ARENAS, REINALDO
Reinaldo Arenas is one of the leading Cuban writers of the twentieth century. He was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1943. From 1974 to1976 he was incarcerated in the El Morro prison in Havana. He left Cuba in 1980 via the Mariel Boatlift along with125,000 other Cubans who were opposed to the ruling regime in Cuba. He settled in New York where he obtained the Cintas and Guggenheim fellowships, as well as the award for best foreign novelist published in France in 1989. On Friday, December 7, 1990, he ended his life. In a letter sent to the Horacio Aguirre, director of the Spanish newspaper Diario LasAmericas in Miami, he explained his reasons. The main reason was that due to his illness, he was unable to continue fighting for the freedom of Cuba. Among his major works are the novels: Celestino antes del alba, El mundo alucinante, El color del verano (for many this is his most important work), El Asalto, Adiós a Mamá, and a few more. In this book, five plays are united under one unifying theme: persecution. Cruel, experimental, casual, ironic and poetic, this book besides being, first and foremost, a work of art, is also an insight into the eternal duality that seems to characterize a human being: his status, both sublime and terrible that makes him the victim or the victimizer. As with many of his other books, this work is satirical (and therefore critical) of the current Cuban regime.
