A Poet’s Life on a Painter’s Canvas

Reinaldo Arenas liked to say he had “two delicious vices.” He was a writer and a homosexual--a deadly combination in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, where Arenas was born.

Arenas endured Castro’s punishment for those “vices,” spending several years in prison and in labor camps, ultimately leaving the island in the 1980 Mariel boat lift with 135,000 other “undesirables.”

His story is unfamiliar to most Americans because his novels and poetry were written in Spanish and were not widely available here. His brief life as an exile in the United States ended tragically in 1990 when, suffering from AIDS, he committed suicide.

But on Friday, a film portrait of the writer, “Before Night Falls,” based on the author’s memoirs of the same title, opens in selected theaters. The film is directed by Julian Schnabel, the New York-based painter with a robust frame and a fondness for sarongs who also directed the 1996 art film “Basquiat.”

Schnabel, it seems, has an affinity for tragic figures in arts and culture. The painter-turned-director says he decided to make “Before Night Falls” after watching a documentary on Cuban exiles that featured Arenas. Despite his difficult life, Arenas never lost his sense of irony and wit, said Schnabel.

“I was attracted to the contrast of how natural and charming he was and how what happened to him was so heavy,” said Schnabel in a recent Los Angeles interview as he puffed on one cigarette after another. “I also felt he created a whole landscape of stuff [in the memoir] I could use as a filmmaker. . . . He is being chased all the time and so there is all the conflict, and that makes a good film.”

Schnabel cast Spanish superstar Javier Bardem to play Arenas. Bardem is best known to U.S. audiences for his role as Penelope Cruz’s sexy motorcycle-riding bullfighter boyfriend in the 1992 film “Jamon, Jamon.” For the role of Arenas, he had to lose nearly 40 pounds and find a connection to a gay man the heterosexual actor felt he had virtually nothing in common with.

“Luckily his nose was broken, like mine,” said Bardem in a telephone interview from Spain. “He had a hard face like me . . . still it was a role that was very far from me. I knew if I did it well I would get a lot out of it. It was a very generous role.”

Although Bardem’s English is heavily accented and at times difficult to understand, Schnabel felt it was important to make the film in that language.

“When the movie is all in Spanish, it’s just going to be a Spanish-language film,” said Schnabel, whose wife, Olatz Lopez Garmendia, is from the Basque region of Spain and played Arena’s mother in the film. “It’s really a study in how we have reached a point in history where the Tower of Babel is inverted in some way. My kids speak Spanish. They had a very hard time their first years in school because they spoke Spanish and were learning English.”

But English served another purpose as well: “Before Night Falls” is the first American film to deal head-on with human rights abuses in Cuba. It is a movie many Latin American filmmakers had been trying to make, said Brazilian director Hector Babenco (“Kiss of the Spider Woman”). After all, nearly all Latin American countries suffered under dictatorships.

“I love the irony of a North American artist from New York being responsible for making one of the most important Latin American movies ever about the repression of artists,” said Babenco, who lived under a Brazil dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. “He brought us a movie that we had been trying to elaborate on for decades. . . . Cuba was once considered a dream paradise because it was the first . . . [Western] country to embrace socialism. Everyone saw Cuba as an important laboratory to provide for the basic needs of its people. And now we are seeing the collapse of this system. I think he has pointed his finger at something which may be the last touch before the Wall of Havana falls.”

Schnabel says he was not interested in politics but rather in being truthful to Arenas’ memory.

“I’m not homosexual, I’m not Cuban, I’m not from the right, I’m not from the left,” said Schnabel. “Reinaldo used to say, ‘I tell my story as does the Jew who suffered racism or the Russian who was in the gulag.’ ”

The oppression of artists or writers in totalitarian states may well be a universal story. But many left-leaning intellectuals and writers, who loudly protest abuses committed by right-wing dictators, have either remained silent or outwardly supportive of Castro. Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for example, is one of Castro’s closest confidants.

“It’s amazing to me how the regime has managed to escape scrutiny with respect to the human rights abuses,” said Eusebio Mujal-Leon, professor of political science and an expert on Cuba at Georgetown University. “Western intellectuals--throughout history and against the evidence--have turned away from the abuses of Stalin in the ‘30s, Mao in the ‘50s, and I think Castro is still sort of the quasi-heroic figure. He knows how to play the audience.”

Bardem said he initially rejected Schnabel’s offer of the starring role, mainly because he didn’t want to make a film that airs some of the dirty laundry of a regime and a country he was taught to revere. Bardem’s mother, Pilar, and his uncle Juan Antonio were both jailed under Spanish dictator Francisco Franco for being Communists.

