When I read that Julian Schnabel’s “Before Night Falls” is about Reinaldo Arenas, a homosexual Cuban poet who struggled under Castro’s revolutionary government, I had expected something very political. I had expected to see more of an ideological war between those who were with Castro and those who were not. But what I saw was an almost dreamlike take on the life of a man who just wanted to express his ideas and thoughts no matter who came across them. Arenas found the gift of poetry as a child, when one of his teachers in school noticed his talent and imagination. But to his grandfather and the rest of society, what Arenas had was not a gift but a shame. But that didn’t stop Arenas. He didn’t care for his writing instrument – he would even carve his words onto the bark of a tree if that’s what it took for him to be able to exercise his passion. This early battle between Arenas’s passions and the voice of society continued into the Cuban Revolution. To Castro’s government Arenas was an enemy not only because he was homosexual but also because of his ideological threats as a writer, so Arenas lay in prison. I found the prison scenes interesting because they reminded me of Martin Luther King Jr.’s time in prison. Even in prison, Arenas wrote and wrote for both the public and his fellow inmates. Just as prison did not deter Dr. King, it certainly did not deter Arenas. Of course, unfortunately, to see Arenas escape from the oppressive Cuban government to New York and wind up with AIDS was tragic to watch. I thought after bearing all the opposition and torture back home that Arenas would no longer suffer. But if he had listened to his grandfather and left his artistic and intellectual potential in the dust, never to show them to the world, wouldn’t he have suffered even more? I think so. Amid quite a bit of hate, he managed to be himself and no one else.