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This chapter places Reinaldo Arenas’s trajectory as a rising literary figure who reached maturity during the initial years of the Cuban revolution. His literary training and eventual dissatisfaction reflect ideological changes in revolutionary praxis, leading to Arenas’s exit from Cuba as a Marielito refugee in May 1980. Within the ten-year span, until his death by suicide in 1990, Arenas became a vocal Queer activist, completing a rather complex and experimental literary corpus, some of it initially started while in Cuba and smuggled out of the island by means of friends.

This chapter contemplates Reinaldo Arenas’s role as both teacher and student, centering on his relationships with mentors and beloved friends Virgilio Piñera and José Lezama Lima. While facing a terminal diagnosis, Arenas wrote against the clock to ensure his own literary legacy. The authors examine how he depicts his teachers in letters, essays, unpublished sources, and in two of his last published works, Antes que anochezca and El color del verano. Approaching his suicide, he employed “writing as a means of righting,” radically rewriting his masters’ deaths, perhaps reflecting his desires for his own artistic afterlife. Arenas’s rewriting of their works, lives, and deaths forms part of his queer activism. This section is enriched by little-known works by Arenas and texts by other Cubans of his generation.

This chapter explores to what extent Arenas knowingly followed the Marielenas’ iconoclastic rupture with Cuban and U.S. (homo)sexual dynamics and erotic expression of sexual desire. Arenas often displayed a dual conflictive persona: On the one hand, he proudly referred to himself as a “Cuban author in exile,” an ideological category that he traced as the beginning of modern Cuban literature beginning in the 19th century with a “destierro,” very much like other notable Cuban writers. On the other hand, in his public self-portrayal as a Marielena, that is, as a pájaro, and as an activist queer writer, Arenas fully intended to take the developing mainstream Queer literary cannon by storm.