Reinaldo Arenas: revolução, nação e homoerotismo em Cuba (1959-1980)

Abstract

This work investigates the experience, representations and interpretations of the Cuban writer and poet Reinaldo Arenas in the two first decades of the Cuban Revolution, from 1959 to 1980, by the analysis of his epistolary writing and novel El mundo alucinante (1966). Arenas was pursued by his homoerotic practices e by the content of his writing at the period when the revolution closed itself in an ideological orthodoxy and deepened, at the same time, the intolerance to the sexual dissidents basing in the revolutionary national ideology. That way, the objective of this dissertation it has to explore the means that the writer found to express his critic autonomy and defend sexual freedom, building and preserving his subjectivity against the authoritarianism and repression of the Castrian regime. To approach the letters and literary fiction, were handled the concept of the imaginary, representations and experiences, in a way to identify the production of meanings that those sources comport, the positioning that it express, the social relations projected and the ideas of Arenas that collide with the dominant nationalist ideology. Regarding his novel, the relation between History and Literature provided the necessary tools to the development of the objective. With that, it is intended to contribute, on one hand, to the comprehension of the complex relation between the revolution and the intellectuals, and in the other hand, the relation between the homoerotism and the Revolution by the author’s trajectory.