The Imperiled Text: Rethinking Censorship in Reinaldo Arenas's Otra vez el mar and Antes que anochezca.

This article considers Reinaldo Arenas's novel Otra vez el mar (1982) from the perspective of his autobiography Antes que anochezca (1992) to revisit and expand the concept of censorship in revolutionary culture. After briefly describing the early history of cultural repression in the revolutionary period, the article offers a reparative reading that illuminates the novel's writing through the lens of Arenas's autobiography, letters, and interviews. By following the novel's successive rewritings, it becomes clear that censorship, understood as a targeted ban confined to a particular moment, is too narrow to capture the range of official and extraofficial processes that pursued Arenas's writing across decades. Instead, I argue that imperilment, understood as a distributed set of processes that collectively situate cultural work in a state of heightened material vulnerability, deepens understandings of cultural repression on the island. In the conclusion, I situate Otra vez el mar within a broader archive of imperilment that stretches across the revolutionary period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]