Ernesto

  “You have a lovely garden. How do you keep it so nice?”

  “Ah, a little toil. I am a bit older now, but it is a small garden. I have always done it. Anyway, I enjoy it.”

  “You still work in the garden at your age.”

  “Sure. I am not as old as I look,” he said, laughing. “And my nephew helps me with the heavy stuff.”

  The house was modest and creaking with its age but kept clean and orderly. Motioning for me to sit down on the sofa, Ortho went into the kitchen, and in a moment, his wife came out with glasses of cold water. She was in her eighties. The glasses were trembling on the tray. Ortho and I helped her before she had an accident! A little embarrassed, I thanked her for the water. She smiled bashfully.

  “This is my wife, Dolores,” said Ortho.

  “Encantado,” I said. (“Enchanted, nice to meet you.”)

  “Igualmente,” she responded. (“Likewise.”) She motioned for me to sit down, and she and her husband did the same.

  I noticed photographs, which seemed to be of their children and grandchildren on the wall, clearly taken at Disney World. The photos must have been at least twenty years old.

  Seeing my interest, Ortho said, “Our daughter. They live in Orlando. From which part are you?”

  “From Washington. From the capital,” I said.

  “Ah, really. Well…” he paused, thinking, then exclaimed, “you are welcome in Cuba! My last name is Durand. My grandfather was French,” he explained. Then, with his index finger resting on his chin and his eyes rolling back, he paused to remember. “I saw El Americano on many occasions. He would pass by here, in his Buick with his wife. What was her name…” (I learned that Hemingway’s neighbors did not know he was a famous writer until he won the Nobel Prize; they just knew him as El Americano.)

  “Mary! Lovely woman,” interjected Ortho’s wife, who, while slow-moving in her eighties, was apparently still quick-thinking and in full possession of her memory.

  “Ah yes, Mary,” Ortho said. “Anyway, he would pass here in front of our house to get to his house there, on the hill, and we would see them occasionally in church where they had a bench reserved, or in the bodega, in front of our house, over there.”1

  “My sister used to sell rum and beer in the bodega,” offered Dolores, “and he used to buy it there. He was a big man. And always he walked everywhere very quickly, with large steps.”

  “Yes, that’s it!” said Ortho. “We would see them occasionally in the neighborhood, at the horse races that they had in the streets of the town, or just strolling around with his walking stick with Mary, or in the Parque de Niño, the park and a little café where they sold drinks and snacks.” Then smiling at the memory, he added, “That was where we used to go on dates, Dolores and I. I courted her for five years.” He pointed sharply in the air to punctuate his sentence, gazing fondly at his eighty-year-old wife, rosy-eyed with the memory. “We just held hands, and would go to the Parto, and talk, every Friday, always chaperoned. That was the way it was in those days,” he explained, smiling.

  “Sometimes we would see them there, during the town festivals, seated in chairs they brought from their garden,” he continued. “But the only real one-to-one contact I had with Mister Way”—his neighbors sometimes shortened his name to make it easier to pronounce—“was one day when I was cutting the hedges in my garden here in front of the house. He drove by while I was pruning them, and having seen me, he stopped his car.”

  “ ‘Those scissors aren’t the right ones to do that job,’ he said.

  “ ‘I know,’ I said, ‘But, I don’t have the right ones.’

  “So he nodded, and he left. Then, in a little while, he returned with his cutting shears and gave them to me,” said Ortho. “He insisted that I keep them. That was the only contact I had with Hemingway.”

  “You should really talk to Luisito who has lived here longer than anyone. He is San Francisco’s historian,” said Mrs. Durand. She pulled out her address book. “Let me call him for you.”

  “All right,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “I just hope he is home,” she said, looking up from the black book full of loose cards and pages, falling apart in her frail, wrinkled hands. “It’s ringing!” she announced merrily.

  That day walking around Hemingway’s neighborhood, I met the Durands’ neighbor Irgan, also in her eighties, sitting on a rocking chair on her front porch, who would confirm the Durands’ stories. She told us that, at the time, before the revolutionary government established the museum, the walls of the Finca were not as high as they are now, built to protect the museum, so the neighbors could once see into his yard, and he could see the other neighbors. One could walk onto the property simply by moving a wire out of the way.

