Introduction

Abstract

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.