Ubaldo Romero rolled a wheelbarrow full of fishing tackle off the docks of this tiny port, sweating in the afternoon heat and talking about the big one that just got away.
“I was pulling like this with my hands. The marlin whipped its tail around and cut the line,” Romero said excitedly as he held up the severed fishing cord. “It was at least 200 pounds.”
But Romero wasn’t disappointed. He’s gone two weeks, even a month without landing a fish. He’s survived violent storms, blistered and cut hands, and chronic back pains.
“I work like a slave,” said Romero, 40, who has been fishing since he was 9. “But it’s the purest thing. When I am out there, in the sea, I forget everything. You have to persevere.”
If Romero’s story sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Fifty years ago, Ernest Hemingway wrote about the fishermen here in a spare and gripping account of a man’s struggle against himself, a gigantic marlin and a wave of voracious sharks in the book, . “The Old Man and the Sea.”
The novel, set in Cojimar, won Hemingway the 1952 Pulitzer Prize and contributed to his winning the 1954 Nobel Prize for literature, something the macho, hyper-competitive author coveted in his literary battles against such contemporaries as William Faulkner.
It also earned the Oak Park native the enduring respect of fishermen like Romero who, a half-century later, say the book captures the discipline, sacrifice and almost religious fervor it takes to work so hard at something where you often come up empty-handed.
Yet for many years, “The Old Man and the Sea” and Hemingway’s other works failed to alter the view of some Cuban intellectuals that the author, despite living here for 20 years, was a “colonial” writer who showed little interest in Cuba or its people.
Embraced by government
Today, that view of Hemingway is in the minority, and he has been embraced by the Communist government of Cuban President Fidel Castro like no other foreign writer, except perhaps Castro’s longtime friend Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
One possible reason is that Hemingway’s life is a business in Cuba, what with his home and a handful of his favorite hangouts turned into major tourist attractions. There are a lot of Cubans, it seems, that want a piece of the famous author.
His favorite bar in Havana, El Floridita, sells daiquiris for $6 a pop; a lobster plate at his favorite restaurant in Cojimar goes for $33.95 — twice the monthly salary of the average Cuban.
But there is more to this warm embrace than just dollars and cents.
Tossing his ragged personal life aside, the portrayal of Hemingway here is that of a simple man in lockstep with the Cuban revolution, a writer whose main characters often struggle heroically against more powerful forces, whether it be the fascists in Spain or a huge fish off Cuba’s coast.
That theme, of course, mirrors the Cuban government’s view of itself as the little guy valiantly holding onto its socialist principles despite being assaulted by the powerful capitalist giant to the north.
“A man can be destroyed but not defeated,” Santiago, the fisherman and main protagonist in “The Old Man and the Sea,” says to himself as the sharks devour his marlin but leave the old man’s courage and dignity intact.
“Socialism or Death!” Castro shouts defiantly at the end of his speeches. “We will be victorious!”
World of a man’s spirit
“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish,” Hemingway wrote at the beginning of the book.
“The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck,” Hemingway added. “Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.”
When Hemingway wrote those words, he was in deep trouble. After the success of his 1940 novel, “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” Hemingway had moved to Cuba and failed to write anything of significance for a decade.
He desperately needed to hit a literary home run. “The Old Man and the Sea” was Hemingway’s blast over the wall.
“This is the prose I’ve been working for all my life that should read easily and simply and seem short and yet have all the dimensions of the visible world and the world of a man’s spirit,” Hemingway wrote in a letter to his publisher in 1951.
The book, all 26,531 words of it, was first published in Life magazine. The issue sold 5.3 million copies in 48 hours.
“The Old Man and the Sea” drew heavily on one major aspect of Hemingway’s years in Cuba: deep-sea fishing.
A second home
Located only a few miles from his lush, sprawling home called Finca Vigia, or Lookout Farm, the small fishing port of Cojimar became Hemingway’s second home. His boat, Pilar, was moored here, and he spent many afternoons fishing for marlin off the coast and pounding down daiquiris at a seafront restaurant, La Terraza.
Ova Carnero remembers the famous author. Carnero, 76, stepped into his tidy home in Cojimar and pulled out a tattered copy of Norberto Fuentes’ 1984 book, “Hemingway in Cuba.” He turned to page 174.
“That’s me,” Carnero said, peering through thick glasses. Sure enough, according to the caption, it was Carnero, decades younger, on the patio of Hemingway’s home with a dozen local fishermen. In the middle of the group stood a smiling Hemingway, his arms folded, dressed in white.
Settling into a lawn chair in his front porch, Carnero said he spent hours talking with Hemingway about the intricacies of marlin fishing — the flow of the Gulf Stream, the fine points of baiting a hook, and the secrets of tracking the powerful fish.
