Before Night Falls

About “Before Night Falls”

Before Night Falls is a 1990 memoir by Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, described by The New York Review of Books as a book above all about being free -- sexually, politically, artistically. It recounts Arenas's odyssey from a poverty-stricken childhood in rural Cuba through fighting for Castro, suppression as a writer, imprisonment as a homosexual, flight via the Mariel boat lift, and his life and death in New York.