“Dear Friends:
Due to the precarious state of my health and the terrible spiritual depression I feel because I cannot continue to write and to struggle for Cuban liberty, I am ending my life. In the last years, in spite of my illness, I have finished my literary work of almost thirty years. I leave you then, as my legacy, all my terrors, but also my hopes that Cuba will soon be free. I am pleased to have played a modest part in the achievement of that liberty. I put an end to my life because I cannot continue my work. None of the persons around me are implicated in that decision. There is only one person responsible: Fidel Castro. The suffering of exile, the pain of banishment, the loneliness and disease, surely would not have come about had I lived a free man in my own country.
“I urge the people of Cuba, in exile and in the island, to continue struggling for freedom. My message is not a message of defeat but of struggle and of hope.
“Cuba shall be free. I already am.”
In 1990 gay cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas committed suicide by taking an overdose of drugs and alcohol.
