Under the headline “Old rubbish in a new bin”, it denounced the movie I was about to see and the man whose life inspired it, the Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas. I can’t say I was surprised, because Before Night Falls which is directed by the artist Julian Schnabel and stars Sean Penn, Johnny Depp and the Oscar-nominated Spanish actor Javier Bardem, confronts that most inflammatory subject, the repression of human rights by Fidel Castro’s long-lived Communist regime. Cuba is currently the cool destination for left-leaning people who fancy a holiday in the sun with salsa bars thrown in. The Manic Street Preachers launched their latest CD in Havana a few weeks ago, posing for photographs with the president, who turned up in his trademark fatigues and cast a benign eye over the proceedings. The band’s presence in Cuba contrasts with the decision of actors such as Penn and Depp, as well as the musicians Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed, to work on a film that shows a very different side of the island. I don’t know whether the Manics, usually ideologically sound to the point of tedium, raised the question of the recent crackdown on dissidents by the Castro regime I doubt it.

When Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, announced his intention of doing so, in advance of a trip to Havana, he suddenly found his invitation cancelled. Schnabel’s movie, which goes on general release here in June, addresses these dilemmas. It is a harrowing, visually stunning account of Arenas’s imprisonment, the censorship that forced him to smuggle his work out of the country for publication abroad, and the government’s well-documented persecution of gay men in the 1960s and 1970s. It is emphatically not the kind of anti-Castro rant we hear from exiled Cubans in Miami, a gruesome bunch of reactionaries who almost certainly share some of their arch-enemy’s prejudices. Aside from his homophobia, President Castro is an enthusiastic champion of the death penalty, which he extended to a wide range of offences, including armed robbery, only two years ago. Before Night Falls ends with Arenas’s suicide in New York, where he lived in exile and succumbed to Aids. It is a tragic and obviously partial account of a wrecked life, in which the scenes of Arenas frantically writing on scraps of paper in prison cannot answer questions about the effect of censorship on the quality of his work.

But the furiously hostile reaction in London last week is an example of the double standards applied to Castro’s nasty regime by people who really should know better. Many of them, including Labour MPs and trade union leaders, support the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, which produced the leaflets denouncing Schnabel’s film and which happens to be holding a one-day conference in London today. Its line on Before Night Falls is that the film distorts and “rehashes old propaganda about the Cuban revolution”. But if things have got better, as it claims, why is the UN Human Rights Commission about to consider a resolution condemning abuses in Cuba? Why does Amnesty International say that several hundred people are in jail for political offences, 19 of whom had been recognised as prisoners of conscience by the end of last year? Human Rights Watch, which organised Thursday night’s premiere, is categorical about the extent of the repression. Hundreds of peaceful opponents of the government are behind bars, it says. Many others suffer short-term detention, evictions, arbitrary searches, surveillance, house arrest, travel restrictions and threats. My own experience as chair of the Writers in Prison Committee of English PEN is that the regime does not respond to appeals on behalf of authors and journalists, who are subject to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment.

Felipe P?z Roque, the foreign minister, insists there are “no human rights abuses in Cuba” He is lying. One young journalist, released after serving two years of a four-year sentence for the catch-all offence of “dangerousness”, contracted hepatitis while in Canaleta jail, a prisoninfested with fleas and rodents. Unlike the events portrayed in Before Night Falls, these things are happening now. No doubt there will be more protests, more attempts to dismiss Arenas as an embittered exile, when the film opens in the summer. But turning a blind eye to the harassment of dissidents in Cuba, three decades ago or today, is as stupid and counterproductive as supporting the American blockade
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