Cuba: The Hemingway Trail

One can't escape Ernest Hemingway in Havana. Throughout the city, his presence is palpable and other cities around the world lay claim and boast their own respective Hemingway trails but neither can hold a candle to Havana, where he lived for more than twenty years, longer than anywhere else and also this is the country where his most famous stories drew inspiration from. This most American of writers was an unbashed Habanero.
In 1932, Hemingway lived in Key West. He spent most of his time aboard the Anita, a ship where he did most of his fishing for marlins.
At first, he slept aboard the Anita. When his wife, Pauline came to visit, he moved into the nearby Hotel Ambos Mundos. Still welcoming tourists, the salmon coloured hotel housed the couple in room no 511.
Today, the room has become a small museum with the requisite Hemingway memorabilia, such as the first edition of The old Man and the Stea and a Royal typewriter. The cost of admission is $2, the daily rate in 1932.
Hemingway, a creature of habit, always repaired to the Floridita, a popular tavern after a day of fishing, still wearing his peculiar uniform of mocassins, khaki shorts held up by a length of rope, and a striped blue shirt.
The signature cocktail at Floridita was the Papa Doble(also known as the Hemingway Especial), a jumbo daiquiri made with grapefruit juice and maraschino liquer. Hemingway reportedly consumed as many as twelve in one sitting.
The thirsty novelist habitually sat in the corner to the left of the entrance. After he won the Nobel Prize in 1954, a small bust was placed on the wall, creating a virtual Hemingway shrine while he was still alive. Then in 2003, a life-size statue was unveiled with much fanfare by Jose Villa Soberon, also responsible for the statues of John Lennon. Hemingway's effigy leans against the bar and appears to be ordering another round. Sadly, Soberon chose to depict an aging, bearded Hemingway rather than the more vigorous one of the 1930s. By all accounts, the younger version was intensely charismatic. In photographs of the time, he is movie star handsome with a broad smile and clipped mustasche, resembling Clark Gable.
Fueled by the Hemingway mystique, Floridita is habitually packed with sunburned tourists, many of whom take snapshots of themselves at the bar. The bartender even plaes a daiquiri before the statue each day, as an offering of sorts.
The most evocative stop on the Hemingway Trail is the writer's former home in San Francisco de Paula, a village just south of Havana. Known as Finca Vigia, it is a breezy, hilltop villa with spectacular views of the city on one side and the ocean on the other.
The Finca has been a museum since 1964. Visitors can wander through the gardens of the twenty acre estate, bright with jacarnda blossoms, and peer through the windows of the interior. Journalists are sometimes permitted to enter.
There is a ninety-year-old ceiba tree by the entrance, entwined with lush orchids. As you pass beneath its branches, it is as if time has stood still. The house has been artfully maintained just as it was when Hemingway left Cuba for the last time in 1960. His worn sillers lie expectantly on the floor. Strewn on the bed are letters that arrived after his death, and on the nightstand, his spectacles. The dining table is set as though company were expeted. The gray and white China is engraved with odd coat of arms.
Most interesting of all is where Hemigway wrote. A few steps from his bed, atop a battered white bookcase, is the famous Royal typewriter. Due to back trouble, he worked standing up and the typewriter rests on a wooden cigar box to reach the level of his chest.
The Old Man and the Sea is an undoubted classic and perhaps his best known work. It first saw the light of the day in Septermber 1, 1952 issue of Life magazine, which sold 5.3 million copies. It hurriedly went to press and sales surpassed any of Hemingway's previous books. This time critics were effusive with their praise. William Faulkner who has sniped at his earlier work, commented that Hemingway had "found God." Even the snide Vladimir Nabakov, who once said that Hemingway wrote for children, declared it ''superb''. It won Hemingway the Pulitzer Prize in 1954. He accepted the latter "in the name of the Cuban people" and donated the medal to the shrine of the Virgien de la Caridad del Cobre near Santiago de Cuba.
Cojimor is the last stop on the Hemingway Trail. In 1962, one year after Hemingway's death, the local fishermen each donated a brass fitting from their boats to cast a part of his statue. Called the Monumento Ernest Hemingway.
Hemingway returned to Havana after the triumph of the Revolution but soon set out for the bullfights in Spain. He then came back amid much hoopla in November 1959, By then, many in the United States had begun to have doubts about Castro. To the assembled crowd at the airport, Hemingway declared:
I am happy to be here again, because I consider myself one more Cuban. I don't believe any of the information about Cuba being published in the foreign press. My sympathies are with Cuban government and all our difficultes.
When he was presented with a Cuban flag, he kissed the hem. A reporter asked him to do it again for the cameras, but Hemingway shot back: "I said I was a Cuban, not an actor."
Hemingway met Castro only once, at the annual fishing tournament he had helped organize in 1950. Hemingway presented him with a trophy, and the photograph by Korda of the two clenching hands with frozen grins is today, one of the most widely circulated in Cuba. Castro seems bashful, obviously in awe of the writer.
Castro himself has declared that for Whom the Bell Tolls helped him plan the guerilla strategy in the Sierra Maestra.
Hemingway left Havana for the last time in July 1960. His first suicide attempt was on April 21, 1961. This was only days after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, and Hemigway must have realised that he would never be able to return.
Like many Cuban exiles, he had seriously misjudged the political situation, and worried whether the Finca would be safe. he was given more shock treatments, and friends are relatives who saw him during the last few weeks of his life saw a frail, broken old man. On the morning of July 2, while his wife slept, Hemingway found the keys to the locked storage room where the guns were kept and shot himself as his father had before him.
Massachusetts congressman Jim McGovern, an advocate of normalising relations with Cuba noted that Hemingway could help bring Cuba and the United States closer together: "He was an American through and through but he also loved this country and the Cuban people loved him back."