Reinaldo Arenas’s Fearless Speech

This chapter considers Arenas’s parrhesiastes public pedagogy as a powerful intervention in the Cuban Revolution’s imagination. Barros, Ocasio, and Willis identify the strength of Arenas’s phenomenologically sensitive discourse by linking it to his testimonial lifewriting as a unique postcolonial methodology of pedagogical truth-telling. As this chapter argues, this methodology successfully allowed Arenas to ground and authenticate his phenomenology of the Cuban Revolution in a literary project through which he recovered dissident voices and the “primordial” meanings of the Revolution as a multifaceted event. To that end, Arenas’s cultivated parrhesia in a way that countered Manichean representations and dichotomist expressions of Left or Right-wing ideology, which, as this chapter discusses, ultimately alienated him from both the cultural establishment in his native Cuba and the diasporic intellectual communities in the U.S.