The estate, today the Hemingway Museum, has that mysterious attraction of places where great artists have been able to create, that I discovered in Klin, where Tchaikovsky composed; in Yasnaia Polyana, Tolstoy’s home; and more recently in Granada, at San Vicente farm, so special to García Lorca.

I have returned many times to the home of the author who penned works of universal appeal – The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), The Old Man and the Sea (1952) – located in San Francisco de Paula, 15 kilometers from the center of Havana, not only because of its beauty, but for the fascination that emanates from a place that still seems to be waiting for the writer to reappear.

THE HILL

In a 1952 letter to his friend Karl Wilson, Hemingway wrote, “I’ve always had good luck writing in Cuba. I moved here from Key West in 1938 and rented this estate. I bought it when I sold For Whom the Bell Tolls(1940). It’s a good place to work because it’s outside the city and sitting on a hill.”

The home has become a museum devoted to a key figure in modern literature, with a personal style of brief, clear dialogue: Ernest Hemingway (Oak Park, Illinois; July 21, 1899 – Ketchum, Idaho; July 2, 1961). Photo: Mireya Castañeda
The Vigía is in fact located on a rise that was once the site of a Spanish colonial army observation station. Thus its name, which means sentry. In 1887, it became the property of Miguel Pascual Baguer, a Catalonian architect, who built the spacious, breezy house, in which he lived until 1903. Among the subsequent owners was the Frenchman Joseph D’Orn Duchamp, who rented it as a vacation home.

In 1939, Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s third spouse, discovered the Vigía in a Havana newspaper’s classified ads and convinced Hemingway to leave the Ambos Mundos Hotel, and move to the city’s outskirts. In 1940, they bought it for $12,500, but it would be Mary Welsh, who married the author in 1946 to become his fourth and last wife, who made the Vigía the splendid place we know today.

THE MUSEUM-HOME

Visitors are not permitted to enter the house, but it is surrounded by a veranda, allowing a full view into Hemingway’s personal, private world through the many windows and doors. You can see the different rooms, first the main living room where the bull-fight paintings by Spanish artist Roberto Domingo hang; Hemingway’s favorite chair beside a small bar; his collection of more than 900 records; and the dining room in the style of a Spanish tavern, with rustic furniture designed by Mary Welsh and constructed by carpenters in San Francisco de Paula.

On the library’s shelves are more than 9,000 books, magazines, and other publications – 2,000 of which are underlined, with notes in the margins – placed according to Hemingway’s taste, regardless of author, subject, or genre.
Taking center stage in the author’s office is his Royal Arrow typewriter. This is where, standing up as he liked, he wrote Islands in the Stream, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old man and the Sea, which won him the Nobel Prize in 1954 and was dedicated to the Cuban people. He left the medal in the Santiago Sanctuary of Cuba’s patron saint, the Virgen de la Caridad de El Cobre.
The indiscreet can peek into the bathroom and see a bookshelf, a magazine rack, and the scale on which he weighed himself every day.
The observation tower, on the left side of the back of the house, was added in 1947. It has three floors, and on the third is a typewriter, a chaise lounge, a rug, and a telescope, to enjoy the panoramic view of the city.

On the estate’s four hectares of grounds is a pool, where Hemingway would swim at the end of his workday –and where Hollywood star Ava Gardner once took a dip –a cock-fighting ring, a tennis court, and even a baseball field.

A must-see is the replica of his yacht, the Pilar, which he took deep-sea fishing into the Gulf Stream, and into legend, since they say he pursued a German submarine aboard this boat during WWII. (Hemingway now has an international fishing tournament to his name.)

THE END

Hemingway left the house in 1960, with the clear intention of returning. He put his desk in order, placing the typewriter on a copy of Who’s Who in America; and left a couple of sharpened pencils at the ready, plus a dozen sheets of “superior quality” carbon paper, still in the box.

He traveled to Spain to see the running of the bulls, but feeling sick, went to the United States where he was hospitalized. He killed himself with a gunshot in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961.