“I tackled a taboo because this film goes against what I had grown up believing and the ideology I had been taught,” he said. “But because it deals with these universal themes, of freedom of speech and thought, then it goes beyond just being an anti-Castro picture. . . .”

Bardem explained that after reading Arenas’ books, visiting Cuba and talking with the writer’s friends, “I fell in love with Cuba, but at the same time I now have a lot problems with the regime.”

Schnabel, who has visited Cuba often, said that many of his European and Latin artist friends were also wary of a film about human rights abuses on the island. He faced some criticism at the Venice Film Festival, where the film premiered in late August. But it also won the grand jury prize and best actor for Bardem.

“If I knew more [then], maybe I wouldn’t have [made the movie],” said Schnabel. “[Italian director] Bernardo Bertolucci told me, ‘You are going to be accused of things. And the revolution was a symbol for us in the ‘60s.’ . . . The thing is that you can’t deny the situation with human rights.”

Schnabel could not film in Cuba because of the U.S. embargo on the island. He shot most of the movie in Merida and the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. He retained a freelance cameraman to shoot some scenes of the famous Havana malecon, or sea wall.

Arenas’ writing was perfectly suited for film because he was extremely visual, a writer prone to vivid descriptions and a wild imagination, said Schnabel.

The only child of a single mother who had been jilted by his father, Arenas lived a lonely and impoverished childhood. It was in the countryside, where he would literally eat dirt, play with animals and climb trees, that Arenas nurtured his creativity.

“I think the splendor of my childhood was unique because it was absolute poverty but also absolute freedom,” Arenas wrote in his memoir. “Out in the open, [I was] surrounded by trees, animals, apparitions, and people who were indifferent to me. . . . This gave me an incredible opportunity to escape it all without anyone worrying about where I was or when I would return.”

Freedom was something Arenas would soon lose. Even though he supported the revolution and fought as a 15-year-old with the rebels against dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1957, he soon became disenchanted with Castro’s regime.

By his early 20s, he had discovered his talent for writing. He won second place in a national competition for his first novel, “Singing From the Well.”

But soon enough he discovered that in Cuba, as in all totalitarian regimes, writers eventually become enemies of the state. He watched as his friends were jailed for writing novels that the government deemed subversive. His friends signed forced confessions about their “antisocial” behavior and began naming fellow writers as “counterrevolutionaries.” In the mid-1960s, Castro began a purge of homosexuals, jailing many and establishing concentration camps to “reform” their sexual orientation.

In 1969, “Singing From the Well” won France’s Prix Medici as best foreign novel. His second manuscript, “Hallucinations,” was smuggled out of Cuba and published in France, where it received great reviews and was translated into seven languages. But the success of “Hallucinations” harmed Arenas in Cuba. His novel, about a priest escaping oppression by the Spanish rulers in colonial Mexico, was seen as a veiled attack on Castro’s regime. Soon, he was a wanted man, a fugitive, desperately trying to find passage to the United States or Europe.

And that is when his nightmare began.

In 1974, he was captured and accused of a phony crime. He was incarcerated without a trial, and sent to Havana’s El Morro prison, a squalid, colonial-era Spanish fortress run by sadistic guards. Arenas survived by writing letters to loved ones for other prisoners who couldn’t write.

“The place seemed to be the warehouse and supply center for fleas and lice,” he wrote in “Before Night Falls.” “Those insects leaped on me in happy welcome.”

Finally after four years in prison, Arenas was released. For two more years he tried to find a way out of Cuba.

In 1980, through a bureaucratic snafu, he was allowed to leave the island with other homosexuals, criminals and personae non gratae of the regime. But his arrival in the United States was bittersweet. He did not like Miami, writing in his novel that “if Cuba was hell, Miami was purgatory.” He soon moved to New York, but found loneliness and despair more than freedom.

Schnabel said it was important to show the other side of coming to America.

“A distributor said to me, ‘Why don’t we end the movie when [Arenas] is in the car and the snow is coming down?’ ” said Schnabel, referring to the only scene in New York where Arenas displays a moment of happiness. “And I said, ‘Well, I can’t make that movie--that’s not what this is about.’ Maybe it’s a nice, happy ending, but success is not arriving in America.”

Instead, the movie ends when Arenas commits suicide at age 47. In his memoir, which was published three years after his death, Arenas concludes with an ode to the moon--a reverie alluding to his childhood and a subject that, along with the ocean and the stars, had always captivated his imagination.

“O Moon! You have always been at my side, offering your light in my most dreadful moments; since I was a child you were the mystery that watched over my terrors, you were the comfort of my most desperate nights, you were my very own mother, bathing me in a warmth that perhaps she never knew how to give me. . . . And now, Moon, you suddenly burst into pieces right next to my bed. I am alone. It is night.”