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HEMINGWAY STILL HAUNTS HAVANA Whether in his favourite bars, at his secluded country house or among the fishermen and boatbuilders of Cojimar, Hemingway's presence in Havana is still almost tangible In April 1932, Ernest Hemingway and his friend Joe Russell sailed from Key West to Havana for a two-day trip which ended up lasting for four months. Amongst Cuba's principal attractions were excellent marlin fishing and the company of beautiful women. Hemingway had his fair share of wives and girlfriends both before and during his Cuban sojourn, but the great love of his life was the Gulf Stream. He wrote 'this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man, and it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted That stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone.' Complementary to his love of the sea was his obsession with marlin-fishing. Hemingway invested the pursuit of these majestic fish with a romantic, swashbuckling sense of adventure andchased them from his boat Pilar day after day, frequently sailing back and forth off the mouth of Havana harbour where the coast juts out to meet la Corriente, the Stream, and the marlin often stop to feed. He even went as far as collaborating with the Smithsonian Institute in the classification of marlin species and in 1950 he instigated an International Marlin Tournament. After the Revolution the contest was named after him, which didn't particularly please him; he called it 'a lousy posthumous tribute to a lousy living writer'. First prize that year was won by Fidel Castro. Many people think that Fuentes was the inspiration for Santiago, the tragic hero of The Old Man and the Sea. This was not actually so. One day, whilst they were at sea, Hemingway and Fuentes encountered an old man in a small boat struggling to catch a huge marlin. When they offered to help him he waved them away, and later Hemingway heard that the old man had died whilst playing his vast fish. This was the trigger for Papa'screation of the book for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and it was a measure of its author's affection for Cuba that he placed the prize in the sanctuary of the Virgin of Caridad del Cobre, the island's patron saint. It's no wonder that Hemingway liked Cuba so much and stayed here longer than in any other of the various locations to which his peripatetic lifestyle led him. Cuba liked him, too. His unrelentingly macho attitude made him popular in Havana, where machismo and loud mutual reinforcement of maleness was, and to some extent still is, a way of life. He was an aficionado of cockfighting and the terrifyingly fast-paced and dangerous ball game called Jai Alai, at that time very popular on the island. Like many Cubans, he regularly fell in and out of love, having lots of wives and girlfriends, both his own and other people's. Almost as soon as he arrived in Havana he began an affair with Jane Mason, the tall, blue-eyed wife of the head of Pan Am in Cuba. Jane was creative, clever, beautiful, fascinating, a good shot and an accomplished flirt. Often she left her luxurious mansion west of Havana (now the residence of the Canadian Ambassador) to go fishing with Hemingway, and on one occasion her daredevilishness extended to climbing through a window at the Ambos Mundos Hotel to spend the night with him. HUMBERTO LINARES Rates; |
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