Ernest Miller Hemingway ( Chicago , 21 as July as 1899 – Idaho , 2 as July as 1961 ). American writer and journalist whose work, already considered a classic in 20th century literature, has exerted a notable influence both by the sobriety of its style and by the tragic elements and the portrait of an era it represents. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
Passionate about hunting , fishing and adventure. He lived in Cuba for a period of twenty years. For his love of this island, in Havana , a marina and a fishing tournament are named after him.
Biographical synthesis
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in the Oak Park district, a suburb of Chicago, 14.5 km west of the city center. He was the son of Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a physician, and Grace Hall.
His childhood was marked by the upbringing of a dominant mother and a father with tendencies to depression. According to his biographers, he did not have a very happy childhood, as he was marked by the conflictive relationship with his father, who committed suicide in 1928 . At fifteen, he left his home, but returned shortly after to finish his studies.
He excelled as a soccer player and boxer in his college days. In 1917 he finished his studies but changed the University to work for a few months at the Kansas City Star as a reporter. From his youth he felt an inordinate addiction to boxing and hunting, sports that together with the practice of journalism make him a globetrotter and a student of human nature. The writer traveled through different countries in Europe and Africa .
He began as a reporter for the Kansas City Star, and shortly afterwards volunteered to drive ambulances in Italy during World War One . Later he was transferred to the Italian army and was seriously wounded. After the war he worked as a correspondent for the Toronto Star until his departure to Paris . Starting in 1927, he spent long periods in Key West, Florida, Spain and Africa . He returned to Spain , during the Civil War, as a war correspondent. Later he was a reporter for the first United States Army . Although he was not a soldier, he participated in various battles. After the war, Hemingway settled inCuba , near Havana , and in 1958 in Ketchum, Idaho.
Hemingway used his experiences as a fisherman, hunter, and bullfighter in his works. On the brink of death in the Spanish Civil War when bombs exploded in his hotel room, in World War II when he collided with a taxi during war blackouts, and in 1954 when his plane crashed in Africa , he finally perished in Ketchum the 2 of July of 1961 , shooting himself with a shotgun amid frequent access of madness, insomnia and memory loss.
Your participation in the Wars
First World War
The First World War had broken out. The United States entered the fray in 1917 , and the then very young Ernest wants to emulate with other greats of the so-called Lost Generation such as John Dos Passos , William Faulkner or F. Scott Fitzgerald .
But he was not accepted as a soldier but as a Red Cross ambulance driver . He landed in Bordeaux at the end of 1918 and joined the front in Italy . When he was seriously injured when the ambulance he was driving was hit by a projectile. Despite this, he carried the Italian soldier he was carrying on his shoulder and carried him safely, earning the Silver Medal of Valor.
He was confined in a hospital in Milan , where he met a young nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky , with whom he had an affair, a relationship that was frustrated but that the narrator translated into another plane when he wrote Farewell to Arms , after working as a journalist in the Toronto Star and the Cooperative Commonwealth.
Spanish Civil War
His presence in Spain as a correspondent during the Civil War and as a fighter in the trenches of the Republic, inspired one of his most important novels, there he participated in the filming of La tierra española; denounces the death of hundreds of former US combatants in the Matecumbe keys, and returns to journalism after ten years.
WWII
In the Second World War in the Far East, he reported the Sino-Japanese conflict, in Europe he was a war correspondent, participated in air missions and took part in the Normandy Landings . Upon returning to Cuba , he becomes involved in an anti-fascist operations agency. With his staff at Finca Vigía , once the «Pilar» was gunned down.
Camouflaged with the appearance of a vessel dedicated to scientific studies on the marine fauna of the Gulf of Mexico , the yacht was gunned down and had a crew of up to eight men, some of them members of the Republican brigades participating in the Spanish Civil War , who Together with Hemingway they sailed through the waters of the Caribbean Sea with the purpose of discovering and informing the Cuban and North American navy about the presence of German submarines that entered the Gulf with the aim of torpedoing the merchant ships and oil tankers that were leaving America to supply the allied side.
