THE BLACK WIDOW OF CADAQUÉS

Javier Bardem in the film version of Before Night Falls.

Cadaqués is a fishing village on the Mediterranean, wedged between mountains and sea, just shy of the French border. It is celebrated as the home of Salvador Dalí and, more quietly, as a long-term haunt of Marcel Duchamp. Over time, a procession of painters, writers and intellectuals has transformed this hamlet of fewer than 3,000 souls into a kind of cultural free port.

At any café table, one might happen upon Richard Gere, now a part-time Spaniard; Ronnie Wood, whose guitar-playing is rivalled only by his painting; Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz; or Neil Jordan, Oscar-winning writer-director. It is a village where fame strolls freely, without fuss. Locals have long since learned to ignore it; the foreign set is otherwise engaged – conspiring, networking, or practising the art of looking unconcerned.

Into this quietly eccentric ecosystem came Magalí, a Cuban American from San Francisco, who spent her summers in a curious house adjoining the ayuntamiento, the town hall. One summer, twenty years ago, her cousin Marcia Leiseca arrived.

Marcia had not fled Castro’s Cuba; she had embraced it. Rising to the post of first vice-president of Casa de las Américas, she curated literature, theatre and the arts from within the Revolution’s institutional corridors. Unlike most Cubans, her diplomatic passport allowed her to roam the globe, a privilege so rare it scarcely required explanation.

We met over coffee, at gallery openings and at drinks parties where the olives were dry but the conversation sharp. Before returning to Cuba, she gave me her contact details, should Iris, my partner, and I ever venture to her island.

The following year, my son Max and his girlfriend – both eighteen and freshly released from school – decided that Cuba would be their destination before university. I contacted Marcia Leiseca. She replied with the efficiency of someone long accustomed to quiet power: helping was effortless, almost procedural.

Cadaqués Connections

That same summer, my friend Marsha Chase, a New York psychologist and a regular in Cadaqués, was reading Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas. Born in rural eastern Cuba in 1943, Arenas initially welcomed Castro’s triumph over Batista, seduced by promises of freedom and artistic licence. The Revolution, as he soon discovered, had other intentions.

Openly homosexual, Arenas became a marked man. Manuscripts vanished. Life shrank into a ledger of surveillance and humiliation. Arrested in 1973 on fabricated charges of sexual assault and “ideological subversion,” he was sent to El Morro – the fortress that served less as a prison than as a laboratory in human cruelty. Hunger, beatings, constant scrutiny, and the particular savageries reserved for gay prisoners reduced existence to a daily calculation of survival. Released only after a coerced confession, he remained shadowed by the state, forbidden to publish, his voice methodically extinguished.

Reinaldo Arenas

Arenas escaped during the 1980 Mariel exodus. In exile, he finally published Before Night Falls, though illness and despair followed him until his death in New York in 1990. His memoir is unsparing, stripping away the varnish of revolutionary idealism to reveal the mechanics of betrayal and fear.

And here, the coincidence acquires the chill of a le Carré subplot.

In his memoir, Arenas describes a woman known as “the Black Widow,” who appeared at the funerals of gay men to photograph, monitor, and quietly terrorise the mourners. On pages 274–275, he names her.

Marcia Leiseca.

The same woman with whom I had shared coffee in Cadaqués.

Marsha’s alarm was immediate. Max and his girlfriend were in Cuba at that very moment. They had been met at Havana airport by a driver, taken to a guesthouse, and welcomed by “Grandma,” an elderly Black woman who looked after them – boiling water to make it drinkable, cooking Cuban dishes from ingredients unavailable in the markets. A guide was assigned. They were escorted to museums and beaches. They were treated as VIPs.

Were they in danger?

Quite the opposite. They were protected – insulated by introductions, permissions and the invisible geometry of favour. In Cuba, safety did not belong to the innocent. It belonged to those who were known.

What unsettled me was not that my son was safe, but why. The same system that had crushed Arenas now laid a careful hand on Max’s shoulder. Surveillance and hospitality, it turned out, were not opposites but adjacent tools.

In Cadaqués, Marcia Leiseca had been just another cultivated visitor, sipping coffee beneath the plane trees. In Havana, she was something else entirely. Power, like the sea, changes character with the shore. And some tides, I learned, only reveal their undertow once you are already in the water.