Cuba: What you didn't know about Che Guevara.

The image of Ernesto "Che" Guevara on the MININIT building in the Plaz de la Revolucion comes from a snapshot by the Cuban photographer Korda. Taken on March 5, 1960, during the funeral procession for those killed in the explosion of the freighter La Coubre in Havana Harbor, it shows the Argentine wearing his trademark beret and gazing off into the distance, a fierce, compassionate look in his dark eyes. if the look is familiar, it's because you recognize it from posters hung in college dormitories around the world.
After his death in 1967, he became not ust a revolutionary martyr but a hippie. Time magazine named him one of the "One Hundred Most Important People of the Century." citing that "he remains the potent symbol of rebellion and the alluring zeal of revolution." Posthumously, he eclipsed Castro, who did not make the list. The only other latin American chosen was Brazillian soccer god Pele.
Korda's photograph of Guevara in his beret remained pristine and untouched. It has little political relevance today, but it's used to sell t-shirts, coffee mugs, and baseball caps.
The Web site Chestore.com, which claims to satisfy "all your revolutionary needs," lists among its top seller "an authentic Che beret" and a Zippo lighter, similar to the one he used in Sierra Maestra to light his pipe.
Guevara's elevated status was complete with Motorcycle Diaries, a movie that recieved standing ovation at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004. It's a romantic, idealized version of a motorcycle trip Guevara took in his youth through South America. Portrayed by the Mexican hearthrob Gael Garcia Bernal, a young Ernesto appears as a carefree, somewhat callow medical student whose social conciousness is awakened during the journey. It ends with Guevara swimming across a river at a leper colony in the Peruvian jungle, presumably to start a revolution of his own.
In fact, he would have to wait only a few more years. Guevara returned home to Argentina in 1952 to finish his degree. But rather than practise medicine, he hit the road once again, going from Bolivia to Ecuador to Guatemala. It was here he witnessed the CIA-sponsored ouster of Jacob Arbenz's leftist government in 1954. This hardened Guevara's political views, and when he fled to Mexico, he looked up a young Cuban he had met named Nico Lopez. From him, Guevara recieved a primer on Cuba as well as a famous nickname. Che is a Guarani used often in Argentina, meaning something to the effect of ''hey, you.'' Apparently Guevara addressed everyone this way, and so Lopez called him Che. It stuck.
Lopez also introduced him to the Castro brothers after they had been freed from prison and arrived in Mexico. Guevara met Fidel in July 1955. The had dinner in a nearby restaurant and, after a conversation lasting several hours, Castro invited him to join the movement. Guevara was impressed with Fidel's audacity. He agreed instantly.
Guevara was perhaps the most gifted military leader. Always in the thick of the fighting, he was famous for physical bravery, undergoing any hardship suffered by his men despite his frail physique and frequent asthma attacks.
A law was passed for Guevara's benefit in February 1959, making him a Cuban citizen by birth.
It would appear that Guevara did little more than mug for the cameras. At the museum in La Cabana, we see photographs of Guevara happily posing with Castro, playing Chess, and grinning with a cigar in his mouth. The during the early months of 1959, Guevara was in charge of the military tribunals, stlying himself as the "Supreme Prosecutor. He was unremorseful of his role in these executions that took place in La Cabana and wrote to a friend they they were ''a necessity or the people of Cuba."
American outrage at the summary trials may have prompted Castro to send Guevara abroad for an extended goodwill tour to Africa and Asia. After his return, Guevara recieved a new assignment, as president of Cuba's National Bank. Guevara himself liked to tell the oft-repeated joke about how he was picked. At a cabinet meeting, Castro announced that he was looking for a good economista. Guevara raised his hand and got the job. Later Castro expressed his surprise that he was an economist. "Economista?" said Guevara. "I thought you said communista."
Following the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1062, Guevara deeply mistrusted the Soviets and had suggested an alliance with their bitter rivals, the Chinese. And after the Revolution had triumphed, there was little left for him to do in Cuba, which increasingly was being rub by the petty, ideologically rigid bureaucrats he despised.
Guevara died on October 9, 1967, hunted down by Bolivian commandos and a Cuban-American CIA operative named Felix Rodriguez.
He was the among the last to see Guevara alive and wrote: "His moment of truth had come, and he was conducting himself like a man. He was facing his death with courage and grace." Che's last words were, " Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man."
Guevara's remains were believed lost but in 1997 were found in a mass grave at an abandoned airstrip in Bolivia. They were returned not to Argentina but Cuba. The man known to the world as Che recieved a hero's burial in Santa Clara, the site of his greatest victory.

