Hemingway : The Importance of Being Ernest in Castro’s Revolutionary Cuba

In the breeze-swept tropical home where Ernest Hemingway spent some of his most productive years, Cuba has preserved his memory with a reverence normally reserved for revolutionaries.

Traces of Hemingway’s years in Cuba are as zealously guarded in his former haunts. His bust adorns his favorite restaurant and port, and his name graces an annual fishing competition.

The American author made his first voyage to the island in 1928. He returned off and on for the next decade to write, fish and rub elbows with Cubans and an international community of artists and writers. He went there to live in 1939.

In 1984, the Cuban government published a 700-page homage to the author, “Hemingway in Cuba,” which fleshes out the private man whose larger-than-life style holds great appeal for Cubans.

The Nobel Prize-winning author’s graceful retreat in San Francisco de Paula, about 15 miles south of Havana, is one of Cuba’s most prized museums.

Returning to the island just a month after Hemingway committed suicide on July 2, 1961, his fourth wife, Mary, donated the house and land to Cuba as the author’s legacy.

“Mary Hemingway donated the house after his death to comply with Ernest’s wishes,” museum director Gladys Rodriguez said. “Fidel (Castro) received it and decided that the house would be converted into a museum.”

Hemingway--whose best-known works include “A Farewell to Arms,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” “The Sun Also Rises” and “The Old Man and the Sea”--won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize and the 1954 Nobel Prize for literature while he was living in Cuba.

Hemingway buffs from around the world travel to the museum to peer through the windows into the house, preserved exactly as Hemingway left it. No one is allowed inside to disturb his trophies of African safaris or his worn armchair.

Copies of old Sports Illustrated and Time magazines lie on his bed. His Royal typewriter perches on a shelf where he stood and wrote during the morning hours.

Hemingway wrote some of his major works in the 22 years he lived in Cuba, including “The Old Man and the Sea,” for which he won the Pulitzer. But he liked to attribute his stay there to his love of deep-sea fishing.

In his years on the island, he made mojitos-- a drink like a mint julep--and daiquiris famous. Even today, Havana’s Floridita Restaurant, Hemingway’s favorite establishment and one that sports his bust, offers sugarless “Papa Grande” daiquiris in the writer’s honor.

Although Hemingway supported the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, he did not work for the Cuban revolution.

But the revolutionary government interpreted the donation of his home as clear evidence of his backing and adopted him as its own.

Castro, who used to throw worn copies of Hemingway’s selected works into the back of his car when he set out on trips around the island after the 1959 revolution, has called Hemingway his favorite author.

“My experience is that I identify almost instantaneously with Hemingway’s works,” he said in an interview in “Hemingway in Cuba.”

Castro and the writer met only once. On May 15, 1960, several months before Hemingway left Cuba for the last time, the two men fished together in the angling contest named after the writer.

Gregorio Fuentes, former captain of Hemingway’s yacht, Pilar, insisted that the two talked only about fishing techniques.

Fuentes, who was one of Hemingway’s closest friends, receives visitors wishing to hear Hemingway lore in the fishing village of Cojimar, where Hemingway kept the yacht. There, too, the author’s bust is on display, looking out at the sea from a tiny plaza beside the bay.

“He loved Cuba so much, and the people loved him,” Fuentes said in an interview. “That was the reason for ‘Hemingway in Cuba.’ ”

Fuentes, 87, said Hemingway’s relationship with Cuba stemmed from his love of the sea and the peace it gave him to write as he sailed in his yacht.

“I would come in the morning and he would say: ‘I am so content because I have written 1,500 words,’ ” Fuentes said.