/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/ CULTURE-CUBA: Reinaldo Arenas Star of Internet Journal’s Debut

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, May 22 2001 (IPS) - The life and works of the late Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, an artist celebrated in Hollywood and mistrusted in Havana, are the centre of the premiere issue of La Jiribilla, a Cuban cultural journal published on the Internet.

An extensive special report on Arenas, whose name was never uttered by the state-run Cuban press, can now be found at La Jiribilla website sponsored by Juventud Rebelde (Rebel Youth), the newspaper of the Communist Youth Union.

Arenas, born in 1943, was the only child of a farming family in eastern Cuba. He published his first novel “Celestino antes del alba” (Celestino before Dawn) in the 1960s, and in 1980 emigrated to the United States. There he became infected with HIV and in 1990 he committed suicide.

He wrote in a farewell letter before ending his life that the diseases he contracted in exile he surely would not have suffered if he had been able to live free in his own country it was his final criticism of Fidel Castro’s socialist government.

The late Cuban novelist achieved fame last year with the premiere of the film “Before Night Falls” (Antes que anochezca), by US film director Julian Schnabel, based on Arenas’ last book.

But not even the glowing reviews of the film were enough to convince Cuban intellectuals to restore Arenas’ literary role on the island or to forgive his condemnations of the Castro administration.

The government-controlled media have been even less capable of pardoning him, refusing even to mention the film, whose star, Spanish actor Javier Bardem, was a candidate for an Academy Award (Oscar) in the best actor category.

Labelled an autobiography by the author and marketed by publishers as the memoirs of a homosexual man who was persecuted in Cuba, “Before Night Falls” was never published on the island, nor can it be found on bookstore shelves here.

The book portrays the Castro government’s period of greatest intolerance towards gays. It is done from the very personal viewpoint of the author, who, according to several Cuban intellectuals, produced a work that is not memories, it is invention passed off as his true experience.

Poet and journalist Raúl Rivero says Arenas was “a problematic man for any (political) system,” with an “innate irreverence” that could not find happiness in Cuba or the United States.

” ‘Before Night Falls’ is a fable in which he used real names,” Rivera said with respect to one of the most polemical aspects of Arenas’ last novel, received by his former friends in Cuba as a betrayal.

“Art or Propaganda?” asks Pedro de la Hoz, a journalist specialising in cultural affairs, in the title of his commentary on Schnabel’s film, appearing on the journal’s website: http://www.lajiribilla.cubaweb.cu.

According to De la Hoz, the film is more than “the mere reconstruction of a delirious, Pantagruelian, self-destructive literary text,” as was the real life of the man who also wrote ’El mundo alucinante” (The Hallucinatory World).

The film “simplifies the personal tragedy of the writer with the none-too-hidden purpose of denigrating the process of revolutionary transformations that have occurred in Cuba during the last four decades,” writes the critic.

La Jiribilla’s website also reproduces some fragments from “Before Night Falls”, as well as a short story by Arenas that was included in an anthology published in Cuba in 1998, several studies of his works, and a long essay about the writer and the way homosexuality is handled in his native country.

In popular slang, la jiribilla’ is a restless and mischievous person usually a child -, and is a term widely used by Cuban authors, especially by the late poet, essayist and novelist José Lezama Lima.

“It is a shame that this publication is not reaching a broader public on the island,” a member of the collective running the new Internet journal which made its debut May 3 told IPS.

There were only 3,625 computers in Cuba with Internet access last year, according to data from the Ministry of Information Technology and Communications.

Experts estimate that as many as 10 people use each one of these computers, but even so, the total is insignificant given that the population of the island is more than 11 million.

The Juventud Rebelde newspaper stated last week that La Jiribilla is an “attempt to provide an in-depth look at certain aspects of the country’s artistic and literary life, which is often manipulated or unknown outside Cuba.”

In addition to the spread dedicated to Arenas, La Jiribilla’ includes an article by essayist Ambrosio Fornet about the Cuban diaspora and a section titled “El Gran Zoo”, which lampoons some of the most radical personalities of the Cuban exile community.