Cuba: Restoration of the old city.

At the time of the Revolution, only about five hundred of three thousand buildings in Habana Vieja (Old Havana) were considered in good condition. In the 1950s, many of the colonial palaces had been turned into shabby apartment buildings, and little had been done to counteract the effects of torrential rain and salt air. Yet like many cities in Latin America, Havana was on the verge of a building boom. An influential group of Harvard-trained architects led by Jose Luis Sert had submitted a plan for every city "much like that of Le Corbusier for Paris." This would have devestated Habana Vieja, replacing old buildings with glass and steel high-rises, turned narrow cobble-stoned streets into limited access highways, and reconfiguring plazas into parking lots. This urban nightmare also included an artificial islands off the Malecon with casinos, malls and hotels. To a lesser extent, this was the fate of the other Cuban cities like Lima, Caracas and Santo Domingo, which retain little colonial flavour.
Inadvertently, Castro changed all that. The casnios shut down, the swank hotels filled with bearded guerilllas, and the tourists were sacred off. The subsequent elimination of the private sector derailed the ambitious plans and overnight reduced the value of real estate to $4 per square meter. For better of worse, Habana Vieja was preserved.
Architecutural preservation was decidedly not a priority during the early years of the revolution, and Habana Vieja (including the surrounding fortresses) as a World Heritage Site. The current Histroiador, Eusebio Leal, reached out to the public by offering guided walks of the old city on Saturday afternoons. Money from abroad began to trickle in, and efforts were undertaken to spruce up key landmarks such as the Plaza de Armas. "This made for some glaring contrasts, since on had to walk a few blocks to see a building literally crumbling to the ground.
Buildings in Havana are colour-coded according to when they were errected. Anything built before the nineteenth century is brown; between 1900 and 1959, beige; and after the Revolution, salmon coloured.
Many streets were named after their physical characteristics. Empedrado (cobblestone) was the first street to be paved, and Tejadillo (tile) was so named because of the first house to recieve a tiled roof. Lamparilla (Lamp) immortalizes the oil lamp "lit by a pious woman every night on the corner of Habana Street. Aquacate street took its name from a avacado tree that grew in the Convent of Belen.
Other streets were labeled by function rather than form. Picota ( yoke) was the site of the whipping post for condemned criminals. Amargura (bitterness) recalls the grim religious procession of the Franciscan monks that passed each morning durin Lent. Throughout Cuba, there are Amargura streets, where crucifixes were set up to mark the Stations of the Cross. Another popular street is San Pedro, which runs along the waterfront. It was given its name by sailors because of their devotion to St Peter, patron saint of seafarers.
With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Cuban economy, in 1991 went into free-fall wth the loss of the huge sugar subsidies that had sustained it. Castro declared the infamous Special Period, and Chinese cicycles replaced gas-guzzling Cadillacs on the Malecon. The future of Cuba would bow be foreign tourism and the U.S dollar became legal tender in 1993.
That year, the Office of the Historiador assumed responsiblility for all tourism-related activinties in Habana Veja and brought in $4million, which was poured into restoration projects extending beyond the face-lift of the Plaza de Armas. In 2001, it earned $70 million and emplyed four thousand people. This funded seventy-six preservation projects, fourteen hotels, seventy-nine other tourist facilities such as restaurants, and even a slick magazine on historical topics called Opus Habana.
But the problem arises when a creaky old building is transofrmed into a tourist-hotel, where do the poor and the dark-skinned residents go? Many are forcibly relocated to Alamar, a souless housing project west of the city.
It is estimated that up to thirty thousand people will be relocated to Habana Vieja alone.
Leal has also been criticized for excessively "prettifying landmarks and creating a colonial Disneyland for tourists." The immacutely white-washed facades, with pastel-coloured eaves and bougainvillea in flowerpots, can be opressively quaint. One of the greatest charms of Habana Vieja is "the eclectic, anarchi vitality of its architecture, with a neoclassical church beside an art noveau mansion."