  I met his neighbor Orlando de Armas who lived just behind the Finca, and whose father trained his fighting cocks with Hemingway’s birds. Hemingway enjoyed this Cuban tradition and kept some twenty fighting cocks, charging his gardener, José Herrero, with the task of maintaining them.

  So many of the neighborhood residents offered me a glass of water, retrieved their parents and grandparents from the house, and set chairs out on the front porch or in their living rooms so that we could chat, think, remember, and just enjoy each other’s company. I wondered why they were so friendly. It shocked me. Maybe they were pre-information-age peoples, somehow sealed in a time capsule? Maybe without raises and bonuses keeping them at the office, they simply had more time to talk to me? Or maybe it was that “tropical warmth in their blood,” in their hearts as an idiosyncrasy of the Cuban character, which Hemingway once light-heartedly referred to as “the sunlight in their eyes” over drinks at the Floridita with his biographer Ed Hotchner. Whatever the reason, Cubans do still treat one another, even foreigners, as family. It makes even the large city of Havana feel like a small town.

  Today, despite a legacy of tension, Cubans are very happy and curious to speak to Americans. They typically told me that they do not confuse the American people with American foreign policy or politics. The trickle of a few American visitors is a recent phenomenon. As one of those people, I can report that Cubans look at us as if to say, “How wonderful to see an American. Maybe he is only the first. Maybe more will come. Maybe this is the sign of change we have been waiting for. Maybe this war between us is about to end.”

  * * *

  —

  Since Hemingway spent so much time on his yacht, he had a second neighborhood in Cojímar, the fishing village to the east of Havana where Hemingway’s first mate Gregorio Fuentes lived, made famous in The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway’s Finca was nine miles to the south of the fishing village, a distance that meant about thirty minutes by automobile at that time. The author praised its proximity in an article for Esquire, “The Great Blue River”: “The biggest reason you live in Cuba is the great, deep blue river, three quarters of a mile to a mile deep and sixty to eighty miles across, that you can reach in thirty minutes from the door of your farmhouse, riding through beautiful country to get to it, that is when the river is right, the finest fishing I have ever known.”2 I knew that I had to make an expedition out to Cojímar village, so I invited the directora of the Finca Vigía Museum, Ada Rosa Rosales. I needed her to help me locate the residents who knew Hemingway, and to accompany me to lunch at La Terraza, where I had heard they did a good paella.

  Among the people I met that day was Gregorio Fuentes’s daughter, named América, who still lives in Cojímar. She remembered Hemingway very well since her father worked as the writer’s first mate for twenty-three years, from 1938 until 1961. She told us that her father and Hemingway respected each other and that they were close. She remembered clearly when Hemingway came to her wedding on August 8, 1954, at the Guanabacoa Church (La Iglesia de Guanabacoa). “He also came when my sister was married. For us, Hemingway was El Americano. We didn’t think of him as a famous author at that time. Nobody was to go on his boat, only my father, but the entire town watched after it so
that nothing would happen to it. Cojímar is a very small town.

  “He had a strong character,” América remembered. “He was respected, but also sensitive to the people of Cojímar. He spoke to them humbly, a bit shyly at first, and then only later opened up. With time though, he walked very comfortably through our streets, or sat at La Terraza drinking with the fishermen. He was friendly with most all of them, and invited them to his house several times, and then of course, during the filming of the movie, The Old Man and the Sea, and to the party to celebrate his Nobel Prize. Mainly though, when he was not on the yacht, he would sit at La Terraza with my father and the other fishermen. If he came into the village proper, it was mostly to see my father in this very house.

  “I can remember once, when Hemingway was going to travel to Europe, he left my father a blank check, signed, in case he needed to fix the boat, or anything. ‘If my father needed it to eat,’ he said. ‘For whatever he needed.’ He trusted him immensely.

