This was definitely not the movie I was expecting. The description going into the movie was a “romantic drama” with Johnny Depp. Honestly, I didn’t know what exactly to expect, but I definitely wasn’t prepared. Personally, this movie was hard to follow. My extent of historical Cuba knowledge is only peripherally being taught about the Cuban missile crisis in high school, so the historical parts of the movie were confusing at times. The revolution and rebellions kept being mentioned, but I couldn’t tell which was which. At the same time the fairly fast-paced Spanish and captions made it hard to catch the images shown.

Perhaps that was another reason I didn’t enjoy the movie very much. At times, there would be dialog, but no translation, so I just didn’t know what was going on. At other times, I heard the accented English and read the subtitles, but was still really confused. It wasn’t just the historical parts either. Sometimes, there would be images of perhaps culturally recognizable things, that I had no context for.

What I found most interesting was how large the homosexual community in Cuba was that they portrayed. After the introductory scenes with his grandfather enraged after learning he wrote poetry well, I was surprised to see the sexual openness of the gay community, especially in the 1970s. I don’t really have a gauge on how abnormal or normal it was then, but I would have imagined that people would be much more hesitant to be openly gay.

Overall, it was an interesting movie, but the humanity of the characters was hard to watch at times.  Reinaldo Arenas clearly faced many struggles in life, enough to the point where he self-harmed and planned his own death. Again, I don’t think I can fully appreciate the film due to my lack of context, but it definitely introduced me to things that I hadn’t previously been exposed to.