Leal has been labelled as the architect of "tourism apartheid," since few Cubans can afford one of his chic cafes in Habana CIeja.
Yet little or no restoration has been undertaken outside of Habana Vieja and Centro Habana ( downtown Havana), although there are plans to develop the Maelcon. It is estimated the Havana loses three buildings every da. According to a Cuban government report, 1400 structures must be abandoned each year, and 20 percent of 2.2million Habaneros live in housing considered in "precarious condition."
Despite this, twenty thousan people move to Havana from the provinces each year. The city's infrastructure is equally in need of repair. According to one expert, it would take several billion dollars to upgrade Havan's failing water and sewage services.
"I won't live to see the full restoration of the city," Leal told a reporter from the New York Times, which in November 2005 featured Havana on the front page of its travel section. "So much is left to be done, but this is a start."

Cuba: Song and dance.

If the Jazz Age produced some of Havana’s most striking architecture, it was also one of the most artistic and culturally fertile periods in Cuban History. It was during this time when the rumba was born.
Cuban music is yet another example of “transculturation”, containing ingredients as diverse as Yoruba drumming rituals and songs of the Spanish student ensembles called tunas. What became the known as the son probably began as street music played in Havana’s poor black neighbourhoods, such as La Vibora or Jesus del Monte. Before the 1920s, son musicians were often persecuted by the police confiscated their bongos and maracas. But the infectious rhythm and bawdy lyrics caught on. Many of the early bands played in the degraded underworld like the Havana Sport, but by 1926, the Sepeto Habanero and others performed at the upmarket Hotel Plaza.
The legitimization of son coincided with the rise of a powerful new medium: radio. The first national radio broadcast in Cuba took place on October 10, 1922, when staion PWX transmitted the inaugural speech of President Zayas. Within a few years, radio was ubiquitous in Havana and transmitters could be found in bodegas, barber shops, and cafes, even catering to the cigar rollers in the factories. Radio stations multiplied, often with U.S. backing. By 1933, there were sixty two on the island, surprassing any other country in Latin America. Although radio stations initially played classical music, they soon catered to popular taste and the son was rapidly disseminated to middle-class listeners.
Cuban musicians played in New York, often in Harlem. Since there was no Cuban recording industry, the first son recordings were made there such as a 78-record cut the Septeto Habanero in 1920. The breakthrough came in 1930, when Antonio Machin sand “El Manisero” composed by Moises Simons and first recorded by Rita Montaner in 1928. It was inspired the traditional cry of of street vendor (progonero), a familiar figure in Habana Vieja. Each with a distinctive call, progoneros sold everything from buttons to pastries, but most common were peanuts sold in tightly rolled cones of newspapers. “El Mansero” was an instant hit in New York, and Machin went on to record it with RCA Victor. It would become one of the most popular songs on twentieth century with renditions of it done by everyone from Louis Armstrong to the Beatles. It appeared in the 1931 film Cuban Love Song and sold over 1 million copies of sheet music.
The popularity of “El Manisero” launched the Rumba craze, not just in the united states but in Europe as well. Strictly speaking, the rumba is not music, but rather dance. It was started by a couple and generally accompanied by bongos. The lewd, suggestive nature of their movements led it to be banned, like the son, but a safer commercialized version was soon being performed at the 1933 World’s fair in Chicago. Rumba eventually lost its original meaning and came to stand for Cuban music in general and specifically the son, which remains unpronounceable in English (somewhere between “son” and “song”).
Bands began appearing regularly in New York, encouraged by the success of Xavier Cugat, a Cuban bandleader who opened the Waldorf-Astoria in 1932. Musicians followed the Vanguardia to Paris, where Josephine Baker was the toast of the town. There were soon rumba clubs throughout Montmartre. The peanut vendor himself, Moises Simons, performed at a cabaret called Melody’s Bar and together with Carpentier organized a concert at the Club du Faubourg.
Rumba lived on in permutations such as mambo (which enjoyed its own heyday in the 1950s) and the omnipresent salsa. But son itelf staged an unexpected comeback when musician Ry Cooder visited Havana in 1997 and discovered it. The results was an abum called the Buena Vista Social Club, a mega-hit that was the subject of an award-winning movie by German director Wim Wenders. Though the songs benefited from Cooder’s state-of-the-art production facilities, they were hardly sanitized for a mainstream audience. They range from sappy love songs to raunchy tunes full of double entendres. Together with sexual innuendos are obscure references to Santeria and lyrics from Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who visited Havana in the 1930s. Many of the musicians who hadn’t performed for years, went on tour and played to packed houses throughout the world, from New York to Amsterdam. One of them, Compay Segundo, was virtually unknown outside of Cuba until the Buena Vista Social Club. He died in 2003 at the age of ninety six, presumably a happy man.