In May 1943, on his yacht Pilar he patrolled the northern keys of the Camaguey province , after the sinking by a German submarine, east of Nuevitas, of a small tanker and the ship Ni berliver . Hemingway and his crew visited Cayo Sabinal , Cayo Confites , where he planted seven pines; the Faro de Paredón Grande , the Maternillos and Cayo Romano . In the latter they supplied themselves with crabs, which they ate raw with lemon. These places are described in his book Islands in the Gulf .
Cuban Revolution
Although Hemingway did not participate directly in the Cuban Revolution , it is a fact that he sympathized with it and with many of its leaders. Modesta, discreetly, at the local level of Finca Vigia, helping to support and that is why, the government of the United States forced him to leave the country.
In January of 1959 Hemingway had given a statement to the American press in favor of the Revolution (he was in America at that time), in which he expressed his hope with what was happening on the island and supported the ajusticiamiento the minions of tyranny by Batista . He lived the experience of having a dog killed , on the farm, in a registry made in 1957 .
In 1959, while in Europe , he publicly declared his satisfaction with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. On November 4 he returns. A reckless gesture reveals his deep love: he kisses the Cuban flag and refuses to repeat it for the “media.”
It was suggested that Hemingway arrived on November 4, but René Villarreal , his butler, in the book Hemingway’s Cuban Son, points out that it was in March. In addition, they find notes on one of the bathroom walls that show that he was in Vigía on that date. The body weight that he had in March and April is recorded there.
But these were not the only statements he gave about the Cuban revolutionary process. “On the occasion of the visit of the 4 of February of 1960 made him Anastas Mikoyan , prime minister of the Soviet Union, Hemingway told the newspaper Pravda – that it then reproduced Time magazine that the Cuban Revolution is indestructible and fabulous. You can imagine how those words must have fallen on the US government. ”On May 15 of that same year during the award ceremony of the marlin fishing tournament.
Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro had won several individual awards and they spoke a lot that day. They shared and were widely photographed. Shortly after, they arrived at his house and told him that if he remained in Cuba he would be considered a traitor. Hemingway never had problems with the Cuban government. While in the United States, he contacted some of his friends to inquire about his possible return, and they told him that he could do it whenever he wanted. In one of his books, he found a bracelet from the July 26 movement and bonds from the Popular Socialist Party of Guanabacoa , to which he contributed money.
Leonardo Depestre tells in his book “One Hundred Famous in Havana” that at the José Martí international airport he was received by a large group of friends and neighbors from the small town of San Francisco de Paula , who gave him a Cuban flag. Then the author adds that on that occasion Hemingway declared to a reporter: “I feel very happy to be here again, because I consider myself one more Cuban. I have not believed any of the information that is published against Cuba abroad. I sympathize with the Cuban government and with all the difficulties.
Hemingway expressed his confidence in the revolutionary process, when he stated in a letter to General Charles T. Lanham , dated Ketchum, January 12 , 1960:
“To say that you are not an imperialist Yankee but a boy from Old San Francisco de Paula, the town where you have lived for 20 years in recent times, is not a renunciation of your citizenship. I am a good American and I have been fighting for myself. country as much as possible, without payment and without ambition. But I completely believe in the historical necessity of the Cuban Revolution … “
Hemingway in Havana
It was not love at first sight. Not the only one, even on this Island, that he ever described as “long, beautiful, and unhappy.” But, forever, Ernest Hemingway and Havana have remained united in universal memory through literature, the retelling of the time, and deeper and more elusive relationships.
The first meeting between the two was in 1928 and it seemed to have no significance. He was 29 years old. He had been a precocious writer, with published poems, chronicles, and books; married for the second time, had a child born and another to be born. He lived in Key West, and he loved the sea above all else. He was traveling then with his wife Pauline and on the way back he made a stopover in this Caribbean and unknown city, but so much talked about.
She, the City, had languidly matured for four centuries; She was mestizo, heterogeneous; it was full — in equal parts — of wealth and misery. The sea overflowed her everywhere. Hemingway had other interests at the moment. However, shortly after that visit to Cuba, he made his first explorations in the Gulf Stream and met Gregorio Fuentes , skipper of the famous yacht «Pilar». In December of that same year, he suffered the suicide of his father. In retrospect, this might all seem like a premonition.
