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Ernest Hemingway's Cuba
Ernest Hemingway,
the most influential writer of the last century and the greatest
American writer of all time, Author of "For Whom the Bell Tolls
"
and "The Old Man and the Sea
."
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Cuban Recipes
el Hemingway
2 oz dark
rum
2 oz. grapefruit juice
Juice from 1/2 lime
Crushed ice
Pour ingredients
over crushed ice and blend well.
Mojito
1/2
cup rum
1/2 cup club soda
1 cup crushed ice
2 tsp sugar
1tsp lemon juice
mix & serve in small glasses and start reading "The
Old Man and the Sea ."
The
Hemingway Cookbook
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Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston,
Massachusetts, First Edition 1952, Artwork by Adriana Ivancich
| "You
can come down here and fight for free, without any publicity,
with an old character like me who is fifty years old and
weighs 209 and thinks you are a shit, Senator, and would
knock you on your ass the best day you ever lived"
Ernest
Hemingway, to Senator Joseph McCarthy
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Hemigway's
house in Cuba, bought in 1940. He lived there until shortly
before his death in 1961
"I'm
not going to climb into the ring with Tolstoy"
Ernest Hemingway (1898 - 1961)
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Homing To The Stream :Ernest Hemingway In Cuba
By Kelley Dupuis
Born and reared
in the suburbs of Chicago, Ernest Hemingway was a product of the
American heartland who, once he got out of it, never wanted to have
much to do with the American heartland again. Aside from a few of
his earliest short stories, which in any case are set in upper Michigan
rather than suburban Illinois, Hemingway never published a word
about where he came from, nor did he ever go back for long.
There are as many possible explanations for this as there are biographies
of Hemingway. Some have suggested that Hemingway, like others of
his generation who lived as expatriates in Europe after World War
I, found the provincialism and narrow-mindedness of middle America
stultifying. Unlike most of his fellow expats, however, Hemingway
never went home. After leaving his birthplace of Oak Park, Illinois
in the fall of 1921 with his new bride, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson,
Hemingway spent the rest of his life either outside the United States
or on the periphery of its life, in places like the Florida Keys,
the upper plains states, (he enjoyed Montana and Wyoming for their
hunting) the Pacific northwest, specifically Idaho, where he ended
his life in 1961...and Cuba. Given the enormously complex relationship
that Hemingway had with his family, particularly with his demanding
and overbearing mother, whom he repeatedly and for years denounced
as a "bitch" to anyone who would listen, it's possible
that Hemingway simply wanted to give the midwest a "wide berth"
because that was where his mother was until her own death in 1951.
(One of Nietzsche's biographers has suggested that Nietzsche's own
passion for climbing high mountains may have stemmed from a desire
to get as far away as possible-in this case the direction being
up-away from a father as overbearing as Hemingway's mother was reported
to be.)
Shortly before Ernest and Hadley were married in September, 1921,
Hadley had said to Ernest, "The world's a jail and we're gonna
break it together." They were young-he was 22 on their wedding
day; she was not quite 30-and deeply in love; in later years, after
later marriages, Hemingway would suggest that Hadley was the only
woman whom he had ever truly loved. But, although he was at heart
a romantic, and conventional enough a midwesterner in his heart
to feel that any time he fell in love with a woman, he ought to
marry her, Hemingway couldn't be monogamous. His friend and fellow
author Scott Fitzgerald (who managed to remain married to the same
woman until he died even though his wife, Zelda Sayre, was mentally
unstable, he was an alcoholic and their marriage was a stormy melodrama)
predicted quite early on that Hemingway was going to require "a
new wife for each book." The remark turned out to be quite
prescient; it was in fact the course of Hemingway's four marriages
that took him to Cuba and lodged him there-he ultimately made Cuba
the most permanent home he would ever make of any place.
Hemingway's trek south began in 1927, when he and Hadley divorced
over his affair with wealthy Arkansas socialite and magazine journalist
Pauline Pfeiffer, who promptly became the second Mrs. Hemingway.
One thing Hemingway would never do with his wives, until his fourth
and last one anyway, was to subject the new wife to living in the
environs of the old. The venue of Ernest and Hadley's marriage had
been Paris, where he struggled in the early-to-mid 1920s to get
his writing career started. With the end of his first marriage,
Hemingway's affection for Paris declined temporarily, and another
friend and fellow novelist, John Dos Passos, suggested to him that
Key West, Florida might be a good place for him to relocate. In
1928, when Hemingway and Pauline went to live there in a house that
her wealthy Uncle Gus had given them as a wedding present, Key West
was a sleepy, run-down fishing village at the end of the Keys southwest
of Miami. Prohibition was still in effect, and among Key West's
attractions for the notoriously-bibulous Hemingway may well have
been that its very position on the periphery of America made prohibition
little more than a word there; smuggled liquor from Cuba was easy
to get, and the island had plenty of its own sources of bathtub
booze as well. Key West was in fact popular with the artistic and
literary crowd; poet Wallace Stevens was among those who spent time
there. In any case Pauline and Ernest set up housekeeping in Key
West and Ernest, who already had one son from his marriage with
Hadley, soon had two more.
