His memoir of the Cuban dissident movement and of being a political prisoner, Before Night Falls, was dictated after his escape to the United States during the 1980 Mariel boatlift and published posthumously.
Because he made the mistake of leaving a note saying that he was going to join the guerillas, the women who lived with his grandparents spread the news like wildfire.
He feared ending up in one of the Military Units to Aid Production, which were concentration camps for LGBT people, Christians, and suspected members of the Cuban dissident movement.
Arenas watched that happen with Herberto Padilla, who had written a book that was critical of the Cuban Revolution to an official competition.
[citation needed] In 1963, he moved to Havana to enroll in the School of Planification and later in the Faculty of Letters at the Universidad de La Habana, where he studied philosophy and literature without completing a degree.
After María Teresa lost her job and was replaced by Castro's police, Captain Sidroc Ramos, Arenas decided the library was not where he wanted to be.
His El mundo alucinante (This Hallucinatory World, published in the US as The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando) was awarded "first Honorable Mention" in 1966.
[2][3] He escaped the prison and tried to leave Cuba by launching himself from the shore on a tire inner tube, but he was rearrested near Lenin Park and imprisoned at the notorious El Morro Castle alongside murderers and rapists.
In a suicide letter written for publication, Arenas wrote: Due to my delicate state of health and to the terrible depression that causes me not to be able to continue writing and struggling for the freedom of Cuba, I am ending my life ...
In addition to significant poetic efforts ("El Central", "Leprosorio"), his Pentagonia is a set of five novels that comprise a "secret history" of post-revolutionary Cuba.
In those novels, his style ranges from a stark realist narrative and high modernist experimental prose to absurd satiric humor.
His second novel, Hallucinations ("El Mundo Alucinante"), rewrites the story of the colonial dissident priest Fray Servando Teresa de Mier.
In interviews, his autobiography, and some of his fiction work, Arenas draws explicit connections between his own life experience and the identities and fates of his protagonists.
As is evident and as critics such as Francisco Soto have pointed out, the "child narrator" in "Celestino," Fortunato in "The Palace...," Hector in "Farewell..," and the triply named "Gabriel/Reinaldo/Gloomy Skunk" character in "Color" appear to live progressive stages of a continuous life story that is also linked to Arenas's.
[12] In turn, Arenas consistently links his individual narrated life to the historical experience of a generation of Cubans.
A constant theme in his novels and other writing is the condemnation of the Castro government, but Arenas also critiques the Catholic Church and American culture and politics.
He also critiques a series of literary personalities in Havana and internationally, particularly those who he believed had betrayed him and suppressed his work (Severo Sarduy and Ángel Rama are notable examples).
His "Thirty truculent Tongue-Twisters," which he claimed to have circulated in Havana and were reprinted in "The Color of Summer," mock everyone from personal friends, who he suggests may have spied on him, to figures such as Nicolás Guillén, Alejo Carpentier, Miguel Barnet, Sarduy, and of course Castro himself.