Fidel paused in front of one hunting trophy, the head of an eland; Mary, making conversation, remembered that eland was the best producer of meat among Africa’s wild beasts. In turn, visionary Fidel wondered aloud if these meat-producing animals could not be imported and domesticated on his island. “Who knows?” said Mary, unnerved in the presence of the young revolutionary’s wild ideas, and politely yet coyly replied, “It could be possible. But their natural habit is at an altitude of two thousand meters.” Inspecting Ernest’s bedroom with his wife, then climbing to the top of his writing tower with his view over the field of royal palms and the distant hills of Havana, Fidel let out a long sigh and said, “I imagine señor Hemingway enjoyed this view.”
“It’s the truth. Every day,” Mary lied.
“I will help you with your pictures,” pronounced the prime minister, looking slyly into Mrs. Hemingway’s eyes as he descended the steps in front of her former home.
Mary hurriedly boxed up jewelry, paintings, fine china, silverware, and linens and secured its passage in the holds of a fishing boat bound for Florida, which would forego a load of fish to carry more precious cargo. Dropping Fidel’s name when necessary and benefiting from his support, she sidestepped officials and roadblocks as they occurred to ship as many of her belongings as the boat could take in one trip.
The rest she gave away: the Pilar to Gregorio, the car to driver Juan, and the other car to the Herrera Sotolongo brothers. To each of their employees, she distributed final payments. Pedro Buscarón, who had worked for eight years at the farm, was given the right to continue to graze his horse on the property, along with José Herrera, the head gardener, who received the Finca’s cattle and the right to graze them there. On July 21, 1962, Finca Vigía was renamed Museo Hemingway.
Today the Finca Vigía remains otherwise just as Hemingway left it, containing his full library of phonograph records and nine thousand books, his clothes, African trophies, and hundreds of other possessions, including the yacht Pilar, which Gregorio, soon after he was gifted it, decided to donate back. By former employees and friends who turned guides under a new regime (Villarreal, Campoamor, and Roberto Herrera Sotolongo), then by Cuban conservationists, the Finca Vigía has been lovingly cared for and preserved and remains one of the world’s best living literary museums. In Havana today, aside from Hemingway’s perfectly preserved home, one can still discover La Terraza bar where Santiago and Manolin shared a beer in Cojímar port, Hemingway’s typewriter that still sits before the window of room 511 in the Hotel Ambos Mundos, the Barlovento Yacht Club where he held his fishing competitions, which was renamed “Marina Hemingway” shortly after his death, and even a bronze statue of the author—leaning across El Floridita bar—immortal.
When asked why, during a fifty-year Cold War and economic blockade, Cuba’s revolutionary government had conserved the home and the memory of this North American writer, Fidel Castro responded that he did it out of “admiration”: a great author had honored his country by choosing to live and write some of his major works there. Fidel said he felt “grateful to him for the great pleasure” he experienced reading his books: “I think we would have been savages if we did not recognize the importance of preserving this place. We do not deserve the recognition; we simply behaved in a civilized fashion.”4 While Hemingway’s first mate, Gregorio Fuentes, stayed in Cuba until he died, a fixture for the tourists to admire and converse with at the La Terraza (provided that a small honorarium was paid), the other living embodiment of the old man in The Old Man and the Sea, Anselmo Hernández, fled the island at the age of ninety-two, crossing the Florida straits with two hundred and fifty other refugees of the Castro Regime in 1965, and lived the remainder of his life as a dissident in Miami, estranged.5