To listen to El Manisero: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj7NfrrnaKE

Cuba:Images and Projections

The image of Havana in the 1950s as a sleazy, Mafia-infested cesspool of vice is so pervasive that it has entered popular culture. After the Revolution, it was gleefully embellished by the leftist historians, and Hollywood followed suit in films such as Francis Ford Copplla’s Godfather II. One historian describes Havana as:

"a place of license and loose morality, of prostitutes, pimps, and pornography, of bars and brothels, casinos and cabarets, gambling and drugs, gangsters, mobsters and racketeers, politicians on the take and policemen on the make. Daily life had developed into a relentless degradation.”

This point of view has turned Havana into a gross caricature. Was it really as bad as all that?
Surprisingly, Grau’s ban on gambling during the postwar years shut down the Cuban tourist industry, and Americans flocked to Mexico. For example, in 1951, Cuba took in $50 million of the $19billion that Americans spent on travel. Mexico’s share was $300 million.
Cuba also faced stiff competition from from Puerto Rico and Haiti. From 1949 its share of the Carribean markey declined from 43 percent to 31 percent.
But just as Prohitbiton had spurred tourism a generation earlier, the straitlaced morals of 1950s made Havana ideal for a dirty weekend.
In the Broadway musical Guys and Dolls, Sky Masterson takes the prim, puritanical Sister Sarah Brown to Havana in the hopes of seducing her. Most Americans’ view of Cuba was shaped by I love Lucy, a television phenomenon that began in 1951 and soon reached 50 million viewers weekly. The character of Ricky Ricardo was played by Desi Arnaz, who often lapsed into rapid-fire Spanish to Lucy’s bewilderment. In contrast to the couple’s humdrum existence, Havana seemed sexy and exhilarating.
The casinos of the 1920s , such as the elegant Jockey Clun and the sedate Casino Nacional, were a far cry from the brassy Tropicana. Big-time gambling came to Havana by way of Miami. Meyer Lansky, once a bootlegger and associate of Bugsy Siegel, ran a lucrative gambling business and bootlegger and associate of Bugsy Siegel, ran a lucrative gambling business in south Florida throughout the 1940s. Just as I love lucy hit the airwaves, Senator Estes Kefauver’s televised hearings cast the national spotlight on mob-related activities. The public outcry soon shut Lansky down, and he served a two-month jail term.
American organized crime had yet to establish a beachhead in Cuba. Al Capone tried to establish a pool room in Marianao during the 1920s but had been chased out. Even by Chicago standards, Havana was a tough town.
Middle-class Habaaneros inhabited another Havana altogether, rarely seen by tourists. They rightfully regarded their city as one of the greatest in the world and would have been baffled and offended by its portrayal in Godfather II.

