First Person - June 9, 1999
Hemingway haunts
Havana is disintegrating, but Papa's places are enshrined
By John W. Milton '57
During spring vacation in 1955, three of my fellow sophomores and aspiring novelists -- Jack Goodman, Alan Graber, and Bill Tangney -- and I went to Cuba to visit Ernest Hemingway, who had just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. We were in search of advice that might help us achieve success as writers. A letter from Professor Carlos Baker *40, Hemingway's biographer, helped us past the novelist's doorkeeper and fourth wife, Mary.
We spent most of the day at his home, Finca Vigia, and departed at twilight, buzzed and inspired. At the time of our visit, Hemingway was working on a long African memoir. It will be released, as True at First Light, on July 21, the centennial of the writer's birth, and 38 years after he ended his life.
Papa Hemingway was generous with his time and his rum concoctions. He regaled us for hours with stories of his life in Paris, his anxiety over "being too old to publish a first novel" (he was 26 when Scribner's accepted The Sun Also Rises), bullfights and matadors, the Spanish Civil War, and safaris in Africa. His advice to aspiring writers? "Write every day, no matter what you did the night before. Or who woke up in your bed in the morning."
Near the end of our visit, his physician, José Luis Herrera, arrived for a house call. They discussed the author's medication. There was also a brief conversation about the rebeldes who were then fighting in the Sierra Maestra to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Fidel Castro, said the author, was not a bad sort. "But a long shot," he added. "He may die up there in the mountains."
BACK TO HAVANA
Recently, I returned to Havana. I slid through a loophole that allows intrepid American citizens to evade the trade embargo of Cuba. My purpose was to see how Havana had survived and what had become of Finca Vigia and a number of celebrated Hemingway haunts. I experienced both shock and amazement.
Havana was disintegrating. The illustrious Malecon Drive, once a gleaming array of colonial architecture, now resembled a procession of aging and neglected aristocrats. In the downtown retail area, mile after mile of storefronts were boarded up. There were a few lines of Habañeros, holding small shopping bags, waiting to enter darkened doorways. The word was out that there was a supply of rice or beans or sugar inside. The Russians, and their money and oil, were long gone. The infrastructure and the machinery they'd left behind was ubiquitous, rusting, and irreparable.
In contrast, the Hotel Nacional was spruced up and swarming with tourists. In Castro's rhetoric, Yanquis were still the loathed imperialistas, but U.S. dollars were welcome. And more remarkable, Hemingway's favorite places were just as I had known them in 1955.
There was a gatehouse at the entrance to his home, and a young woman in army fatigues was posted there. Finca Vigia was now a national museum, and she smiled as I paid the admission in U.S. dollars. Inside, it was a sparkling, uncluttered version of what it had been when Papa and Mary were living in it with assorted dogs and cats and an endless parade of visitors. They were all gone now, but the African trophy heads, of impala and gazelle, were still in place above the dining-room table. The lion-skin rug was still on the tile floor of the study.
Strolling around the gardens, lush with bougainvillea, I was stunned to see the Pilar, Hemingway's boat. It had been dragged up from the fishing village of Cojimar and placed in a gigantic frame just downhill from the pool. The sunlight, filtered by palm-fronds, danced on its somber black hull and deserted fishing deck.
I climbed up the stairs to the tower room where Hemingway did most of his work during the last two decades of his life ... For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea, and the several works he left unfinished. The desk, where he would stand and write each morning, was in its place, dustless and bereft of clutter. Too neat, in a ghostly way.
That evening, I went to Hemingway's favorite bar, El Floridita. As a tribute to his frequent visits, a barstool in the corner he favored had been roped off and left in place, forever vacant. Framed on the wall above it was a photo of Papa, in sunglasses, his fishing visor-cap at a jaunty angle, and a smiling, blackbearded Fidel Castro, his fatigue cap on just so.
El Floridita was unchanged. Behind the bar was the same inscription, in English: "The Cradle of the Daiquiri." The barmen were still dressed in cardinal-red jackets, with matching bow-ties. The bar was full of American students, some of nearly a thousand who'd defied their country's embargo to attend Castro's 14th World Festival of Youth and Students. Daiquiri-mixers were whirring as the students reached into their jeans for the Yanqui dollars.
I walked out onto the dimly lit street, past posters of Che Guevara, who'd been resurrected for the visiting youth. In this once-effervescent city, I heard the shuffling of sneakers and sandals and the squeaking of bicycles. Where was the animated conversation, once so characteristic of Habañeros? After a short distance, I ducked into La Zaragozana, a renowned old restaurant that was just as well preserved as El Floridita, with an impressive menu, prices in U.S. dollars, an extensive wine list, crystal, china, and linen. As I dined on fresh fish, rice, and a green salad washed down by a white wine from the Ribera Del Duero region of Spain, I was transported back to 1955 by a trio of ancient men playing "La Ultima Noche" ("The Last Night"), a sad dirge by Cuban songwriter Bobby Collazo.
MARINA HEMINGWAY
On my final day, I went out to see the Marina Hemingway, just west of Havana. No place better illustrates the ambivalence of the Cuban government toward capitalism, and the U.S. government toward our obdurate Cold War adversary. Marina Hemingway consists of a luxury hotel for boaters longing to sleep in a real bed; a touristy restaurant aptly named Restaurante Papa, with a menu in English and prices only in U.S. dollars; and private condos evocative of Naples, Florida, and La Jolla, California. Every year, fishing teams from several countries, including the United States, come there for the annual marlin tournament. More Yanqui dollars.
One day I'd like to go back to Havana. Despite the undercurrent of anger and frustration, the Cuban people have benefited from Castro's programs for literacy and health care. The Malecon might be crumbling, but there's much more to see. I can wait, though, for someday soon our government will work out an armistice with our neighbor. When that happens, the embargo will become a mere postscript to the demise of the Berlin wall and planes full of U.S. bankers jetting to Hanoi.
When I go back, it won't be to the Hemingway haunts. I can give those up now, knowing that capitalism, even Fidel's variety, has preserved them.
John W. Milton '57 is a freelance writer living in Afton, Minnesota.
GO TO the Table of Contents of the current issue
GO TO PAW's
home page