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Throughout his life, Fidel remembered and referred to Hemingway, often at moments that were decisive to his career. In 1967, defending Hemingway, Fidel declared, “All the work of Hemingway is a defense of human rights.”6 Much later in 1975—twenty years after the revolution—when two journalists interviewed Castro, he again cited Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, noting its influence on his thinking at a critical moment in Cuba’s history.7 To appreciate the influence of Hemingway’s writing on the Cuban leader’s thinking and character, we might also cite the famous speech Castro made before the United Nations in 1979 while urging world governments to work toward peace and growth. There to underline his commitment to peace and civilization, Fidel invoked a Hemingway title: “We say farewell to arms and shall consecrate ourselves in a civilized manner to the most pressing problems of our time…This is, moreover, the essential premise for human survival.”8
Before Fidel’s death, in his office there hung a large poster of Hemingway beside an enormous swordfish that the writer sent him shortly after their meeting at the fishing competition. Read in Cuban high schools as part of the curriculum, Hemingway has had more influence on Cuban literature than any other writer, except for José Martí.9 Despite political tension between the United States and Cuba, North American writer Ernest Hemingway has remained one of the most esteemed writers in Cuba to this day. Fidel Castro declared that Hemingway was his favorite author on numerous occasions, and Fidel’s friend Gabriel García Márquez vouched for the sincerity of this affirmation.10
Hemingway’s first mate Gregorio Fuentes shares an interesting anecdote. He reports that during the Cuban Revolution, Hemingway knew his first mate was hiding arms on the Pilar to support the movement. Ernest did not interfere. Then, one day, when he saw him wearing the militia uniform, he hugged him and proclaimed enthusiastically, “I love you more each day.”11 Phil Bonsal, understanding the historical necessity of Fidel’s rise to power, said, “The Castro regime seems to have sprung from a deep and widespread dissatisfaction with social and economic conditions as they have been heretofore in Cuba and to respond to an overwhelming demand for change and reform.”12
When Castro forced Batista into exile, Hemingway remarked to his friend Ed Hotchner, “I just hope to Christ the United States doesn’t cut the sugar quota. That would really tear it. It will make Cuba a gift to the Russians. You’d be amazed at the changes. Good and bad. A hell of a lot of good. After Batista any change would almost have to be an improvement.”13 Hemingway was a man of intelligence and shrewd observation who witnessed events in Cuba at close range. As an American and a patriot, he hoped his country would see events with clarity and do the right thing.
In his eighties in 2008 during his interview with Ignacio Ramonet, Fidel Castro would again openly affirm that he would have liked to have known Hemingway better.
He liked Cuba. He loved this island. He lived here and left many things, his library, his home, which is a museum today. During the first year following the revolution, I spoke with him on two occasions, relatively briefly. Had Hemingway lived a few more years, I would have liked to have talked more with him, more intimately. I have read several of his novels more than once. In many of them, like For Whom the Bell Tolls or A Farewell to Arms, his main character has inner dialogues with himself. This is what I like most in Hemingway, the monologues, when his characters talk to themselves. As in The Old Man and the Sea, the book which earned him the Nobel Prize. In my brief encounters with him, his habits, his work, his general dealings gave me the impression of a very humane person. I always liked his work very much. He portrayed himself in his books, the adventures he lived and those he wanted to live and couldn’t. I felt sincere admiration for his thirst of adventure.14
When relations with the United States went from poor to worse, Fidel, and his brother Raúl after him, remained loyal supporters of all things Hemingway, ensuring the museum was well cared for by René Villarreal and well administered. Despite the scarcity of the country’s resources, Cuba’s government has consistently funded the museum—$4 million during 2005’s renovation alone—and employed fifty-five of its citizens to work there, full-time, at the task of protecting the memory of a North Ame
rican author. The restoration of the Pilar, too, was complicated and costly. Approximately 164 tourists per day or (73,000 tourists annually) from the world over can look through the open windows he left behind, know how he lived, and feel his presence in the spaces, in his books, in objects he endeared, and in the fading photographs. The museum has become an indispensable stop for diplomats and celebrities passing through Cuba.
