HEMINGWAY AND CUBA
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“I was rowing out there when the storm came,” says 87-year-old Ova Carnero, aiming his index finger behind me towards Cojimar bay. “The sea gets really rough here, and the waves were crashing all around. I was only 17, so I was very scared, but suddenly I heard ‘Wshhh! Wshhh!’ and a rope was thrown towards me. I was saved.”
The man at the other end of the rope, doing the saving, was Ernest Hemingway. During the 21 years he lived in Cuba – from 1939 to 1960 – the tiny seaside village of Cojimar provided Hemingway not only with his favourite fishing spot, but also the blueprint for his Pulitzer-winning 1952 novel The Old Man And The Sea, and he repaid its inhabitants by shielding them from the capricious fury of the Gulf Stream.
“In bad weather, Hemingway would always go out in his boat to help us,” Carnero tells me. “All the fishermen loved him. He was always happy if he caught a good fish, but if he caught nothing – don’t approach him! You’d say hello and he wouldn’t say a word, he just sat there drinking. I think he loved fishing more than he loved women.”
Cojimar – and Cuba in general – provided Hemingway with ample opportunity for both. With the country set for a period of sweeping change as the Fidel Castro era nears its end, I’ve come here to follow in Hemingway’s footsteps, drink in his favourite haunts and, ultimately, try to figure out why an all-American author who had stalked antelope in Kenya and sipped absinthe with James Joyce in Paris came to love this little island more than anywhere else on Earth.
A CITY IN FLUX
My journey begins a day earlier, in Havana; the maddest and most beautiful city I have ever set foot in. Fabulous Fifties convertibles roar back and forth between vast, crumbling, flamingo pink buildings with ‘VIVA LA REVOLUCION!’ daubed sporadically across them. It’s like stepping on to a film set, albeit a film set where everyone is constantly trying to sell you cigars.
I go for a stroll, and end up wandering along with an excellent chap called Lazarus; a practicing lawyer who – under the country’s wage-cap system – still makes so little money that he has to work weekends as a cabbie. He tells me that Second World War-style ration books are still in use here, and even insists we walk separately on main streets because Cuban police “don’t like it when tourists tell us about life outside Cuba. [Fidel] Castro wants to keep the people blind.”
Aside from the cars, architecture and cab-driving lawyers, one of the most striking things about Havana – from a Big Mac-eating, iPad-jabbing Western perspective – is the total lack of recognisable brands. When Castro nationalised American-owned property following the socialist revolution of the Fifties, the US retaliated with a suffocating trade embargo that has kept the country frozen in time (and relative poverty) ever since.
Consequently, you won’t see any Starbucks mermaids, golden arches or Apple, well, apples. Plus, as beautiful as those convertibles are, they’re only still running because the Cubans have no other choice. The only recognisable, mass-produced image on display is Che Guevara’s face, which pops up on more badges and fridge magnets here than it does in Camden Market.
However, change is afoot. Raul Castro, who took over the presidency from his ailing brother Fidel in 2008, finally sanctioned the ownership of private property in 2011. With no estate agents, though, the process is at a fairly primitive (some would argue, better) stage. Lazarus points out people sitting in town squares with photos of their houses, simply asking passers-by if they fancy buying them. You can purchase property the same way you would a Che Guevara fridge magnet. Lazarus predicts outbreaks of Starbucks mermaids and golden arches within a year of Fidel’s death.
Of course, the one thing that’s remained unchanged since Hemingway’s time here is the city’s penchant for dangerously potent rum. “My mojito in La Bodeguita, my daiquiri in El Floridita,” was the man’s motto, and with both venues nearby, I obligingly follow suit.
MOJITOS ALL ROUND
The trip to La Bodeguita is unremarkable aside from the fact I see a man walking a dog with a rat clinging to its back. The bar itself is tiny; about the size of an office kitchen. Under the watchful eye of Hemingway, who stares down from a dozen photos on the wall, I sink two mojitos in quick succession. They’re eye-wateringly strong. A tipsy-looking man at the end of the bar overhears me telling the barman about my Hemingway booze trail, and shuffles over. He promises me some little-known Hemingway trivia if I shout him another mojito. I order one more for each of us, and he points up at a picture of Hemingway surrounded by Cojimar fishermen taken in the late Fifties.
“That’s me,” he says, pointing to one of the fishermen. “How old are you?” I ask. He finishes his mojito and gets up to leave. “Thirty-five.” I start to wonder if the real reason the police want to keep tourists away from locals is to stop them getting mercilessly fleeced for mojitos.