  “When my father gave the boat to Cuba, he said to Fidel, ‘I am giving this boat, on one condition: that it go to the museum. This is the boat, which he gave me to do with what I wish, and it must go to the museum.’ That is what he said to Fidel,” América recalled.

  The directora said to América, “Any time. Any time you want to come to the museum, just call me at this number. Or if you need anything…a doctor, medicine. Or if you want to visit. Just call me, and I will send someone to pick you up. I don’t have money, but I can give you what I have, and it comes from here,” she said touching her heart.

  As we said goodbye, América looked up at me and asked, “Well, did I give you…something? Something you could use?” And we walked down the hill toward the sea while América stood watching us. Her eyes still bright, she was living evidence of a lifelong friendship between a North American writer and a Cuban fisherman.

  “She is still a sharp one,” I said, “Very alert, for her age…How old do you figure she is?” I asked Ada Rosa.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She turned back to América. “América, cuantos años tiene, señora?” Ada Rosa yelled in her unabashed, neighborly Cubanness.

  A wry grin crept across América’s lips. “¡Ochenta y cuatro! Eighty-four!” she yelled back to us, holding up first eight aging fingers, and then four more. She would have been fourteen years old when Hemingway moved to Cuba.

  At the bottom of the slope, arriving from the Gulf Stream, the breeze rippled across the waters of the sleepy port. It blew through narrow streets of the small village of Cojímar where Cuban fishermen had once built their houses on this hill beside the sea. On a pedestal behind the old fort, Hemingway’s bust seemed to look out across the harbor as if contemplating the two men in a small wooden boat who were casting a small fishing net to catch baitfish in the middle of the cove.

  * * *

  —

  Among Hemingway’s personal effects, museum curators found a collection by the only writer in Cuba who is more recognized and celebrated than Ernest Hemingway: José Martí, Cuba’s “national poet,” of prophet-like importance. Referring to him as “General Martí,” Hemingway owned a complete set of his works and cited them often. After twenty-two years on the island, it would have been next to impossible not to have been familiar with Martí, a poet who was wise beyond his years.

  Among the many beautiful things that José Martí wrote during his lifetime is this: “Patria es humanidad.” (“Our homeland is humanity.”) The three words signify that our loyalty as human beings should be to one another first. Charging in to parts unknown to experience new places and mores, Hemingway reported back from other worlds, from people with new perspectives and wisdom to convey.

  In Cuba, Hemingway became a friend to a people that he had come to know and to admire. Rejecting the dominant political narrative of the day, he strove to understand and to express his solidarity. Today, children still read The Old Man and the Sea in Cuban schools and think highly of Hemingway, appreciating the beauty and universal values that he expressed. In contemporary Cuban vernacular, to say “Eso es Hemingway” (“That is Hemingway”) means that the thing being referred to is magnanimous, great, or fantastic. In other words, in Cuba, Hemingway’s name has become synonymous with grandeur.

  Beyond his art, the Cuban people also elevate Hemingway as a symbol for the lost understanding and friendship with his native United States. They remain hopeful that this friendship will someday be renewed. As Hemingway’s hero Santiago says, “It is silly not to hope.”3

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1 News agencies reported Hemingway dead after a jeep accident while chasing Nazis as a foreign correspondent in Europe during World War II, then again after a plane crash while on safari in Africa. “Report from Africa: Hemingway, Wife Killed in Air Crash,” Daily Mirror, January 25, 1954.

  2 Author interview with América, Gregorio Fuentes’s daughter, in Cojímar, 2011.

  3 Literally translated as “a mixed breed, a mutt; a stray street-dog Cuban.” Figuratively it means a “garden-variety Cuban.”

  4 The faithful believe that La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, or the Merciful Virgin of the Copper Church, once appeared when three fishermen from Santiago were about to be engulfed by a violent storm at sea, protected them, and assured their safe passage back to shore. Today, thousands believe the Virgin to possess divine powers; they ask her favors, then make pilgrimages to Santiago when their wishes are fulfilled. The coffers of the Church are lined with Olympic medals from Cuban athletes, trophies, offerings from family members who have requested help for dying relatives, and Hemingway’s Nobel Prize medal.

