity of meaning.  It is a vivid portrait of a prodigiously talented and responsive human being; a piercing account of political repression, persecution and exile; and a soaring testament to art’s liberating power, its ability to confront, illuminate and transcend.

Reinaldo Arenas was born in 1943 “in an uncertain and rocky location somewhere to the north of Holguín and to the south of Gibara”.  He grew up in the misery of a peasant family during the Batista dictatorship, and he sided with the revolution shortly after the overthrow of the old regime, continuing to support it for a time.  Despite having friends and teachers such as Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera in Havana, he was virtually self-educated. These friendships, labelled “socially dangerous” and “counter-revolutionary” hardly helped his deteriorating reputation.  Reading the story of his life is like reading an adventure, in that Arenas hardly ever seems to enjoy a moment’s peace.  His many novels and his poetry were always written under times of duress.  Antes que anochezca (Before Night Falls) is hardly an exception.  He decided on the title because he started the work when he lived as an outlaw in the woods in Cuba, and had to finish writing before nightfall.  In New York he wrote in his “Introduction”:  “Now night was falling again in a more imminent way.  It was the night of death”.