Robert Redford glorifies Fidel’s sidekick Che Guevara on film in “The Motorcycle Diaries,” and since that is apparently insufficient, Steven Soderbergh follows suit with a six-hour session that might as well have been entitled “Saint Che.” Director Oliver Stone praises Fidel as “one of the world’s wisest men.”Actor Jack Nicholson calls him “a genius.” Supermodels Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell gush after meeting Fidel that this was “a dream come true.

Before the revolution, Cuban cinema existed in a diluted form controlled by the U.S. film industry. In the 1960s, the support granted by the newly formed ICAIC (Cuban Institute of Cinema Art and Industry) — plus the copious cache of primary material and inspiration on the ground in Havana — allowed a handful of talented filmmakers to launch careers that would, in turn, launch Cuban cinema to internationally-recognized heights.

Although some might contest precisely which of his films should top this list, Tomás Gutierrez Alea is without doubt the most important Cuban director, for both his candid portraits of Havana and the manner in which his renown managed to snag the international spotlight and shine it on Cuba. His oeuvre alone stands as a testament to the power of Cuban cinema; his films are alternately bitter and sweet and always reflect the sharp sense of humor for which Cubans are known for.

Cuba: University of Havana

The eighty-eight step stone staircase telescopes up to the elegant, neo-classical rectory, with four columns.
Nearly at the top is the Alma Mater, a bronze statue cast by Czechoslovakian artist Mario Korbel in 1919. Dressed in a Roman tunic, she welcome students with outstretched arms, seated atop a marble pedestal.
The University has been founded in 1728, and its majestic campus was inspired by Columbia University in New York.
The nomenclature of the university has takes its turn to change over its more than 280 years of existence. It was first called "Real y Pontificia Universidad de San Gerónimo de la Habana" (in English Royal and Pontifical University of Saint Jerome of Havana).

At those times, universities needed a royal or papal authorization in order to be created and thus the names Real y Pontificia. The two men who gave that authorization to the university were Pope Innocent XIII and King Philip V of Spain. In 1842, the university changed its status to become a secular, royal and literary institution. Its name became Real y Literaria Universidad de La Habana (in English, Royal and Literary University of Havana) and later, when Cuba was a free republic, the name was changed to Universidad Nacional (in English, National University).

Currently the University, has an enrollment of 60 000 students spread over its 17 faculties and 15 municipal locations. In the current educational teaching period studied 32 races.

The University was traditionally a hornet’s nest for political conspiracies. It was the site of the demonstrations, known as tanganas, during the Machadato and the refuge of gangsters during President Grau’s years. It’s autonomy has been codified in the Constitution of 1940, and in theory, police were barred from the “sacred hill.”
The nearly eighteen thousands students, in thirteen faculties, were governed by the Federation of University Students (FEU). During the 1950s, the students would once again lead the fight against dictator, Batista.
It is here that Fidel Castro enters the story. After, graduating from Belen, he had enrolled as a law student in 1945, more interested in politics than attending classes. Castro dreamed of being elected President of FEU but met with little success.
The FEU was headed by Jose Antonio Echevarria, an architecture student from Cardenas. Affectionately called Manzanita, Eschevarria was a catholic intellectual with a gift of oratory. In November 1955, he organized a rally on the escalinta ( university’s steps) to commemorate the death of the medical students by the Spaniards in 1871.
Batista’s enforcers, known as esbirras moved in, hospitalising several students. Echevarria, himself was severly beaten. The FEU called for a student strike and riots spread throughout the island, met with ever more brutality by Batista’s secret police.
Because of the Cuban revolution, the university had been closed down for three years in 1956, yet the demonstrations of the escalinata continued .
The pedestal of the Alma Mater provided a podium for many passionate speeches. The students then marched down the stairs linked, singing the Cuban national anthem and shouting “Abajo Batista!” The police awaited them on San Lazaro Street, assaulting them first with water cannons, then truncheons, then bullets.