The great success of Adiós a las armas, the attraction —that’s immediate— to Spain, an accident and the birth of his third child, kept him away from Cuba until 1932 , when he decided to use the Ambos Mundos hotel as a base of operations for his fisheries in Cuban waters. This would be a new knot in the noose that would inevitably tie him to the City.
His passion for Havana
It was not until 1940 that Hemingway decided to settle in Havana, but since 1928 he will not stop visiting her intermittently – sometimes for longer or shorter periods – and will always return to his room at the Ambos Mundos.
From a distance remembers this city and its climatic virtues says a chronic conducted for Esquire in August of 1934 :
“Havana is cooler than most cities in the northern hemisphere in these months, because the trade winds blow from ten in the morning until four or five the next day …”
He evokes its spaces, as in the foreshortening with which the story “Una travesía” (published in Cosmopolitan, April 1934) begins, which will be the first part of his novel Having and not having :
«Do you know what Havana is like first thing in the morning, when homeless people still sleep against the walls of the houses and the carts that bring ice to the bars don’t even pass, right? Well, we were coming from the port and we crossed the square to have coffee, at the cafe La perla de San Francisco. In the square there was only a beggar awake who was drinking water from the fountain … »
Still the satisfaction of the senses, the sensuality of living and the pleasure of his stay on the Island, make him exclaim:
«… and have you ever been to the Sans Souci in Havana, on a Saturday night, to dance in the patio under the royal palms? They are gray and rise like columns. And hang out all night, play dice or roulette, and drive to Jaimanitas for breakfast at dawn. And everyone knows each other and everything is happy and pleasant.
Mentions of the city and its house are only descriptive fragments. The subjective load is so great that it is difficult to find very long references. They can be individual phrases: «… in the Cojímar bar , built on the edge of the rocks that dominated the port …» or «… through the open terrace, he looked at the sea, deep blue with white crests, crisscrossed by fishing boats trolling in search of dorado.
Sometimes the allusion is like a glance in passing: «… one evening, when he had gone out at dusk to walk and observe the flight of blackbirds (sic) that went to Havana, where they flew every night from the countryside from south and east, converging in long flocks, to alight, noisily, on the laurels of the Prado ».
At times, the nervous and contradictory reflex of thinking seems to prevail: «with this cold there wouldn’t be many people in the Floridita . But it will be nice to go there again. He didn’t know whether to eat there or in the Pacific, he thought. But I’ll take a sweater and a coat, sheltered from the wall, which is out of the wind.
There is only one, but very important, exception: the long, very long description of the journey, a true route that Thomas Hudson makes from Finca Vigía to Floridita. Written with the well-known fragmented «iceberg» technique, this passage is narrated in the manner of a «flow of consciousness» or inner monologue of the protagonist who, immersed in suffering over the death of one of his children, has hidden his misfortune to all.
Particularly permeated by nostalgia for the good old days and the terrible breath of loneliness, these “Cuban” texts will establish a deeper understanding (also a more dramatic vision) of the human and social reality of the city that has welcomed it as its own. .
Once again in Ambos Mundos, he wrote his best novel: For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1939 , and the only story of his that takes place in Cuba: No one ever dies. That year, at the urging of his future third wife, Martha Gellhorn , he rented Finca Vigía .
Hotel Ambos Mundos
The Ambos Mundos hotel is a solid and square five-story building that, in an eclectic turn of the century style, was erected on the site of an old manor house, previously demolished, on the corner of Obispo and Mercaderes.
The room where Hemingway initially spent the night – and which would become a home, a place of study and work for almost ten years – opens to three parts of the city through two large windows: one, facing north, faces Obispo Street; another, further east, to Calle de los Mercaderes, and the third, located between the first two, is on the corner. Through those windows, when he was left alone, Havana suddenly surrendered to the writer.
In an early chronicle published in the fall of 1933 by Esquire magazine, Hemingway describes the panorama that opens to his eyes from this room. But beyond what is described there, surely the first day he looked at his beloved Bishop, he noticed – perhaps attracted by the ringing of bells – in the old building of the old University, then still standing.
