45: At night every night

Night in Cuba falls like a metaphoric curtain. The dense, layered, always long-delayed night depends only on its own majesty to erase the Revolution’s remnants of the day. Even if the night is used by the Cuban political police to carry out its cruelest arrests, it is the intimate territory of freedom. We see this in our literature. How Night Fell is the memoir of Commander Huber Matos, betrayed by the Communist faction of the Castro regime and condemned in 1959 to decades of torture and imprisonment.

“Two homelands have I: Cuba and the night. Or are the two one?” asks José Martí. His verse is almost a farewell. Celestino at the Gates of Dawn and Before Night Falls are the first and last books by Reinaldo Arenas. Both writers committed suicide—Martí trotting out toward the Spanish rifles with his coat the color of the night, Arenas leaving his minimal anti-Castroist will in a mute Manhattan dawn. The Revolution is a diurnal effect, and every night it can’t avoid committing suicide between dusk and dawn. But a day is approaching when the Revolution will rise no more.