Reinaldo Arenas

Born July 16, 1943, in Aguas Claras, a rural hamlet in Holguin Province, Cuba, Reinaldo Arenas grew up in grinding poverty on his grandparents' farm after his father abandoned the family. At fourteen he briefly joined Castro's guerrillas in the Sierra de Gibara, and after the revolution's victory in 1959 he won a state scholarship to study agricultural accounting. He moved to Havana in the early 1960s, worked as a researcher at the Jose Marti National Library, and there met the writers Jose Lezama Lima and Virgilio Pinera, who became his mentors. His first novel, Celestino antes del alba (Singing from the Well), won a national prize in 1967 and remains the only book of his the Cuban state ever allowed into print. His second novel, El mundo alucinante (Hallucinations), was smuggled to France in 1969, where it shared that year's top prize for a foreign book with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and publishing it abroad without permission marked Arenas as a counterrevolutionary. Arrested in 1974, he escaped custody and spent months hiding in Havana's Lenin Park, smuggling out a letter denouncing the regime, before he was recaptured and imprisoned at El Morro Castle alongside violent offenders. In 1980 he fled Cuba aboard the San Lazaro during the Mariel boatlift and settled in New York, where he wrote prolifically in exile, completing the five novels of his Pentagonia cycle. Diagnosed with AIDS in 1987, he continued writing through his decline and, on December 7, 1990, took his own life in his Hell's Kitchen apartment at forty-seven, leaving a farewell letter that closed with the words 'Cuba will be free. I already am.' His memoir, Before Night Falls, appeared in English in 1992 and was adapted into a film a decade later.

At El Morro Castle, held among convicted murderers and rapists, Arenas earned goodwill by writing love letters home for illiterate inmates. Payment came in paper, hoarded and traded for more, on which he kept drafting fiction between the one hour of daylight granted once or twice a month.