Behind its bell tower, the uneven and also sonorous bell towers of the Cathedral Church loomed and, still a little further away, the parks of Avenida del Puerto and the reflection of the sun on the water of the entrance channel to the bay. To the left, he saw the Castillo de los Tres Reyes del Morro with its lamppost and, later, only the sea as it exited towards the Gulf of Mexico , the great blue river.
On Mercaderes Street, his gaze must have passed over the many tiled roofs and, interrupted by the mass of the building that was then occupied by the United States Embassy, flanked to the right to see the tower of the Convent of San Francisco , which already knew from their first meeting. And if he looked a little further to the left, he could see — in front of the Plaza de Armas — the Santa Isabel hotel , behind which the city proudly displays its inland sea and the towns on the other shore.
He does not seem to have immediately noticed the Palace of the Captains General , which emerges from below, abruptly, when the central window is opened. But above this, in perspective, he must have seen La Giraldilla at the top of Castillo de la Fuerza , and even more distant — on the other side of the canal and among the trees — the promontory dominated by the fortress of San Carlos de la Cabaña .
But it was not, ultimately, neither the baroque monumentality, nor the colonial charm, nor the urban design of the city that seduced the writer and the man.
The Finca Vigía
In 1940 , the writer bought Finca Vigía with the money received from the rights to For Whom the Bell Tolls , and made it his home.
By 1945 , at Finca Vigía began the writing of two new drafts. One of them will be his novel The Garden of Eden, published many years after his death in a controversial editorial version. The other would be titled The Sea Book, but his writing is interrupted several times and he would never get it done. From here will come the definitive version —as an independent novel— of The Old Man and the Sea; the rest of that manuscript would see the light after his death with the title Islands in the Gulf 1970 .
Ernest Hemingway Museum
At twelve and a half kilometers from the center of the city of Havana, in the town of San Francisco de Paula, the Vigía farm is located, the last resting place in Cuba of the North American journalist and writer Ernest Hemingway.
The beautiful residence where Hemingway was built in 1887 by the Catalan architect Miguel Pascual y Baguer . It is made up of the main house, an independent construction known as a tower, the bungalow-garage, the swimming pool and pergola, the pavilion of the yacht Pilar and the cemetery of the writer’s dogs.
A year after his death, the 21 of July of 1962 -date in which the 63 anniversary of his birth was fulfilled, and his last wife, Mary Welsh, donated the house to the Cuban revolutionary government decided to make it museum in order to perpetuate the memory of the American storyteller whose prolific work won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 for the sobriety of its style, as well as for the tragic elements used and the portrait he makes of the time he represents in it.
The original atmosphere of the museum allows you to discover the tastes, customs and hobbies of someone who was a great friend of Cuba. Its facilities are preserved as if their owner still inhabited them. Each object remains as he left them before leaving for Ketchum, where on July 2 , 1961 he ended his enigmatic life.
The valuable collection of books that rests on the shelves and the stuffed heads of animals that hang on the walls of the rooms reflect another facet of the writer, also a lover of adventure, among which hunting and fishing stood out.
Upon entering the rooms of the beautiful residence, you discover the unique and interesting world of this man who was one of the most talented writers of all time.
The Pilar Yacht
The yacht made of mahogany and oak, with a length of 11.86 meters and a beam of 3.65 meters, had a 110 HP Chrysler marine engine, as well as a smaller auxiliary engine in case the engine failed. first, 40 HP Lycoming brand with direct drive. The distribution of the space was conceived to your liking, with a forward cabin with two bunk beds, which is isolated by a door that leads to the corridor. The kitchen on the right and the bathroom on the left. The dining room follows with a movable board table and a bunk bed on the other side. Two steps allow you to go up to the deck, and a door leads to the bridge where the slate and the control wheel are located, the latter repeated on the roof of the boat to allow its steering with greater visibility.
It is a boat, solid and manageable in any state of the sea; it has a low stern and a thick wooden cylinder to lift large pieces on board. The flying bridge is so solid that you can fight a big fish from it. Hemingway himself wrote.
