HAVANA – Six years after he won the Nobel Prize in 1954, Ernest Hemingway's world was falling apart.
The best-known writer in America, perhaps the world, was losing his mind. Depression and paranoia were overtaking him, turning his renowned terse and direct style into rambling excess. His writing, the talent that made him famous and rich, was slipping away.
Biographers blame Hemingway's “heroic” lifestyle for his mental decline. Heavy drinking, drugs, a handful of concussions and neglected injuries from two plane crashes in Africa in 1953 combined to assault his 60-year-old body.
Equally devastating was the political upheaval in Cuba, the longtime home where he lived in shabby baronial luxury at a 19th-century estate 10 miles east of Havana.
Finca Vigia – or “Lookout Farm” – was the only house Hemingway owned outright. He bought it in 1940. From its full staff of servants to its secluded swimming pool, it fit Hemingway like his favorite guayabera, the traditional Cuban shirt.
The writer and his fourth wife, Mary, sailed from Cuba on July 25, 1960, leaving behind the “silver, Venetian glassware, eight-thousand books . . . and Ernest's small collection of paintings, one Paul Klee, two Juan Gris, five Andre Masson, one Braque . . . ” along with 70 cats and at least nine dogs.
Hemingway never returned. He killed himself with a double-barreled shotgun blast July 2, 1961, at his other home, in Ketchum, Idaho.
After appropriating the property in 1961, the Cuban government continues to promote Hemingway as a cultural icon, casting him as a mythical figure on a level just below Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
“Hemingway loved the Cuban people and they loved him,” said Gladys Rodriguez, who, as president of the Hemingway section of Cuba's Jose Marti Institute of International Journalism, is the official keeper of Papa's flame. Mention an incident in the writer's life and she can recite chapter and verse on the details.
She notes examples of the Hemingway-Cuba love affair:
“The Old Man and the Sea,” his last novel to appear when he was still alive, is read by Cuban schoolchildren for its sympathetic central character, a Cuban fisherman.
He gave his Nobel Prize medal (though not the $35,000 cash prize) to a Cuban church.
Though no friend of the revolution, he and Fidel Castro were photographed together after Castro entered and won – legitimately – Hemingway's fishing contest in 1960. Photographs from the event are reverently displayed in a variety of places. Plus, the writer never publicly criticized the Communist dictator.
Finally, Hemingway “did not live in the best part of Havana, but with the poor people outside of town,” Rodriguez says, overlooking the fact that his home came with a full complement of servants.
That home, now called the Ernest Hemingway Museum by the Cubans, is the center of this homage. Reopened in January after what the government says is a $1 million renovation, the one-story stucco building and grounds are a lovingly restored time capsule of a different era.
Much remains to be accomplished at the estate. The museum plans to restore the pool, servants' quarters and the house used for guests. It also wants to find models of Hemingway's 1950s fleet of cars for the garage after a new building for offices and document preservation is built, sometime next year.
For now, the charming house appears in excellent shape, but less than two years ago, the finca and its contents were in serious decline.
Conditions were so bad that the National Trust for Historic Preservation named it one of its 11 most endangered landmarks in 2005, the only building outside North America to make the list.
The roof leaked water into the interior walls, causing mold to grow throughout the house, which lacked basic climate controls like dehumidifiers. The foundation was shifting, the stucco was peeling and steps were crumbling. The property even lacked a modern security system.
The museum moved the library, documents, furniture and other items, including animal heads from Hemingway's African hunting trips, into storage bins in the basement.
The salvation of the finca and Hemingway's books and papers was the result of a unique and troubled partnership of Americans and Cubans, a relationship that remains clouded because the Bush administration has prohibited nearly all business transactions between the two countries since 2004.
“The big problem with saving the Hemingway site is the U.S. government,” Rep. James McGovern, D-Mass., said in a telephone interview. “This hassle is a relic of the Cold War and the result of the administration's domestic policies, that's all.”
McGovern was a key player in the 2002 deal he and Castro signed at the finca initiating a joint preservation project.
A group of American specialists in restoration and document salvage schooled the Cubans in the latest techniques, while the Cubans promised to give the Hemingway Library digital copies of his letters and documents.
Sandra Spanier, a Penn State University English professor, is director of the letters' collection project.
“It's been a very big deal in the last year, year-and-a-half, to salvage all the letters, but the house has been a major concern. Things needed to be done,” she said.
Jenny Phillips, granddaughter of Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway's legendary editor at Charles Scribner Publishers, came to the finca's rescue following a visit to Cuba in 2002 by establishing the Hemingway Preservation Foundation, headquartered outside Boston.
Although it has raised nearly $400,000, not a penny can be spent in Cuba until the Bush ban is lifted.
The 40-minute drive from Havana offers no hint of the comfortable, understated luxury of Hemingway's rehabilitated estate. The ride passes weed-choked, abandoned docks on the harbor, empty ancient factories and crowded, dilapidated housing.
In the village of San Francisco de Paula, no signs to the finca can be found. Discovery comes only after a lucky turn into a narrow, bumpy lane.
The finca is a low, modest building painted in pale beige with a tile roof and white wooden windows across the front, all open to a refreshing breeze.
The windows are also open to offer views of the living room, which takes up most of the first floor. Visitors are not allowed inside to peruse the large collection of artifacts, from 1959 magazines to half-filled liquor bottles remaining where Hemingway left them.
Museum Director Ada Rosa Alfonso proudly shows off the restoration work. Through the freshly painted windows can be seen the writer's favorite chair in the chintz covering chosen by Martha Gellhorn, wife No. 3, who found the house in a newspaper want ad in 1939 and persuaded Hemingway to buy it.
In most of the rooms are bookshelves filled from top to bottom.
As prominent as the books are the stuffed heads of a dozen animals Hemingway brought down on his many hunting trips in America and Africa.
The swimming pool, still unrestored, is below the house in a wooded area.
The final stop beyond the pool is the landlocked Pilar, Hemingway's trim fishing boat that gave him days of escape and adventure in the Atlantic Ocean. It's been on blocks for more than 30 years.
Its first mate, Gregorio Fuentes, who lived to an alleged 104, is a minor god in the Hemingway firmament, either as another example of how the writer respected the Cuban people or as the model for Santiago in “The Old Man and the Sea.”
Fuentes spent his last years as a tourist attraction cadging drinks at the La Terraza restaurant in Cojimar, the now-nearly-empty fishing village where the Pilar was moored and which was mentioned in the novel.
Bob Hoover writes for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