During the months that followed, the police executed many of the students that led the failed coup. President Batista ordered the university to be closed, and it remained so until Batista fled the country and Fidel Castro entered Havana in January 1959.

The Castro regime re-opened the university in 1959 and put an end to student demonstrations and political affiliations. By 1961, particularly after the Bay of Pigs invasion, public student gatherings were forbidden unless they were government sponsored. As per the information in the university's website, the student body was "purified" of all opposition to Fidel Castro.
Today, people from around the world come to the University of Havana for Spanish courses bereft of any violence.

Cuba: Havana Nights

“Open to the sky, the stage appears to float in a prehistoric jungle of oversize ferns. Coffee-coloured girls dressed in spangles slink down the branches towards the audience or else shimmy down creeping wines. The retro orchestra kicks in with a mambo, and the warm breeze carries the perfume of expensive cigar smoke. Waitresses even more stunning than the dancers bring another round of mojitos, and you wonder just how you go to heaven.” – Alfredo Jose Estrada
Described as a must in guidebooks, the Tropicana is Havana’s most famous nightclub of the 1950s tries hard to recapture its lost glory.
You can’t help but wonder what the Tropicana was like fifty years ago, when tuxedoed guests were entertained by Nat King Cole and where the guitar-shaped dancers dressed like Greek Goddesses. High rollers were flown in on a nightly chartered flight from Miami called the “Tropicana Special” and won or lost fortunes at the roulette tables. At the tiem, the nightclub combined the glamour of Monte Carlo and the spectacle of Hollywood.
The Tropicana Tigres in which the master of ceremonies announces:

“Showtime!...the most fabulous nightclub in the world..presents its latest show..where performers of the Continental fame will take you all to the wonderful world of supernatural beauty of the Tropics…”

In her book Tropicana Nights, Rosa Lowinger recounts in loving detail how the Tropicana first opened its doors in 1939. It’s location was an estate in Marianao called the Villa Mina, built by the former president of the Havana Yacht Club. Located next to the Colegio Belen, the Jesuit school favoured by the Cuba’s elite (Castro, the son of wealthy landowner, enrolled in 1941), it had six acres of lush gardens. According to one theory, the name Tropicana comes from “tropical” and “Mina.” But the war brought tourism to a halt, and gambling was banned by the President Grau who took office in 1944.
But then the Tropicana had been acquired by Martin Fox, a burly, rough-hewn gambler under Ciego de Avila. Known as the Guajiro, he made his fortune running illegal but lucrative bolita games and used his mob connections to keep the police at bay. When casinos were reopened in 1949 under President Prio, the Guajiro added roulette, baccarat, and blackjack to his repertore.
The Tropicana soon became Havana’s glitziest cabaret. The allure was not just gambling but musical acts like Rita Montaner and Xavier Cugat. Erratic weather often closed it down, so the Guajiro commissioned architected Max Borges Jr. to build an indoor stage.
The results was known as Arcos de Cristal (Arches of Crystal), a tour de force of soaring concrete arches and glass sheets, like a vast modernist seashell. At the entrance was a fountain ringed by eight marble nymphs that had once graced the Casion Nacional.
One of Rodney’s ( celebrated choreographer) most famous efforts was called Omelen-ko, in which a white woman woanders into Santeria ritual and is possessed. According to Lowinger, Rodney’s shows were razzle-dazzle productions that cost an unprecedented $12,000 a night. They featured Cuban music, African drums, elaborated costumes and above all, gorgeous dancers. In 1954, NBC broadcast live from the stage for its show Wide, Wide World.
The guests at the Tropicana included Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Rocky Marciano, David O. Selznick, and Joan Crawford with her husband, Alfred Steele, the president of Pepsi-Cola. Hemingway came once or twice, according to Fox’s widow, Ofelia. Headliners were not just Cuban stars such as Celia Cruz and Benny More but Josephine Baker, Liberace and Yma Sumac.
The Tropicana was also a favourite of Graham Greene, who knew Cuba well. In Our Man in Havana, British vaccum cleaner salesman cum spy Wormold celebrates his daughter Milly’s birthday there. As he describes it,

“Chorus girls paraded twenty feet up among the great palm trees, while pink and mauve searchlights swept the floor…Then the piano was wheeled away into the undergrowth and the dancers stepped down like awkward birds from the among the branches.”