Every tourist who's ever gone to Key West to take pictures of Hemingway's
house there knows that Sloppy Joe's Bar was his favorite Key West
hangout. He quickly made friends with its owner, Joe Russell, described
by Hemingway biographer Michael Reynolds as "a salty, red-faced
bootlegger who was the real thing." Russell had a boat for
fishing, the Anita, and he and Hemingway often went out on fishing
expeditions in it, some of which lasted for days. One such expedition
took place in the spring of 1932. Pauline had given birth to Hemingway's
third and final son the previous November. Hemingway wasn't pleased
about becoming a father again, and the birth put further strain
on what was already a strained relationship-Pauline's family's money
had been largely responsible for freeing Ernest from the necessity
to write journalism, enabling him to devote himself exclusively
to fiction, and he was not a man to be comfortable with owing anyone
anything. Partly to get away from the strained relationship and
partly to get away from the sound of a crying baby, Hemingway went
off with Russell in April of that year on another fishing trip.
They sailed to Havana for what was supposed to be a two-day stay.
They ended up staying four months.
Hemingway had seen Havana once before, when he and Pauline had a
stop-off there on their way to Key West from France in 1928. But
Havana had new attractions for him now, not the least of which was
22 year-old Jane Mason, the wife of the head of Pan American Airways
in Cuba. They began an affair as Hemingway took up extended residence
at what would be his base in Havana for the next several years,
the Hotel Ambos Mundos. In the spring of the following year, as
his second marriage continued to unravel, Hemingway was in Havana
for another extended stay, and once again Jane Mason was there.
Pauline used the excuse of the annual visit of Hemingway's son Jack,
known as Bumby, to come over from Key West as she brought the boy
to Havana to spend time with his father. But Hemingway made her
feel unwelcome and she soon went back to Key West alone.
Hemingway and Mason talked of getting married, but it didn't happen.
Instead, in 1936 back in Key West, he met Martha Gellhorn, a vivacious
and attractive blonde and fellow author/journalist with whom he
would soon share a hotel room in Madrid while they were both covering
the Spanish Civil War as correspondents, and who would become the
third Mrs. Hemingway in 1940 after Pauline, a devout Catholic who
did not take divorce lightly, finally agreed to divorce Ernest so
he could marry Martha. The divorce became final in November of that
year and Hemingway and Gellhorn were married the same month.
The house in Key West had been a gift from Pauline's family; obviously
Ernest and Martha weren't going to live there, although he remained
generally on good terms with Pauline and they did sometimes visit.
The logical place for the newlyweds to settle after their Hawaiian
honeymoon was the city that had virtually been Ernest's home away
from home since 1932: Havana.
Aside from the fact that he had already established in Havana what's
known in the world of bullfighting as a querencia-the part of the
ring where the bull feels comfortable and at home-there were other
reasons for Hemingway to like Havana. During the years of the Grau
and Batista regimes that preceded the rule of Fidel Castro, Havana
was something of a playground for the wealthy of America's east
coast (some have called it "America's brothel.") Havana
was a good place to have a good time, and Hemingway liked a good
time. His years in Key West had already given him a taste for tropical
ambience. Naturally sloppy in his personal habits, (Martha Gellhorn
casually nicknamed him "Pig") he liked a place where he
could go around in shorts and loose-fitting shirts all the time.
His outings aboard the Anita with Joe Russell-who died of a stroke
in 1941-had given Hemingway a passion for deep-sea fishing, and
the Gulf Stream, adjacent to Cuba, offered the best marlin fishing
in the world. Always fond of blood sports, Hemingway discovered
and became an enthusiastic follower of cockfighting in Havana, and
there was also the less-bloody, but for its human participants more
dangerous, sport of Jai Alai, another amusement of which Hemingway
became a devoted aficionado.