A few weeks after the author’s death, his widow Mary Welsh came to Havana to collect a few items of value and donate the house to the Cuban people with the majority of its contents, in accordance with Hemingway’s final wishes. Since 1962, it has functioned as the Museo Finca Vigía.

Ernest Hemingway made his first trip to Cuba in 1932, and left his mark at the Ambos Mundo Hotel, where his room remains intact, and at the Floridita and Bodeguita del Medio bars. He is always quoted as saying, “My daiquiri at the Floridita, and my mojito at the Bodeguita.”

Clearly the most important stop for those following the footsteps of the great novelist in Havana is the Vigía estate, where he lived from 1939 until 1960, to feel the mystery of creation that emanates from his home. A special adventure that brings us a little closer to the life of Ernest Hemingway and sends us back to read his work again.

(Granma)

At noon on Friday, Commodore of the club, Jose Miguel Diaz Escrich, will welcome them both, in time for the race for Bone Island (21 to 26 May) from Sarasota, Florida, just when just concluded May 21 Challenge starting Havana Key West.

Excellent season for the Cuban tourism and recreational boating, as they see the sector authorities, interpreted as bit in the relations between the US and Cuba.

John Patrick (writer) and Patrick Edward (photographer), are children of Gregory Hemingway (1931-2001) and grandchildren of Pauline Pfeiffer (1895-1951) second of four wives novelist.

Both were in September 2014 in the archipelago and were very pleased with their contacts with the locals and the marine world in this country, as they recognized this reporter.

The reason for that trip was to celebrate in Cuba 60 years of the Nobel Prize for Literature for his grandfather (1954) and 80 of the purchase of the yacht Pilar, now perched on a dry pool Hemingway Museum at Finca La Vigía, San Francisco de Paula (house purchased by the author in 1939)

Writer grandchildren were at that time the condition of Honor Members of the International Club of Cuba Hemingway hands of Commodore Diaz Escrich, principal animator of recreational boating in this country.

At that time they came as part of a team of 16 favorable to the protection of marine species in the Straits of Florida US.

John and Patrick then declared their support to the friendship between Cubans and Americans, element considered as a starting point for a future when they stated that there is much to learn from Cuba by the United States.

Now they can participate in the 65th edition of International Fishing Tournament of the Needle Ernest Hemingway (25 to 30 May), one of the events of his oldest guy in the world, and where they are already enrolled 10 boats northern neighbor approved by the Treasury Department.

(Prensa Latina)

A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.

Ernest Hemingway

50 years after his death the mysteries surrounding the writer’s relations with the FBI and the possible connections of the federal agency with his suicide are still being unveiled.

Those who have held in their hands the famous FBI file on Ernest Hemingway affirm it contains 124 pages, 15 of which even today are still held back “in the interest of national defense”. Of the remaining pages, 40 are covered with black ink except for their greetings and signatures, and several more are practically illegible. Between the readable and those crossed out in black, it is possible to determine that the file holds information on Hemingway gathered between 1942, during the 2nd World War and 1974, almost 15 years after his death.

The existence of 15 censored and 40 carefully crossed-out pages, the permanence of others which barely repeat innocuous information about the days when Hemingway chased German submarines along Cuban coasts, and finally the fact that the writer was a subject of interest for FBI investigations even after his death, at least suggest how problematic the relationship must have been.

The legible documents imply that Hemingway, who in the years of the Spanish Civil War had harshly criticized the federal agency, decided to collaborate with what he would call “the American Gestapo” from September 1942 (while he was already residing in Cuba) with two main objectives: to inform on the activities of the members of the Spanish Falange and Nazi followers on the island, and to launch a search for German submarines to discover where and, above all, who was providing the fuel they needed to sail the Caribbean waters.