Carnero said Hemingway met with a half-dozen fishermen a couple times a week, always at La Terraza. Hemingway never took notes.
“It was all up here,” Carnero said, pointing to his own head. “One time he told us that everything we had told him was for a book that he was writing about fishing. When it came out he gave me a copy of it to read. It’s a great book.”
Fishermen here say that Hemingway got the details right. Tied to a creaky wood dock in Cojimar’s harbor are a half-dozen 12-foot wooden rowboats — just like the one Santiago used in “The Old Man and the Sea.”
Most fishermen now use boats that are about twice that size and have engines. The rest is pretty much as Hemingway described in the novel.
Like the character Santiago, Romero said he has no fishing poles, fancy lures or other equipment. That, he said, is for “sport fishing. That’s for fun.”
“I fish by hand. I fish to eat, to survive,” he said.
Romero, like Hemingway’s hero, uses spools of bare fishing line, hooks the size of your palm, and empty plastic bottles and Styrofoam blocks, which he attaches to the line to slow down the marlin as it takes out line and fights for its life.
Asked how difficult it is to haul in a 150-pound marlin by hand, Romero responds simply, “It takes strength.”
That’s something Hemingway either saw firsthand or learned from his discussions with Carnero and other fishermen. It’s something he captured in the book, describing Santiago’s bloodied and cramped hands, his aching back, his thirst and hunger, as he finally hauls the giant fish in close enough to plunge a harpoon into its side.
“The old man felt faint and sick and he could not see well,” Hemingway wrote. “But he cleared the harpoon line and let it run slowly through his raw hands and, when he could see, he saw the fish was on his back with his silver belly up. The shaft of the harpoon was projecting at an angle from the fish’s shoulder and the sea was discoloring with the red of the blood from his heart.” Not long after, the first shark would appear. Soon they were ripping huge chunks of flesh out of the marlin’s carcass, which was lashed to Santiago’s boat.
As the light fell, Carnero began shuffling through his photographs.
“Here look at this,” he said. “That’s me in Hemingway’s house. That’s me on the couch.”
Fact or fiction
Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. It’s difficult to separate fact from fiction when it comes to flushing out the persona of a famous writer who put a gun to his head 40 years ago. Hemingway, it seems, wanted it that way.
“He mythologized himself,” said Sandra Spanier, an English professor at The Pennsylvania State University and general editor of the Hemingway letters collection. “He cultivated the persona, Papa, and it’s very difficult to separate the myth from the man.”
Carnero wasn’t about to set the record straight. He’s part of a group of Cubans with real or imagined ties to the great one. The primary symptoms are an inflated sense of self-importance and a rule about never speaking ill of Hemingway.
“There are some who say that Hemingway was a despot and an alcoholic, but with me he was always a good person,” Carnero said. “He was humble. He never hung out with rich people.”
Experts beg to differ. It’s true that Hemingway admired and respected Cojimar’s fishermen, whom he found courageous, but the author also spent a lot of time with large landowners, diplomats, movie stars and other heavyweights. Although he was surrounded by poverty, Hemingway’s house on the outskirts of Havana covers an entire city block.
While Cubans were being gunned down for their opposition to Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, Hemingway — although criticizing Batista as corrupt — continued writing away, attending cock-fighting matches and shooting live pigeons at an exclusive gun club.
“It’s more like he would observe them,” explained Jeffrey Meyers, a Hemingway biographer, referring to Cojimar’s fishermen. “He didn’t have to become great friends. I don’t think that he was very close to the uneducated people in Cuba.”
The reality of his image
The reality of Hemingway’s complex life in Cuba mucks up the official portrait of him here as the affable, brilliant American writer living in solidarity with Cojimar’s noble fishermen. It’s also bad for business.
Tarnishing the image of the great one by nature tarnishes the image of those who continue to live in his shadow. “Japan, Vietnam, Spain, Italy, France, Korea, the United States and Mexico,” Carnero said excitedly, rattling off just a few of countries that have featured him in films about Hemingway’s life. “Another crew is coming in the next day or two.”
But Cubans have added another twist to the time-honored tradition of cashing in on the carcass of a famous person: They’ve fostered the illusion that Hemingway may somehow magically reappear.
Hemingway’s favorite table at La Terraza is covered with a white tablecloth — all the other tablecloths are red — as if to indicate that this table is permanently reserved for the famous author. Asked if it costs more to dine at that table, a waiter quipped, “Not yet.”
In Havana, the author’s barstool at El Floridita remains empty and roped off, as if the broad-shouldered Hemingway just left for the bathroom and would return any moment to polish off his drink.
No place is more surreal than Finca Vigia, Hemingway’s home, where the author wrote “The Old Man and the Sea.”