On his desks are dozens of bullets, casings, artillery shells, talismans, hunting spears, walking sticks, rabbits’ feet, and other totems that he picked up along the way and kept for good luck. One curator spent weeks dusting a wall to reveal the place where he recorded his weight beside the bathroom scale. Beside his bed on a bookshelf sits the same typewriter where, often sweating profusely, Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea, Islands in the Stream, Across the River and into the Trees, A Moveable Feast, The Dangerous Summer, and The Garden of Eden.
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On December 2, 1961, Castro allied with the Soviet Union, reversing his early positions to declare “I am a Marxist Leninist and I will be one until the last day of my life.” While Herbert Matthews continued to defend Castro’s government as “free, honest, and democratic,” Cuban exiles blamed the New York Times for fathering Fidel’s fame.15 According to Matthews, Hemingway’s support for Fidel mirrored his own, and despite the rumors to the contrary, it had not wavered, “Now that he is dead, I can divulge that one who stood by me at all times was Ernest Hemingway, as did his wife, Mary. My last letter from Ernest, written in the late summer of 1960 while he was in Spain, was to assure me that the reports saying he had ‘gone sour’ on Fidel and the Cuban Revolution were false.”16
Amping up the embargo against Cuba, Kennedy imposed a full naval sequester in February 1962. Shortly after, Mary Hemingway and Ernest’s three sons heard Hemingway’s last will and testament read to them by the executor of his estate. Then, on March 9, 1962, an article appeared in the New York Times: “Manuscripts Hemingway Left May Yield Four More Novels.”17 The piece focuses on Mary: “It’s always the same,” she said, referring to the unpublished batch. “It’s his work—you could tell. I loved them, I’m mad about them,” said his widow in her apartment the day before but added that she was still undecided as to when, or if, they would be published. “I am bajo sus órdenes—I am under Papa’s order,” she said, “I must do my utmost to know what he would want done about his work.”
On April 10, the first sections of A Moveable Feast appeared as a teaser in Life magazine, and by May 23 Scribner’s published a full-length book with masterful editing from Mary and editor Harry Brague. In October, the world had held its breath while President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev brought the human race to the brink of a nuclear holocaust during the Cuban missile crisis. And on November 22, 1963, the nation wept when Kennedy was assassinated; two days later, Mob-connected Jack Ruby killed Kennedy’s suspected assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.
In October 1967, Che Guevara was killed in Bolivia where he had travelled to stir up a revolution as he had previously done in the Congo. Later, Richard Borne would call Che the “Apostle of the Immaculate Revolution”; Frantz Fanon described him as “the world symbol of the possibilities of one man”; and French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre would write, “Che was the most complete human being of his age. He lived his words, spoke his own actions, and his story and the story of the world ran parallel.”18
When Che was martyrized like Camilo Cienfuegos before him, Fidel Castro also wrote beautifully but hauntingly: “[Che] distinguished himself in so many ways, through so many fine qualities…As a man, as an extraordinary human being. He was also a person of great culture, a person of great intelligence. And with military qualities as well. Che was a doctor who became a soldier without ceasing for a single minute to be a doctor.”19
When Castro’s regime turned Communist, Spaniard-turned-Cuban-rebel Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo would find himself marginalized and flee the island in 1961. He returned as a member of Alpha 66, a paramilitary organization whose intent was to overthrow Castro and bring real democracy to Cuba. When Castro caught Menoyo, he spared his life but imprisoned him for twenty-two years.