  5 Jividen, “Cinema and Adaptations,” 83.

  6 “Hemingway Dead of Shotgun Wound; Wife Says He Was Cleaning Weapon,” The New York Times, July 3, 1961.

  7 Fuentes, Hemingway in Cuba, 237.

  CHAPTER 1

  1 The ship travelled at 14 knots per hour, or 16 miles per hour. “Ship Descriptions,” TheShipsList, Swiggum, accessed October 30, 2011, http://www.theshipslist.com/ships/descriptions/ShipsO.shtml.

  2 Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, 191.

  3 After a brief refueling and cargo stop in Bermuda aboard RMS Orita, the Hemingways arrived in Havana late Sunday evening at 10:50 p.m. on April 1, 1928. Official records of dockings, Morro Castle, July 31, 1927–May 2, 1928 (Havana: National Archives, 1928), 436.

  4 Hawkins, Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow, 54; Ernest Hemingway to Pauline Hemingway. March 28, 1928, in Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 275.

  5 Cristoforo Colombo in Genoese, Cristóbal Colón in Spanish, Christopher Columbus in English. To this day, the names of plazas and cities bear his name, such as the District of Columbia. Much like Columbus, Ernest would have first seen the shores of the Bahamas as they passed. See excerpts from Christopher Columbus’s 1492 travelogue at the Franciscan Archive, http://www.franciscan-archive.org/columbus/opera/excerpts.html. Consensus among historians is that Christopher Columbus first landed in America at a place he named San Salvador. He noticed gold pendants in the natives’ noses and was determined to find the source. When the natives told him about a large island called “Colba,” he set sail to find it. While the expedition did not find gold, they did “discover” the natives smoking an unusual herb that they called “tabaccos.” Smith, “Routes of Columbus’s Second, Third, and Fourth Voyages, 1493–1504,” in Bowman and Isserman, Discovery of the Americas: 1492–1800, 28–29.

  6 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 175.

  7 Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 6.

  8 “They offer to share with everyone. They would make fine servants…With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” Christopher Columbus, “Journal of the First Voyage of Columbus,” quoted in The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 114.

  9 “As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information
of whatever there is in these parts.” Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 7.

  10 Christopher Columbus, “Columbus reports on his first voyage, 1493,” The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, accessed April 11, 2015, https://www.gilderlehrman.org/content/columbus-reports-his-first-voyage-1493. See also José Barreiro, “A Note on the Tainos,” in Yewell, Dodge, DeSirey, eds., Confronting Columbus, 30; Todorov, The Conquest of America, 25–27.

  11 Finding only traces of gold, Columbus condemned 8 million natives to death, or to lives of slavery, dismemberment, and disease, which spread quickly in the abysmal conditions imposed in search of precious metal. 85 percent of the Taíno, Guanajatabey, and Ciboney peoples were killed. Those who resisted slavery or failed to produce gold every three months were burned alive, had their noses, ears, and hands cut off, and were left to bleed to death. Those who attempted to escape were hunted down, hacked to pieces, and fed to dogs while Bartolomé de las Casas, a missionary on their expedition, bore witness. See Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 10; Columbus, The Four Voyages, 139. De las Casas, A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies; “Estimates of Haiti’s pre-Columbian population range as high as 8,000,000 people…a census of Indian adults in 1496…came up with 1,100,000.” Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, 63.

  12 Also known as El Castillo de los Tres Reyes Magos del Morro. On April 1, 1928, the moon in Havana was waxing gibbous, which is to say nearly full.

  13 Columbus was ultimately betrayed by his own men, imprisoned, and expelled from the Americas in chains. Although he was later pardoned and allowed to return, he was stripped of his governorship and his promised percentage of the profits. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, 50.

  14 They were now Taíno, Guanajatabey, and Ciboney; Gallego, Canario, Andaluz, Castellaño, and Catalan; Bantu, Yoruba, Ibo, Ibibio, Ijaws, Ewe, and Fon; Canton, Hakka, Mandarin, Japanese, American, English, French, Italian, and German.