ROBERT DREWE
As a teenager my view of Cuba came not from the charisma of Fidel or Che, much less from the Hollywood and Mafia celebrities who’d flocked here to enjoy Batista-era, pre-revolution debauchery. It came from Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana.
Actually, it came first from the films of those novels. The books followed, and I’m still not sure whether it’s the literary images or the films’ literal scenes that stick in my mind. After Spencer Tracy’s efforts as the old fisherman, and Alec Guinness’s as a vacuum-cleaner salesman and unlikely spy, there’s no doubt that Cuba excited my imagination.
If Our Man in Havana, a satire of MI6, was too subtle to totally engross this 15-year-old boy, The Old Man and the Sea touched all emotional bases. It was almost biblical in its depiction of the exhausting three-day struggle between Santiago the fisherman and a giant marlin. In a series of first-person discourses, Santiago expresses compassion for his adversary, praising the marlin’s dignity, even referring to it as “brother”. Eventually he wins the somehow ennobling battle, harpoons the fish, and straps it to his boat for the return voyage. Then marauding sharks reduce it to a skeleton. I almost wept for Santiago.
Decades later, I’m in Havana admiring the Pilar, the model for Santiago’s boat. It’s sitting on blocks in the garden of Hemingway’s six-hectare estate, Finca Vigía, in the suburb of San Francisco de Paula, beside the graves of Papa’s pet cats and dogs and the pool where Ava Gardner once swam naked. Ironic, I think, that Hemingway’s boat, on which he recklessly scouted for wartime German submarines, is now a backdrop for selfies by crowds of German tourists in velcro sandals.
The bungalow where he wrote his most famous novel – it won him a Pulitzer and a Nobel – was a compulsory call. A couple of days before my visit I bought a copy from a bookshop in Habana Vieja and, for the first time since my teenage enthusiasm, I re-read the book.
Hemingway left Cuba in 1960, in the aftermath of the revolution, but his 20 years on the island endeared him to its people, to whom the house and its contents were left.
It’s now a museum. To prevent pilfering, visitors aren’t allowed inside, but big windows reveal Papa’s world: his writing desk, the Picassos on the walls, his eyeshade and hunting boots, the liquor bottles on a drinks tray in the sitting room, the stuffed animal heads – including a lion’s head on a table – and books (8000 in all) in every room, including the bathroom.
His desk – what a great place to write, I think, despite the Cape buffalo head hanging over it, its horns as wide as the table. Shot by Papa, of course. The house is a place to envy; the sophisticated residence of a wealthy, famous man. As employees wearing tight T-shirts emblazoned with “Museo Hemingway” mill about me, the memories of the old man and his finca start to jar with the humility of the old man and the sea. Santiago’s sentimental homilies don’t ring true in Papa’s world.
A few samples: “Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is”; “Luck is a thing that comes in many forms and who can recognise her”; “Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.”
These words seem ridiculous from a writer who had luck, success, wealth and beautiful women galore. His string of righteous sermons make my fillings ache.
Only the Pilar seems true. No rich man’s extravagance, just an ordinary wooden boat sitting beside the graves of Black, Negrita, Linda and Neron. An old man and his cats.
Hemingway’s boat, on which he scouted for German submarines, is a now a backdrop for selfies by crowds of German tourists.