By Roberto F. Campos
From the Economy editorial team
The narrator liked spending time in the Caribbean nation so much that some consider him as much Cuban as American. This statement is supported by the corners where the Nobel Prize winner left a mark in the so-called Caribbean Cayman, where he lived for more than 20 years.
In Cuba, he met with his friends, talked, drank and wrote the Bronze God of American Literature and also selected marine currents for fishing or in the pursuit of German submarines.
For these reasons, Hemingway is a man of Cuban tourism, as he was considered during his lifetime and his lineage as an adventurer or as a simple human being capable of choosing the best places is still present today.
Born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Chicago, he arrived in Cuba for the first time on April 1, 1928, at 10:50 p.m. local time, during a cloudy night with a foggy horizon, as reported in notes from the time.
Specialists affirm that he arrived on the British-flagged steamer Orita, as stated in the entry of that vessel in the books of the Morro Castle, the most emblematic fortress in Havana, the capital.
He arrived accompanied by his second wife, Pauline Pfaiffer, on a trip from France to Key West, with a stopover in Havana. She was five months pregnant. A year later, the young reporter approached Cuban waters on the Anita boat to fish for needlefish. From those encounters on, he loved Cuba dearly.
However, other authors believe his interest in Cuba was due to the attraction of a stormy woman named Jane Mason. According to this version, it was 1929 when the American multimillionaire George Grant Mason -representative of Pan American Airways- moved to the Cuban capital with his wife, a turbulent lady who was bored.
Hemingway (29 years old) appeared in that woman’s radius of action, and fell under her charms. During his first visits, he stayed at the Hotel Ambos Mundos, in the old part of the capital, in room 511, which today is displayed as a relic, although it lacks truly historical objects.
From there, the writer enjoyed a fairly complete image of the city and finished some of his texts. From 1929 to 1936, Hemingway participated in an active life in Havana, which made him a member of bars such as El Floridita, a place where he took refuge and even coined a drink with his name.
This is the Papa Doble or Hemingway Special, a variation of the Daiquiri cocktail, made with Cuban white rum, lemon, mint and sugar, but the writer omitted the sugar and added alcohol.
He drank up to 12 large glasses of these preparations and took a couple of them with him on the road, back to his Finca Vigía, a mansion on the heights of San Francisco de Paula, rented in 1939 by his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, and bought in 1940.
In this country residence, with a wonderful view, he would discard the tower that his wife built for him to write in, because he preferred to do so standing up in his room. All his things are there just as they were when he lived in the house, now the Hemingway Museum.
Relatively close to the place is Cojímar, a fishing village in the eastern region, where his yacht Pilar docked, and where his owner Gregorio Fuentes (1897-2002) lived for a long time (up to 104 years). Cojimar has the restaurant La Terraza, specialized in seafood and fish, which the writer consumed with pleasure.
In 1930, Hemingway sailed through the central-northern Cuban keys, through the Guillermo, Coco and Romano keys and the Maternillos Lighthouse. He also visited Camagüey, in the eastern region, especially towns like Palm City, a curious city founded by Germans, according to some researchers, among them writer Enrique Cirules (1938-2016).
These were the years in which the Hemingway myth was born, before his permanent residence in Cuba in 1940. He then travelled to Cayo Confites and Cayo Lobo, after the sinking of two American ships by German submarines.
Then he began his adventure in search of these Nazi ships, but he never fought against one (it seems that he only saw one German submarine on the surface, but when he was about to attack it, it left).
During these journeys, he was captivated by the beauty of these places; today, Cayo Coco, in the province of Ciego de Ávila, is one of the most important tourist development centers in the country.
This island of some 370 square kilometres in size, with an airport and 22 kilometres of virgin beaches, appears to travellers as a heavenly setting.
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