Finca Vigia is perhaps the world’s only museum that’s always closed to the public. For $3, visitors can walk around the house, but can only peer through the windows to glimpse Hemingway’s black Royal typewriter, his half-empty bottles of Campari, his aging Sports Illustrated and New Yorker magazines, his bathroom, complete with Hemingway’s daily notations of his weight, and, of course, the mounted buffalo head and other animals the author gunned down in Africa.
On a recent visit, Antonio Rodriguez, a tour guide, sauntered up to chat. Asked if there is anyone around who knew Hemingway, Rodriguez shook his head, “Nope.”
But a minute later Rodriguez was back again, saying that, yes indeed, he had not only met the great writer but worked for him for seven years tending Finca Vigia’s expansive gardens.
“He helped a lot of people, no matter what color they were,” Rodriguez recalled as he strolled up a stone pathway. “He gave the kids baseball uniforms. He gave people work. He had 55 people working here. He had one person just to take care of his cats.”
“Hemingway had a lot of friends,” Rodriguez added before asking for a tip.
Taking on the myth
Cuban intellectuals have been less timid in taking on the Hemingway myth.
In the classic 1968 film, “Memories of Underdevelopment,” Sergio, an alienated, eurocentric Cuban caught in the aftermath of the 1959 revolution, visits Finca Vigia.
As Sergio wanders about inside the home, the camera fixes on the buffalo head, the rifles and ammunition, animal skulls and Hemingway’s other possessions, before Sergio recalls the story of Hemingway taking in an impoverished local boy and raising him to cater to his every whim.
“Hemingway must have been an insufferable guy,” Sergio says to himself. “This was his refuge, his tower, his island in the tropics, boots to hunt in Africa, North American furniture, photographs from Spain, books and magazines in English. He never really cared about Cuba.”
That view of Hemingway, as the rich outsider removed from the harsh reality of Cuban life, was held by some Cuban writers and intellectuals in the 1960s. The Cuban revolution was in its infancy and, faced with the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and the U.S. economic embargo, was militantly anti-American.
“I always admired him as a writer,” said Pablo Armando Fernandez, 72, a Cuban author and poet. “What the writers of my generation were criticizing was the way he lived. I am talking about the man.”
Over the years such harsh criticism of Hemingway has been eclipsed by the more popular notion that Hemingway, while an outsider, was a genuine friend of Cuba who wrote about the country and its fisherman with dignity and grace.
Cubans repeatedly cite Hemingway’s gesture of giving his Nobel Prize medal to a shrine dedicated to La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, Cuba’s patron saint, as one indication of the author’s affection for the country. It also helps that his book, “Islands in the Stream,” published posthumously in 1970, chronicled his wartime experiences in Cuba.
Still, it’s unlikely Hemingway’s popularity would be as great without the Cuban government’s stamp of approval. His life, or at least the part that reflects honesty, sincerity, respectfulness and a commitment to social justice, is taught to schoolchildren as young as 5.
Widely read
Documentaries about Hemingway’s life appear on government-run television, and there is a large marina in Havana named after the author. His books are widely read in Cuban schools. “The Old Man and the Sea” is one of a handful of books published here in inexpensive, newspaper form so that a broad range of people can read it.
“He didn’t write in Spanish but he can be considered in a certain way one of the most important Cuban writers,” said Ricardo Alarcon, president of the Cuban National Assembly. Alarcon said Hemingway is beloved because he wrote simply and vividly and because he was “friendly to the revolution.”
That, of course, is the official line — that Hemingway backed Castro and his guerrilla army as they ousted Batista in 1959 and turned Cuba upside-down. But in fact, Hemingway said little about the revolution and committed suicide in Idaho a little more than two years after Castro took power — well before the revolution set its course.
Although Castro and Hemingway met only once — at a 1960 fishing tournament where Castro took first prize — the famous photograph capturing the moment is all over the island.
It’s on the wall at La Terraza, behind Hemingway’s barstool at El Floridita, and in the lobby of Ambos Mundos, the author’s favorite hotel in Havana.
“Hemingway was a fervent admirer of the Cuban revolution and Fidel Castro,” reads a caption of the photograph included in the Cuban newspaper version of “The Old Man and the Sea.”
In a 1984 interview with Cuban author Norberto Fuentes, Castro said Hemingway was his favorite author and drew a direct parallel between the old man’s struggle with the marlin and the sharks and his own battle to reshape Cuban society.
“Man can confront adversity and indeed should do it,” Castro said. “The end is not written, and triumph will not always be reached. But the imperative is to seek it, fight for it.
“Hemingway was right,” Castro continued. “A man can be destroyed but never defeated.”
