During a 1983 interview, published in the New Yorker just last year, Reinaldo Arenas was asked, "Does a writer have a duty to himself and to society?" Arenas responds that it is indeed the writer's job to write as best he can, but defines it as "when a writer writes, he always refers to a social and historical context." Arenas was a Cuban writer, exiled because he was openly homosexual and rebelled against the Cuban government through his written works. He was also very autobiographical in his work and, as it would appear from his New Yorker interview, this is where his passion and writing flourished. Reinaldo Arenas used his marginalized voice as an openly homosexual man in Cuba and commented on the Castro regime to challenge the persecution of the individual in Cuba. In 1961, Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator, introduced Marxist-Leninist ideology to the Cuban people, “through grafting it into the images, symbols, values ​​and concepts of Cuban nationalism” (Medin 53). This ideology was promoted through what Medin describes as a world where there are no "in-betweens", but only "good and evil", and any departure from that perceived norm was seen as counter-revolutionary and had to be removed so as to be able to do it. do not corrupt the process of developing a “homogeneous revolutionary social consciousness” (Morales-Diaz 1). “The concept of 'counterrevolutionaries' and the connection to capitalist nations embody the revolutionary government's contempt for anyone not on the side of the communist revolution” (Medin 40). In this way, Castro created enemies of all Cubans who did not live up to his standards. According to Arenas, this new idea of ​​unifying Cuba came at the expense of the persecution of a large segment of the population and... middle of the paper... must leave its readers uneasy. In concluding his interview with the New Yorker and answering the question, “Does a writer have a duty to himself and to society?” Reinaldo Arenas said: “If someone is a true writer – not an opportunist who wants to be favorable to the government of the moment – ​​that person will always be for freedom because the simple truth is that without freedom, the writer cannot exist." Arenas was a great supporter not only of the freedom of homosexuals in Cuba, but of the individual. In 1990, after fighting AIDS, Arenas committed suicide. "My message is not a message of failure," he declared , "but rather of struggle and hope. Cuba will be free, they already are." The writer worked hard to reclaim the "marginalized voice" by rebelling against the norms established by Castro and elevating the individual.