3 ideas
Arenas argues that when the state criminalized homosexuality, gay sexual life in Cuba did not shrink. It went clandestine and became more intense and more pervasive, because every forbidden encounter was also an act of defiance. His claim is that a regime which polices intimate life turns sex itself into a form of political resistance that it cannot fully control.
The book treats writing as a defensive act against forces trying to erase the writer. In Cuba, security agents repeatedly confiscated or destroyed Arenas's manuscripts, and he rewrote Farewell to the Sea from memory several times. In New York he wrote against the clock of AIDS, which is what the title names. Seen this way, an authoritarian state and a terminal illness pose the same threat: silence before the work is finished, so the work must be hidden, duplicated, smuggled out, or finished fast.
During the 1980 Mariel boatlift, the Castro government branded those leaving as 'escoria' (scum). It used the exodus to dump people it wanted gone, including homosexuals, alongside criminals and the mentally ill. Arenas got out only by altering his name on his exit papers to slip past lists barring known writers. This shows how a regime can reframe the loss of its own citizens as a purge of undesirables, while deciding which critics are too valuable to let go.