Cuba Shows Its Affection for Hemingway

HAVANA —  Cuba remembered Ernest Hemingway on Wednesday with respect, affection and not a little gratitude for the way he lent his fame to bars, hotels and beaches that now draw planeloads of tourists to the island nation.

One hundred years after his birth in 1899, it is difficult not to be reminded of the more than 20 years that “Papa” Hemingway wrote, drank, fished and made a home in Cuba.

“Hemingway is alive for Cubans in the places he visited, which he had a gift of making famous,” Gustavo D’Mesa said.

D’Mesa is the manager of the famous Floridita bar in downtown Havana where Hemingway, alone or with celebrity friends, quaffed uncounted daiquiris, so many that the writer and the drink now share each other’s fame.

Tourists jammed the Floridita on Wednesday, drinking and chatting under the gaze of a bronze bust of the bearded author presiding over the bar.

Run by a Cuban state tourism company, it grossed $2 million in 1998.

Most visitors had no idea that the day marked a century since Hemingway’s birth.

“I didn’t know. But the drinks are great,” said French tourist Catherine Sachet, enjoying a rum cocktail.

Cuba prepared no major national celebration to mark the centennial of Hemingway’s birth. But a special commemorative postage stamp was to be presented later Wednesday at Finca Vigia, the spacious villa on Havana’s outskirts where he lived and which remains as a museum in his honor.

Places like the Floridita remain a magnet for followers and admirers of the Nobel Prize-winning author of “The Old Man and the Sea,” “A Farewell to Arms” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

Memories are more direct and personal in the fishing village of Cojimar just east of Havana, where Hemingway docked his boat “El Pilar.”

From here, in the company of local fishermen, he embarked on some of the marlin-fishing trips that helped inspire “The Old Man and the Sea.”

His fishing captain, Gregorio Fuentes, now 102, will share his memories for a fee of $50.

“Since he died, life hasn’t been the same for me and I haven’t been fishing like the old days,” said Fuentes, his blotched and craggy face shaded by a cap marked “Captain.”

It was in July 1961 that Hemingway, sick and depressed and nearly three weeks short of his 62nd birthday, shot himself with his favorite shotgun at his home in the United States.

He spent better days at Havana’s Ambos Mundos Hotel, now tastefully refurbished. The top-floor room, number 511, that he occupied between 1932 and 1939 is preserved as a simple literary shrine that can be visited for $2.

It was in this room, with its sweeping view of Havana Bay, that Hemingway wrote “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” an acclaimed novel based on his experiences in the Spanish Civil War.

“A nice room to write a book,” wrote German visitor Franken Merrier in the visitors’ book, echoing Hemingway’s own recollection of the Ambos Mundos as “a nice place to work.”

Hemingway left Cuba for good after the 1959 Cuban Revolution that ousted Fulgencio Batista and brought Fidel Castro to power.

He met Castro only once, in 1960 during an awards ceremony at an annual game-fishing tournament that still bears the Hemingway name.

He was apparently saddened by the political rift that opened almost immediately between Washington and Havana.

It could have been nothing other than Hemingway’s genuine passion for Cuba that led him to present his 1954 Nobel Literature Prize medal to Cuba’s Catholic patroness, the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre.

The medal remains at the Virgin’s shrine near Santiago de Cuba.