Testifying to the Mentors’ Deaths

This chapter contemplates Reinaldo Arenas’s role as both teacher and student, centering on his relationships with mentors and beloved friends Virgilio Piñera and José Lezama Lima. While facing a terminal diagnosis, Arenas wrote against the clock to ensure his own literary legacy. The authors examine how he depicts his teachers in letters, essays, unpublished sources, and in two of his last published works, Antes que anochezca and El color del verano. Approaching his suicide, he employed “writing as a means of righting,” radically rewriting his masters’ deaths, perhaps reflecting his desires for his own artistic afterlife. Arenas’s rewriting of their works, lives, and deaths forms part of his queer activism. This section is enriched by little-known works by Arenas and texts by other Cubans of his generation.