LavenderRed_Cubabook

Colonial period in Cuba
‘Before Night Falls’
Hollywood projected Cuba
as ‘police state’ for gays
Hollywood turned up the volume on charges that Cuba was a “penal colony” for
homosexual males with its release of “Before Night Falls” in August 2000.
The movie was based on a memoir by the late anti-communist Cuban homosexual
writer Reinaldo Arenas, who emigrated to the United States in 1980. A decade later
Arenas committed suicide in a dilapidated Hell’s Kitchen apartment in Manhattan, the
capital of capital. Impoverished and dying as a result of AIDS, he had no health insurance
and could not afford high medical costs of care—rights enjoyed by every Cuban
under the revolution in his homeland.
Since the early days of the 1959 revolution, the CIA had trolled for grievances about
the revolution—real, manufactured or exaggerated.
“Before Night Falls” was the pinnacle of this propaganda campaign, by virtue of having
the most capital invested in its production, its cast and distribution network; the
publicity generated for its release; and the accolades and awards that gave it the imprimatur
of “truth.” Interspersed snippets of actual archival footage from the early days of
the revolution and snippets of newsreel of Fidel Castro’s speeches aim to lend the film
the appearance of historical authenticity.
As the movie begins, the cameras pan across what is actually rural Mexico, as the backdrop
for Arenas’ childhood in Cuba. The reality of agricultural plantation enslavement
is nowhere to be seen. Instead, the voiceover narrates that the author’s childhood was
“splendor,” adding that “it was absolute poverty but also absolute freedom … .”
Projected onto movie screens, “Before Night Falls” became an imperialist-era sequel to
“Gone with the Wind.”
In both reactionary propaganda films, bygone epochs of white-supremacist plantation
slavery—which shackled African and Indigenous peoples—are nostalgically revived,
revised and romanticized. In both films, the armies that break the manacles of slavery for
profit are cast as the bad guys.
Pre-revolution: exploitation, not freedom
Viewers of “Before Night Falls” are left with the overall impression that the U.S.-
backed Batista regime actually offered greater “freedom.”
Hollywood projected Cuba as ‘police state’ for gays 25