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-