From La Bodeguita, it’s a short stumble down the road to El Floridita. This is an altogether classier, roomier joint, absolutely loaded with Hemingway history. It was here he (somewhat inexplicably) introduced his wife Mary to Leopoldina Rodriguez, the Cuban prostitute he visited regularly. There’s even a life-size Hemingway statue propping up the bar in same spot he once drunkenly punched a cartoonist who was brazen enough to sketch him without consent.
I order the ‘Papa Doble’, a cocktail Hemingway famously invented here (if by ‘invented’ you mean ‘once asked a barman for a daiquiri with twice the rum’). Hemingway claimed to have sunk 16 here in one evening. I manage two and narrowly avoid careering into the house rhumba band on my way out.
According to Carnero, this is not the sort of display that would have impressed ‘Papa’, as the Cubans called him. “He drank a lot, but I never once saw him drunk,” he tells me.
“I remember, after he won the Nobel Prize [in 1954], a local brewery threw him a party and he took us fishermen along. He was angry that all these wealthy men in suits were at the table with him – he made them all get up, saying, ‘This table is for the humble fishermen of Cojimar!’ We all got very drunk.”
The next morning, with a hangover that could descale a kettle, I head to Finca Vigia, Hemingway’s home from 1940 to 1960, which is located just outside Havana, and has remained so well-preserved since his death in 1961 that it now serves as a museum. It’s a sprawling estate replete with 18 different species of mango, and lush green fields on which Hemingway used to train birds for cock fights.
I wonder aloud if these events still happen, and our photographer promptly shows me some faintly nightmarish pictures of men cheering on partially decapitated poultry. “I took these last week,” he says. “People make millions at cock fights. Millions.”
Decapitation is a recurring theme at Finca. The walls are decorated with the blank-eyed heads of creatures shot by Hemingway during his African safaris. My guide tells a great story about the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who admired Hemingway so much that he sent a messenger with a blank cheque here in 1943, under instruction to return with one of Hemingway’s antelope heads at any cost. Hemingway scrawled two zeros on the cheque and told the messenger that if Mussolini wanted one so badly he should shoot it himself.
Finca also houses Hemingway’s beloved boat Pilar, on which he took the lives of fish and, as I’ve learned, saved the lives of fishermen. Pilar also came in handy during the Second World War, when Hemingway loaded it with machine guns, and volunteered to search Caribbean waters for German U-Boats.
Considering how a small wooden fishing vessel piloted by one tipsy author might have fared against a giant metal tube full of Nazis, it’s probably for the best that these patrols were fruitless.
THIRST FOR MEANING
Incidents such as the U-Boat hunts are neatly indicative of why Hemingway loved Cuba so deeply. Like his pal Jean-Paul Sartre, who stayed at Finca several times, Hemingway was basically an existentialist; a writer concerned with finding meaning in an apparently meaningless world.
While Sartre’s response to this dearth of purpose was to fling himself head-first into Marxism, Hemingway discovered what men as disparate as Friedrich Nietzsche and Johnny Knoxville have been realising for centuries: that life becomes more meaningful the closer you are to losing it.
“Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters,” Hemingway wrote in 1926, and while Cuba may not have had bulls, its opportunities for submarine-chasing, shark-grappling and double-strength daiquiri-downing could provide him with a chance to live life “all the way up” whenever he required it.
All of which leads me to Cojimar, a few miles outside Havana, where most of these chances were taken. There’s still an annual fishing tournament held here in Hemingway’s name, the first of which, in 1960, Fidel Castro entered and won. The many theories behind Hemingway’s flight from Cuba and suicide a year later range from health issues and money troubles to marital stress, but Carnero believes it was this friendship with Castro (and an outspoken support for his revolutionary politics) that drove ‘Papa’ off the island and, ultimately, to self-destruction.
“In my opinion, Hemingway killed himself for political reasons,” he tells me. “When [the US government] saw him on TV with Fidel, they ordered him to leave Cuba, and he became very depressed, as he loved it here. Maybe he felt so bad that he shot himself. They tried to break his connection with Cuba, but his spirit lives on here.”
To prove this, Carnero shows me the bay-side Hemingway bust fashioned by the fishermen from boat propellers in his memory. In The Old Man And The Sea, Hemingway wrote, “Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed, but not defeated.” As I look at the sculpture, which still has pride of place in this little town more than 50 years after his death, I reflect that he was probably right.
Return flights to Havana start from £670.62 with Virgin Atlantic; virgin@atlantic.com .Visit americancar@cuba.com and esenciae@periences.com for Hemingway tours
(Images: Rex/Abel Ernesto/Corbis/Alamy/Getty)