Arts and Literature of Cuba

world around us, read our first book, loved for the first time, is always the world of our dreams.” Arenas began life in 1943, in rural eastern Cuba. Raised by his single mother and his grandparents, he grew up in poverty. At the age of 16, he joined Castro’s rebel fighters in the Sierra Maestra. But he would soon grow disillusioned with the revo- lution. Arenas moved to Havana in the early 1960s and began writing. In 1965 his first novel, Celestino antes del alba (U.S. title: Singing from the Well ), won second place in a literary con- test run by Cuba’s National Union of Writers and Artists. The book—which made use of magical realism in telling the story of a Cuban childhood filled with cruelty and deprivation—was the initial installment in a larger work Arenas envisioned. But Celestino was the only volume that would be published in Cuba. The Castro regime banned the author’s second novel. Undeterred, Arenas had the book smuggled out of the country and published abroad. It first appeared in the United States under the title Hallucinations . For publishing without official permission, Arenas was harassed by police and state-security agents. In 1974 he was imprisoned in the notorious El Morro Castle prison in Havana harbor. His offenses were being gay (the Castro regime persecuted homosexuals) and being a “counterrevolutionary” (as evidenced, according to the govern- ment, by the objectionable tone of Hallucinations ). In 1976, after the government finally extracted a confession, Arenas was released from prison. But he continued to be harassed and monitored by the gov-

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Arts and Literature of Cuba