Martha had in fact joined Hemingway in Havana the year before they
were married, but she was not about to share a small, dirty room
at the Hotel Ambos Mundos with him. Looking in a newspaper, she
found a 15-acre estate about 15 miles from downtown Havana called
the "Finca Vigia" ("Lookout Farm.") The place
was badly dilapidated and Hemingway thought it not even worth trying
to renovate, but Martha saw it as a challenge and hired workers
at her own expense to knock the Finca into liveable shape. At first
they rented the farm for $100 a month; in December 1940 after they
were married, Hemingway bought the Finca Vigia for $18,500. It was
the first home he had ever owned that hadn't been given to him by
someone else, and he "settled" there to the extent that
a man as restless as Ernest Hemingway could settle anywhere. The
Finca provided a spacious, quiet place for him to work. It had a
swimming pool and tennis court, and Hemingway's myriad cats and
dogs wandered freely about the place. Soon he was a regular fixture
at Havana's Floridita bar, where he could be seen downing ice-cold
dacquiris in his own reserved seat at the end of the bar.
But the Hemingway-Gellhorn marriage was as doomed as his two previous
ones. Martha had in fact expressed misgivings to a friend before
her marriage to Ernest as to how well things would work out. Both
of Hemingway's first two wives had been older than he was, she pointed
out, whereas she was nine years his junior. Martha was less than
enthusiastic about assuming the role of housekeeper, and Hemingway's
mercurial temper, often exacerbated by drinking, increased tensions.
Martha later decried her husband's "ceaseless, crazy bullying"
of her. There is also some evidence, not surprising perhaps in view
of the fact that Martha was the first of Ernest's wives to be younger
than he was, that they were sexually incompatible.
Then World War II came along and invaded what was already less than
Eden. Hemingway had already been directly or indirectly involved
in four wars: World War I; the 1922 war between Greece and Turkey;
the Spanish Civil War and, most recently, the Japanese war in China,
which he and Martha had gone off to cover as correspondents shortly
after their marriage. He was inclined to sit this one out, although
in 1943 German U-boats were slipping into the Gulf of Mexico to
torpedo American and Venezuelan shipping, and Hemingway saw an opportunity
to participate in war without straying too far from home. By now
he had his own fishing boat, the Pilar, and with the connivance
of the American ambassador in Havana, Spruille Braden, Hemingway
embarked on a slightly-crackpot "U-boat hunting" scheme-he
had the Pilar outfitted with machine guns and ammunition, rounded
up a crew and made a number of patrols in the Gulf Stream looking
for German subs. (They never found one.) Other than that, Hemingway
inclined toward staying home in Cuba as the war in Europe raged.
Martha didn't. She was an ambitious writer who loved her work and
was not going to be content with sitting around the Finca Vigia
being Mrs. Hemingway when the whole world was at war. She went off
to cover the war as a correspondent for Collier's magazine, and
Hemingway was eventually cajoled into doing likewise. In 1944 he
went to London, his first stop toward becoming Colliers' front-line
correspondent after the Normandy Invasion, at which he was present.
His marriage to Martha was already in trouble, and the war finished
it off-in London he met yet another woman journalist, Mary Welsh,
who would become the fourth and last Mrs. Hemingway. In 1946 he
brought her to the Finca Vigia, where she became the somewhat-uneasy
but increasingly confident mistress of the place.
Mary did, in fact, unlike her predecessor Martha, go to great lengths
to make the Finca a "home," although for Hemingway "home"
seldom meant much more than a base of operations. Mary put in a
great deal of work maintaining flower and vegetable gardens on the
property and went to great pains with the upkeep of the decaying
house while also having to work around her husband's less-than-fastidious
personal habits and coexisting with a menagerie of cats, dogs and
other animals on the property. Years earlier, Pauline Pfeiffer had
tried to keep Hemingway close by giving him a decent home in Key
West; Mary Welsh in the 1940s and '50s made similar efforts in Cuba
for a man now in his fifties and aging quickly, with a list of physical-and
mental-ailments that would mount and mount over the years, making
their life together on the island as stormy as the previous Hemingway
marriages.
Hemingway would in fact make Cuba his base of operations for the
remaining years of his life, although being naturally footloose
and craving audiences as well as excitement, he and Mary and would
often leave their somewhat-remote tropical outpost for sojourns
in the United States, Europe and Africa. When Castro came to power
in 1959 and the Americans who had been in Havana evacuated the place
quickly, Hemingway chose to stay on; he had been fully aware of
the corruption and abuses of the previous regimes and, naive about
Communism, felt he had no reason not to accept Castro as a welcome
reformer. He went so far as to wish Castro "all luck"
with running the country, an attitude which didn't do much to endear
Hemingway to either the U.S. government or the FBI. FBI director
J. Edgar Hoover had in fact been "keeping an eye" on Hemingway
ever since the sub-hunting adventure of 1942-43, and Hemingway's
mounting paranoia in his later years about FBI surveillance was
not entirely without basis in fact. (Castro returned Hemingway's
compliment, by the way-since Hemingway's death he has been a much-honored
cultural hero in Cuba, the government maintaining his house as a
museum and even having his boat the Pilar transported overland to
be the museum's chief attraction.)
