Like his fellow artists, Arenas rode high on the crest of a cultural wave. Through his poetry, he explored his identity as a Cuban, as a human in tune with his natural surroundings and, ultimately, as a homosexual. His poetry, which we re treated to several times during the movie, seemed to be written with equal parts fire and grace. That enthusiasm was soon squashed. After he came to power, Castro was threatened by the kind of artistic expression glimmering in every line of Arenas work.
Artists are counterrevolutionaries.
That kind of thinking makes Castro nervous and he starts to make life increasingly hard for Arenas and his colleagues. Hard might be a bit of an understatement, actually. As it turns out, Arenas becomes an outcast in his own country and it s painful for us to watch him get bullied and eventually thrown into a confinement facility, which is just a glorified term for concentration camp. Arenas struggle is all the more wrenching because, in the early years of the Castro regime, the movie portrays him as a writer who walks around Havana with an ecstatic grin always hovering at the edges of his lips. Here is a man who is burrowing into the deep-plush carpet of language and sex and rolling around like someone who d been sleeping on cement floors for the past twenty years.