Greene adds that it “was not a night [Wormold] was ever likely to forget.”

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."

Cuba: Rum diaries.

In Cuba, early planters distilled sugarcane juice into a brandy. The molasses that remained in the kettle after the sugar crystals were boiled was used to feed slaves. Once again, the intrepid British led the way by boiling this thick, brownish sludge a second time and allowing it to ferment. The resulting extract was a harsh, dark liquor called “kill-devil,” drunk only by those too poor to afford anything else.
By 1667, it was called rum and proved popular as well as profitable. Barbados was soon producing 200,000 gallons a year.
If wine was drunk aboard Spanish galleons, rum will forever be associated with the Royal Navy. Apparently, sailors were wary of diluted rum, for they tested it by dripping some on a few grains of gun-powder. If the alcohol content was sufficiently high, the water evaporate and the gunpowder flashed when lit. This was the “proof”, a measure that has remained on liquor bottles to this day.
The British sailors who stormed Havana in 1762 brought their tots with them. In the decades that followed, the increased trade with North America and the expansion of the sugar industry created a booming market for Cuban molasses.
This started a peculiar variant of the Triangle Trade: Yankee slavers traded rum directly for slaves. In 1767, the going rate was 130 gallons of rum per man and 110 gallons per woman. From Africa, the slave ships proceeded to Havana, where they unloaded the slaves and took on hogsheads of molasses.
The docks of of Havana was thus awash in rum long before the slave revolt in Saint Domingue, but the French refugees who fled the violence brought their distillation techniques with them.
They found an eager student in Don Facundo Bacardi Masso, who emigrated to Cuba in 1829. He married the daughter of a French sugar baron and a bought a tin-roofed distillery where he developed a charcoal filtering technique that created a smoother, mellower rum. A colony of fruit bats lived in the rafters, and the bat thus became the symbol of Bacardi Compania, founded in 1862.
Today, Bacardi, selling more than 200 million bottles of rum a year, it is still controlled by six hundred of Don Facundo’s descendents. The company flourished during Prohibition, when American tourists flocked to Havana to drink in bars like Sloppy Joe’s on Zuleta Street.
Bacardi became synonymous with rum itself and an indispensable ingredient in Cuba libres. If Bacardi was to be believed, this cocktail was born during the Spanish American War when one of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders added Bacardi to his Coca-Cola and drank to a free Cuba.
Another famous libation was developed at around the same time in the village of Daiquiri, not far from the Bacardi distillery. Rum sage, Charles Coulombe maintains that the American engineer at the local iron mine ran out of gin one day and served rum to visiting friends. To hide the taste, he mixed it with lime juice and sugar, creating a variant of grog. In 1932, a bartender at the Floridita on Obispo Street mixed one for a thirsty Ernest Hemingway and rest is literary history. The daiquiri has probably been featured in more novels than any other drink and was a favourite of John. F. Kennedy who enjoyed it with his H. Upmanns.
The holy trinity of Cuban cocktails is completed with mojito, a fizzy version of the daiquiri with fresh mint.
In recent years, Bacardi has become well-known for litigation as for rum, waging an expensive, politically savvy fued against Castro over trademarks. The Cuban government entered into a partnership with French Liquor giant Pernod Ricard to market Havana Club. Havana Club has been owned by the Arechabala family who fled Cuba after the Revolution. When the trademark expired, Cuba re-registered it in the U.S Patent and Trademark office. Despite this, Florida lawmakers managed to get a bill passed that exempted nationalized trademarks such as Havana Club from the usual protections of International Law.
Recently Bacardi announced plans to sell Havana Club in the United States, perhaps inviting another contentious lawsuits.
Rum and politics are still familiar bedfellows.