People did sometimes ask Hemingway why he chose to live in Cuba.
Late in 1948 he wrote an article for Holiday magazine in which he
talked about his life there, offering his readers verbal snapshots
of cool mornings at the Finca, cockfights and pigeon shoots, but
most importantly the incomparable marlin fishing in the Gulf Stream,
which he lovingly called "the Great Blue River." In fact
it was not only in journalism but in his often less-than-successful
later fictions that Hemingway's attractions toward this part of
the world are apparent. In his 1937 "proletarian" novel
To Have And Have Not Hemingway displayed his affection for the seamy
side of Havana life, and on one level his late novella The Old Man
And The Sea could be read as a lyrical tribute to the Gulf Stream.
His posthumous novel Islands In The Stream, cobbled together in
1970 from a huge pile of manuscript that he churned out between
1946 and 1950, while it may be unbearably talky in places, is in
other places a moving tribute to the Caribbean world-and to Cuba.
Hear Hemingway in that novel use his unmatched gift for evoking
topography to share with his readers what was, unquestionably, a
longstanding love-of-place:
He got into the car and told the chauffeur to go up O'Reilly to
the Floridita. Before the car circled the plaza in front of the
embassy building and the Ayuntamiento and then turned into O'Reilly
he saw the size of the waves in the mouth of the harbor and the
heavy rise and fall of the channel buoy. In the mouth of the harbor
the sea was very wild and confused and clear green water was breaking
over the rock at the base of the Morro, the tops of the seas blowing
white in the sun.
It looks wonderful, he said to himself. It not only looks wonderful,
it is wonderful. ©
by Kelley
Dupuis
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Ernest
Hemingway
Born on
21st July 1899 in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, Illinois.
At the age of 17 Hemingway published his first literary work.
From 1940, until shortly before his death, he lived in Cuba.
He died
aged 61, of self inflicted gun shot wounds.
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Books related to Cuba
[detail]
31540 Arboleta Jesus, Havana Miami. The US-CUBA Migration
Conflict
[detail]
21008 Harnecker Marta, How Peoples Power Works. Cuba:
Dictatorship or Democracy ?
[detail]
31308 Huberman and Sweezy, Cuba-Anatomy of a Revolution
[detail]
31546 Rousseau Isel, Editor, Children in Cuba. Twenty
Years of Revolution
[detail]
21007 Stone Elizabeth, Editor, Women and the Cuban Revolution.
Speeches and Documents By Fidel Castro, Vilma Espin and Others
[detail]
21006 Elliot Jeffrey M. and Dymally Mervyn M., Interviewers,
Fidel Castro. Nothing Can Stop the Course of History
[detail]
36925 Lorenz Marita and Schwarz Ted Marita. From Castro
to Kennedy: Love and Espionage in the CIA
All Prices in AUD. Available by Dee
Why Books
Hemingway's books in chronological order:
Three
Stories & Ten Poems, Hemingway's first book, publ.
in Paris, 1923
In
Our Time, Hemingway's second book, publ. in New York,
1925
The
Torrents of Spring : A Romantic Novel in Honor of the
Passing of a Great Race, 1925-26
The
Sun Also Rises, 1926. Hemingway''s 4th book
Men
Without Women, 1927
A
Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway, 1929
Death
in the Afternoon, his 7th book, 1932
Winner
Take Nothing, 1933
Green
Hills of Africa, by Ernest Hemingway, 1935
To
Have and Have Not, Hemingway's 10th book, 1937
The
Short Stories/the First Forty-Nine Stories, with a
brief introduction by the author, 1938
The
Fifth Column : and four stories of the spanish civil
war, 1938
For
Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940, Hemingway's 13th book
Men
at War: the best war stories of all time, by Ernest
Hemingway (Editor), 1942
Across
the River and into the Trees, 1950
The
Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway, 1952, Nobel
Prize for literature
More Hemingway: A
Moveable Feast / By-Line,
Ernest Hemingway : Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four
Decades / Islands
in the Stream / Complete
Poems : Ernest Hemingway / Ernest
Hemingway, Selected Letters, 1917-1961 / The
Dangerous Summer / The
Garden of Eden / The
Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway : The Finca Vigia
Edition / True
at First Light
"If you're looking for messages,
try Western Union" Ernest
Hemingway
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descrybe
is brought to you by Dee
Why Books
a
careful selection of second hand and antiquarian books.
Editors: Lilly Hagen, Joe Schmidt-Muller. Associate Editors:
Tom Clift, Nadine Hattom, Photographer: Kate Naylor
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