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own culture. This nonacceptance by the colonizer leaves the colonized out of the loop. Through colonization, the cultures of the colonizer and the colonized are affected; thus, the culture of the colonized and the oppressed is transformed at a larger scale. Consequently, not becoming what the colonizer wishes the colonized to be, Caliban defends the old ways—the inferior ways—as legitimate and equal to the ways of Prospero, if not better than the alternative. Had Caliban been accepted by Prospero, would he have given himself completely to the colonizer’s culture? It is Prospero’s refusal to believe in Caliban’s abilities that make him aware that the colonizer will never give him anything, let alone his freedom. The colonized is a figure who feels rejected, hated, exploited and is not allowed to participate fully in society. At the same time, the colonized has been transformed because he is no longer the happy little native. Instead, he must reappropriate the colonizer’s gaze to relearn what and who he was before colonization. The solution for the colonized is to rediscover his identity and reshape it so that he may reach a moment where he will be on the verge of postcolonialism. However, what happens when the colonizer is no longer there? What happens when the process of decolonization has taken place and the native is left to fend for himself? In the case of Cuba, although the colonizer is gone, there is a continuous presence of a neocolonial power that is alluded to (i.e., the United States) and used by the revolutionary government to control everyone. Under these circumstances, how does the marginalized/colonized subject such as Reinaldo Arenas define himself?
In order to reconstruct or reformulate an identity after having lost it to the colonizer, the colonized subject must embark on a voyage of self-(re)discovery/self-enlightenment whose goal is to reintroduce the lost self to an entity that is in transition. This identity, however, is in its production stage as it refers to the