Defending our culture

Havana, Hemingway’s Muse

The Caribbean archipelago has always been an enigma for many travelers and some, such as the U.S. writer Ernest Hemingway, transformed this magic into literature with cities such as Havana the backdrop of their inventive minds.
As we approach the 45th anniversary of the death of this giant of U.S. letters who was one of the most famous of the so-called “lost generation”, he is still missed in Cuba. Hemingway’s writing often included references to the island such as in To Have and to Have Not, Islands in the Stream, and, of course, the fisherman Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea. Indeed, Hemingway’s presence on the island was one of the country’s most enriching experiences of the 20th Century.
Hemingway started writing for the Star in Kansas City, which printed his first experiences of the First World War, and led him to the Toronto Star as its Paris correspondent. His first trip to Cuba was in 1928 on his return to France, albeit a brief visit of a few days in the company of his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer via a ferry to Cayo Hueso key. He arrived in Havana with the manuscript of Farewell to Arms in his hands.
Four years later, between April and June of 1932, he was trapped in the Gulf Stream – like his narrative alter ego – his love of fishing bringing him to the Cuban capital, where, upon his third trip to the island in 1933, he began writing some of his best work, including one of his most famous novels, For Whom the Bell Tolls. He wrote from room number 511 on the 5th floor of the Ambos Mundos Hotel in Havana where he said he was “in a good place to write”. The room is kept as a small Hemingway attraction, the building having been restored in 1977. The “odors” – as Alejo Charpentier put it – and sensations of Old Havana momentarily held him and he discovered the fruits of the tropics: pineapple, the queen of all fruit, the sweetness of mango, and the sensual pulp of the avocado, along with voluptuous coffee and tobacco – all experiences that are reflected in his article Marlin Off the Morro: A Cuban Letter published in the 1933 Fall edition of Esquire magazine.
Havana Bay, the coast bordering the city, and the poor fishermen from the east of the capital along the shores of Cojímar, all came into play like the fish he caught at sea. Hemingway thus knew the realities of life on the island beyond its hedonistic aspect. His own wife Pauline experienced a clash on the streets of Havana during the tyranny of President Gerardo Machado.
In August 1933, the novelist left for Spain where the Second Republic had been installed and where civil war would soon break out, feeding his journalistic and literary writing. Hemingway expressed sympathy towards the Spanish people and on his way to the Iberian Peninsula learned on the radio he kept on his boat that the government had fallen.
These experiences manifested themselves in his novel To Have and to Have Not published in 1937 in a discussion between Cuba and Cayo Hueso (in Florida), beginning with a description of the city of Havana: “You know how Havana is early in the morning with the vagabonds still sleeping against the walls, even before the ice trucks brought their cargo to the bars. Well, we crossed the little square in front of the wharf and went to the Pearl of San Francisco café and there was only one beggar awake on the square drinking water from the fountain.”
The protagonist of the novel, Henry Morgan, listens to the explication of a young revolutionary as to what his motivations were: “We are the only revolutionary party … we’ve had enough of the old politicians, of Yankee imperialism that strangles us via the tyranny of the army. We’re starting afresh so as to give every person an opportunity. We want to end peasant slavery … divide up the huge sugar estates among those who work them … Today we are governed by rifles, pistols, machine guns and bayonets … I love my country and I would do anything … to free it from this tyranny.”
At the end of his time in Spain with the defeat of the Republic, Ernest Hemingway returned to the United States and then moved to Cuba in April 1939, joined by his new wife Matha Gellhorn who rented a more remote, abandoned place than the Ambos Mundos Hotel - the Finca Vigía in the suburbs of San Francisco de Paula owned by the D´Om family.
It is said that Hemingway at first didn’t want to stay there because it was so far from the city, preferring to spend time in Havana or on his boat, Pilar in the company of his friend, Gregorio Fuentes. But Martha repaied the place and the couple moved in definitively as their new Havana residence. Later, in December 1940, the writer bought the property. It was in the Finca Vigía that he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea, among other works. This was his “hang out” until 1961 when he returned to the United States as a sick man and tragically killed himself on July 2nd of the same year. In homage to his work and, above all, his love of Cuba, his residence was converted into the Hemingway Museum.
In his novel Islands in the Stream, which was published posthumously, one can find Havana in his prose in the description of San Isidro Street in the neighborhood of Atarés as well as the wharves of the port and the populous neighborhood of Jesús María, giving particular emphasis to the hills of Casablanca: “On the other side of the Bay I saw the old yellow church and the scattered houses of Regla - green and yellow ones … and behind it all the gray hills close to Cojímar.”

posted by Lilith @ 8:45 AM