In his autobiography, published in 1992 after he had moved to the United States, Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas presents both professional and personal aspects of his development. Although he had experienced childhood sexual awakenings, the two related transformations that Arenas underwent as a teenager were his embrace of the revolutionary cause and his awareness of being gay.
The former became significant not only for his political thought, but because it enabled him to move from the countryside to Havana. As he realized that his calling lay in literature, Arenas began both to write and to work in the National Library. His literary career was significantly impacted when he won a major prize for children’s literature, and throughout the 1960s, he continued to write and publish fiction.
In these years, Arenas began to write about his gay identity. Many of his works were not published in Cuba but abroad; in particular, Hallucination dealt with gay sexuality. His outspokenness and growing fame coincided with the Castro government’s policies that identified gays as counterrevolutionary and antisocial and legitimized discrimination against them. In the 1970s, Arenas was arrested and convicted of practices labeled as deviant, spending several years in prison. After his release, he fled Cuba with others on the boats from Mariel and lived the rest of his life in the United States. He died from AIDS-related complications.
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