Before Night Falls is Arenas' autobiography. Beginning with early childhood, he describes how Cuba in the 1940s was a harsh place, which only deteriorated after Castro came to power in 1959. Arenas is raised by his single mother and her sister, although he meets his dad unknowingly once. As a child, he spent most of his time unsupervised. He amused himself in various bizarre ways, including eating dirt which gave him worms, having sex with many different kinds of animals, writing poems, playing in mud, shouting in the fields, listening to his grandmother's stories, and listening to the radio with her elderly friends. At a fairly young age Arenas finds out that he's gay. This unfortunately is not tolerated by the extremely heterosexually-oriented government under Castro.
Adulthood is not kind to Arenas. He has a constant series of lovers who each end up leaving him out of fury. Eventually his aunt betray his secret, revealing to government officials that he's gay. Arenas is promptly arrested and thrown in prison under the most disgusting conditions. His guards beat him and starve him and rape him. He's forced to work in the cane fields. All of this could end if he denied his sexuality and declared himself officially "reformed," but he refuses.
Arenas decides he must escape this country that only seeks to hurt him. He tries to swim across Guantanamo Bay to the U.S. He tries to escape via inner tube across the Florida Straits. Each time he is caught. Living as a fugitive, he spends a week camped out in Lenin Park, Havana. While daylight lasts, he begins writing this autobiography and reading the works of Homer. Hoping to enlist citizens to catch Arenas, the police announce to the public that a rapist is on the loose. Finally he is caught and sent to prison again from 1974 to 1976.
The political climate of Cuba is devolving. In prison, Arenas observes how the culture of his homeland is reflected and skewed by his fellow prisoners and guards. Again, he is starved, raped, and overall mistreated. He learns how to catch sparrows and eat them. When his case comes to trial, the government loses the case because they cannot get the witnesses -- two boys with whom Arenas allegedly had sex -- to testify. They do make him confess to being a traitor by sending his writing overseas (where he becomes famous) for the purpose of decrying the Cuban government. They send him to a rehab camp.
After his release, Arenas is left destitute. No work. No money. No friends. The police follow him constantly, and spies are everywhere. Although he swore in court to cease writing negative comments about the government, he continues to write counterrevolutionary literature. Finally, Arenas abandons all hope of surviving Cuba and escaping to America. He kills himself, leaving a note which blames Castro for everything awful that happened to him in life and now death too.