The connection is established through the US Embassy in Havana and the person who would receive the information was the “Legal Attaché” R.G. Leddy, an FBI man with little sympathy for Hemingway as reflected in the comments with which he sprinkled his reports. For example, one where he remembers the writer “was actively linked to the Republic during the Spanish Civil War” and another where he jots down the fact that in 1940 he had joined “a general campaign to slander the FBI after the arrest of certain individuals in Detroit for their alleged violations of the Neutrality Act due to their activities in the Spanish Civil War”, and he goes on to affirm that “he has been accused of sympathizing with communism.”

Under the wing of the FBI, Hemingway, with his protagonist mania, organized and directed a network of “amateur” informants, but this collaboration would last for only seven months until the 1st of April 1943 when the Ambassador cancelled it on the grounds that the information provided by the writer had been “in almost all cases worthless”. In fact, the reason for laying off Hemingway as a spy must have been the fact that his activities had become dangerous, because they included spying on General Manuel Benítez, Chief of the Cuban Policía Nacional, a man who enjoyed the complete trust of the then constitutional President Fulgencio Batista, “Cuba’s strong man”.

Hemingway had crossed the line and the Director of the Agency, Hoover himself, tried to set matters straight and wrote in 1942, “Any information you have related to lack of trust in Ernest Hemingway as an informant must be discreetly reported to the Ambassador. In this sense it must be remembered that Hemingway recently provided information related to the refueling of submarines in Caribbean waters which turned out to be unreliable.” Hoover also dropped within his comments, political judgments on the writer and others of a personal nature referring to his addiction to alcohol, in a typical operation to undermine Hemingway’s credibility.

A hypothesis that could explain these reactions of the FBI would be that the hunting operation for German submarines would have placed Hemingway on the road to a dangerous revelation. Although there are still no documents as evidence, the suspicion that General Manuel Benítez, from his position of Chief of Police, could have been in charge of selling fuel to the Germans is quite feasible. It is a fact that the Nazis were refueling their submarines in several Cuban ports and there is no doubt that an operation of such magnitude could not have been carried out without the acquiescence of the army (Batista) and the police (Benítez)…

On May 30, 1960, Hemingway was admitted to the Mayo Brothers Clinic, as recommended by a New York psychiatrist. Hemingway had been compelled by his friends to see the psychiatrist, mainly because he had complained that the “Feds” were following him. Seemingly this “persecution mania” had reached its peak during his visit to Spain in 1959, but then when he reached New York, he again started feeling that the eyes of the Feds were on him. His wife Mary Welsh and some friends believed such feelings were a symptom of the writer’s paranoia.

The treatment prescribed at the famous clinic was to subject him to a series of between 15 and 20 electroshocks which wiped out his capacity to write. This procedure known as electro-convulsive therapy was reserved for hopeless patients. A few days after being discharged, in a deep depression, he committed suicide on July 2, 1961 in his Idaho cottage. He was 62, but was so devastated he looked like a very old man… The fact that his widow, the only person with him in his Idaho house when he died, has for years denied the fact that her husband committed suicide is at least unsettling.

Documents released in 1984, revealed that in fact the writer was being followed and watched by agents acting on orders of Hoover who a few years before had considered Hemingway as “Public Enemy #1”. What was the reason for the preeminence granted to the writer by the FBI?

In the 50’s the FBI learned that Hemingway was planning to write a book about the agency. Documents of the Bureau reveal the fear, particularly Hoover’s, that the book could have damaged the image of his agency, and most of all expressed judgments about his person. The existing animosity against Hemingway was then increased and the Director of the FBI spread the image of a drunk and pathetic Hemingway, with communist-leaning ideas. Perhaps we’ll never know if Hemingway actually began that book. What is certain is that as he made Finca Vigía his residence for 20 years, the house was full of papers belonging to the writer. A few months after the suicide, his widow travelled to Havana and took away the most valuable paintings and the documents she considered important. During her stay she made a bonfire with a huge amount of papers. What did Mary Welsh burn? Only she herself knew. Maybe some of the clues to the persistent FBI surveillance of Hemingway went up in smoke among the trees of Finca Vigía.