Hemingway archive ‘will help unite US and Cuba’

Ernest Hemingway’s legacy helps to bring Americans and Cubans together, a US congressman said as he opened an archive at the legendary writer’s one-time home in Havana, despite tensions between the two nations.

“Hemingway is once again serving to unite Americans and Cubans,” Massachusetts congressman Jim McGovern said at the ceremony on Saturday at the facility, already a museum chronicling the 20 years the author spent in Cuba.

The inauguration came against the backdrop of a sharp pivot by the administration of US President Donald Trump following his predecessor Barack Obama’s policy of normalisation with Havana.

“There is no good and rational reason” why the US and Cuba cannot have normal relations, said McGovern, a Democrat, as flags of the two countries stood behind him.

McGovern, who has made numerous trips to the island, established the Finca Vigia Foundation in 2002 with Jenny and Frank Phillips. Jenny Phillips, who died in 2019, was the granddaughter of Hemingway’s editor and friend, Maxwell Perkins.

Its mission is to work with Cuban colleagues to restore and preserve Finca Vigia (Lookout Farm) the Havana home of the Nobel literature laureate — as well as its contents and his fishing boat.

The boat had already been renovated and the home restored “to its 1950s splendour”, according to the foundation’s website.

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Now the on-site archival storage facility, whose construction began in 2015, has also been opened, with McGovern cutting a ribbon and reviewing the archives, which include Hemingway’s passport.

The congressman, who favours scrapping the sixdecade-old US trade embargo against Cuba, later met with President Miguel Diaz-Canel.

Gladys Collazo, director of Cuba’s National Council of Cultural Heritage, said the new facility is the result of collaboration among people of goodwill despite the obstacles.

In a separate statement the council said “there are many US interests linked to cultural exchanges with Cuba that are curbed by the setback in bilateral relations”.

“With very little money, and in the midst of a dauntingly difficult political climate, this project has flourished and continues to grow,” the foundation said.

Hemingway wrote many of his classics, including For

Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea, at Finca Vigia. Most of Hemingway’s time in Cuba preceded the 1959 communist revolution. He committed suicide in 1961 after returning to the US.