Before Night Falls

The river that runs near Arenas’s childhood home in Oriente figures prominently in his childhood and later in his conception of the history of Cuba. The river symbolizes and exemplifies the dual nature of life as both creation and destruction. At the age of six, Arenas has his sexual awakening at the river when he sees a group of young men bathing nude and realizes without a doubt that he likes men. This scene imbues the river with a generative, vital quality that in turn seeds Arenas with the sexual desire that becomes vital to him.

After storms, the engorged river becomes destructive: “The power of the overflowing current would sweep away almost everything in its path: trees, stones, animals, houses. It was the mystery of the law of destruction, but also of the law of life” (94). The awesome spectacle entices Arenas with a kind of fatal attraction, its flowing chaos promising to dissolve the turmoil within him: “Why not throw myself into those waters? Why not lose myself, vanish in them, find peace in that clamor that I loved? What joy to have done just that!” (95). In the river Arenas sees reflected his own tortured psyche; in his loneliness, it is his only companion, the only thing that he identifies with in his world where he feels like an outsider. The fantasy of throwing himself into the river is the fantasy of deliverance from his loneliness, of destroying himself to affirm the core of his being.

As an adult, Arenas reimagines what the river symbolizes, seeing it instead as the destructive tide of dictatorships in Cuba: “I now see the political history of my country as I saw the river of my childhood, which dragged everything along with a deafening roar; a turbulent river that has been gradually destroying us all” (279). Like the river, Cuban politics are like a relentless force of nature, a destructive flow that sweeps up everything in its path. There is a fatalism to this comparison in the suggestion that just as the river’s flow cannot be stopped, the political tide of Cuba is inexorable. The river as political history symbolizes self-destruction, a flow, a tide that destroys the very ground, the very country through which it runs.