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After months of preparation and talks between Cuban and American government officials, scholars, curators, and the Hemingway family, a ceremony was held in November 2002 to commemorate a historical agreement to collaborate to preserve and protect the structures and the contents of the Hemingway Museum and to grant world scholars access to the Finca Vigía papers. Congressman Jim McGovern, present at the ceremony, would emphasize the extraordinary importance of this moment. While all shared a love for Ernest Hemingway, McGovern confessed another passion: “I believe that the Cuban and the American people have been kept apart for far too long by politics, rhetoric and mistrust. I have a passion for tearing down those unnecessary walls and for building a new relationship based on communication, exchange, trust and mutual respect. And even today, forty years after his death, Ernest Hemingway can help us achieve that goal.”20
After Congressman McGovern called for a change in relations between the two countries, Hemingway’s and Max Perkins’s grandchildren spoke, thanking Cuba for its creation of the Hemingway Museum and heartfelt protection of his works. Last, an aging Castro took the stand and expressed his admiration of his works and his gratitude to Hemingway for honoring his country by residing and for writing his masterpieces there. Fidel then shared more specific ruminations on Hemingway’s submarine hunts during World War II, referencing parts of Islands in the Stream and For Whom the Bell Tolls.21 Concluding his remarks, President Castro moved his hands along the microphone and cable. He paused before continuing, and gathering his thoughts, he endeavored to explain: “What is man without history? Without history we would not even have an idea of how limited the work of the human species is. The human species continues to make mistakes all the time.”22
One of the most famous series of photographs in Cuba captures the moment when these two men met at Hemingway’s fishing tournament. Prints of Ernest and Castro are everywhere in Cuba—hanging above the hotel bars, on walls in offices and lobbies, proudly displayed in private homes, the two most famous beards of their time, chin to chin, grinning at each other.
AFTERWORD
When Your Neighbor Is Ernest Hemingway: Cojímar and San Francisco de Paula Today
Part of the reason Hemingway’s memory endures in Cuba is that he consistently treated his Cuban neighbors with kindness and generosity. Hemingway had a close relationship with the people of Cuba, and he lived in a very good neighborhood. I do not mean the neighborhood had pretty houses, nor that it had well paved roads, but that good people inhabited it, possessing next to nothing, and still today they have very little. But one gets the sense that if somebody were in need, these would be the kind of neighbors who would give all they could spare. One finds here not dog-eat-dog, sink-or-swim, fear of dangerous strangers, but rather neighborly solidarity.
Most of Hemingway’s neighbors, now in their sixties or older, still live here in Havana and very clearly remember El Americano walking in their neighborhood or driving by in his Buick, and most have at least one small story to tell. The village of San Francisco de Paula lies about twenty minutes by car to the southwest of Havana.
After weeks hunched over the documents at the Finca Vigía’s extensive library and documentation center, one afternoon I slipped out the back door of the museum to seek out some of Hemingway’s neighbors. It was a pleasantly sunny day in San Francisco de Paula. A gentle breeze was blowing through the leaves of the palm and mango trees above me. I walked along the dirt road between the aging wooden houses, each with its sagging porch, cast-iron rocking chairs, caged parakeets, and vegetable gardens. In the yards, hens patrolled their well-travelled lawns, their heads darting left and right, scanning for edible kernels. Neighborhood children were returning from school in their starched white-cotton and red-polyester uniforms. In the
road, dogs socialized, their tails wagging in a cheerful greeting.
I crossed paths with a lean old man, in his late seventies, perhaps early eighties, who was also walking along the road. He noticed me, clearly not a neighbor, not by a long shot, in the small town. He shyly grinned, waved, slowed his pace to say “hello” and perhaps offer help to a stranger.
“Buenas tardes,” I said. “I am a researcher from the United States studying Hemingway in the museum. I wonder if I might ask you a few questions.”
“Claro, con placer.” (“Surely, my pleasure.”) Wearing a flannel shirt, he was a very thin old man, with a white mustache and intelligent, friendly eyes. “Name’s Ortho,” he said, extending his hand.
“Mucho gusto,” I said, shaking his hand. “I would like to talk to anybody who might have known him. If I might ask, how long have you lived in San Francisco de Paula? Did you know him?”
“I have been here since 1955, but my wife has been here longer. I knew him all right, or in any case, he was my neighbor. This is my house to your left. Would you like to come in?” I had the weird and wonderful sensation of suddenly stepping fifty years into the past.
“Oh…yes. Thanks very much.”
“No trouble,” he said, showing me the path that led along his garden to the front door. “Please, this way.”
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