Reinaldo Arenas

(1943 - 1990)

An early supporter of Fidel Castro, Reinaldo Arenas was sixteen when he joined the movement against Fulgencio Batista in 1959. After the Cuban Revolution, Arenas worked as an editor and researcher in Havana until 1973, when he was charged with “ideological deviation” for his open homosexuality and sent to prison until 1976. He was one of more than a hundred thousand Cuban refugees who fled to the U.S. during the Mariel boatlift. Ten years later, at the age of forty-seven and suffering from AIDS-related complications, he died by suicide in his Manhattan apartment. “You have to believe the reader is eternal,” he said in a 1983 interview. “If a work of yours that people are reading now endures, it will be read in a hundred years or—optimistically—a thousand. You have to think that way because otherwise you don’t write or you only end up writing newspaper articles.”