The yacht was baptized with the name of Pilar, in honor of the Virgin of Zaragoza, the Pilarica of Spain , which shows her predilection for Spanish. Upon his arrival in Cuba, he stayed at the Hotel Ambos Mundos, while the yacht Pilar was based in Cojimar, a picturesque fishing village east of Havana where Hemingway made many friends.
El Pilar source of adventure and inspiration.
The yacht had two captains: The first was Carlos Gutiérrez , an expert on the Gulf Stream, for which Hemingway had a predilection. He was in charge of the Pilar until 1937 when the writer marches as a correspondent to cover the Spanish Civil War . Upon his return, Gregorio Fuentes took command of the Pilar and remained in the position with the writer for the rest of his life.
The Old Man and the Sea, a work written by Hemingway in 1952 and which earned the writer the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, was largely inspired by the experiences they both shared. Gregorio died on January 13 of the 2002 at the age of 104 years.
El Pilar traveled a large part of the north coast of Cuba and other islands of the Gulf Stream, Andos, Bimini, Tortuga, among others. The keys of the north coast of the province of Pinar del Río , such as Casigua, and Cayo Romano , north of the province of Camagüey , uninhabited and desert but attractive and welcoming, were frequently visited by the yacht Pilar.
The Pillar rests in the Ernest Hemingway Museum .
Hemingway had achieved such skill in fishing that in 1935 he won the famous Bimini fishing championship, and was named Vice-President of the Saltwater Fishermen’s Association of North America for his contributions and contributions to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. on classifications and rare specimens.
With the direct participation of Hemingway, and at the initiative of the International Nautical Club of Havana, in 1950 an international fishing event was organized with the cooperation of the Tourism Corporation, presenting a beautiful silver cup donated by Hemingway himself as a trophy. Today, a fishing event inspired by that one, although with other characteristics, which is called “Hemingway Cup” continues to be held in Cuba.
Literary works.
- Three stories and ten poems 1923
- In our time 1925
- Men Without Women 1927
- Winner Takes Nothing 1933
- The fifth column and the first forty-nine stories 1938
- The Torrents of Spring 1926
- Party 1926
- Farewell to Arms 1929
- The Green Hills of Africa 1935
- To have and not to have 1937
- For Whom the Bell Tolls (Book) 1940
- Across the river and among the trees 1950
- The old man and the sea (book) 1952 . Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and Nobel Prize in 1954.
- Men at War 1942 .
- Death in the afternoon 1932
- Angela Swarn’s Cabaret 1939.
- The Wild Years 1962.
- Paris was a 1964 party .
- Islands in the Gulf (book) 1970.
- The Nick Adams Stories 1972
Last years in Cuba
Hemingway receives the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea , and undertakes his first return to Spain after the Civil War. Practice hunting big game in Africa again. He suffers new accidents that feed the mundane myth that has accompanied him for a long time. For a few hours, the planet shudders at the false news of his death. Finally, in 1954 , the year in which he received the Nobel Prize , he returned to Havana .
Like old Santiago losing his battle, “he saw the reflected glow of the city lights at about ten at night. At first they were perceptible only as the light in the sky before the moon rose. Then they were seen steadily across the sea that was now choppy from the rising moon. He steered into the center of the glow and thought that now he would soon reach the edge of the stream. And he gave the Cuban people and especially the fishermen of Cojímar , in the Sanctuary of the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre , the golden award medal.
In 1956 , his permanent pilgrimage took him to France and again to Spain. On September 4, by ironic coincidence, Look magazine publishes its latest chronicle on Cuba, already from the significantly gloomy title: “A report on the situation.”
He stayed at Finca Vigía until the summer of 1960 , and he met Fidel Castro during the celebration of the fishing contest that, since its constitution, bore his name. At Finca Vigía the writing of Paris will end. It was a party , a nostalgic remembrance of his happiest days: his first marriage, his first child and his first book . The emotional imbalance that afflicts him and its consequences, haunt him and hurt him in the most sensitive.
Amid the crisis between the US and Cuba, in an airport transit, journalist and Argentine writer Rodolfo Walsh achieves a brief exchange with him, part Spanish , part English . In the hubbub of farewells and reunions of the airport are floating fragments of dialogue:
“We Cubans, we will win …” says Hemingway.
He adds:
“I am not a yankee, you know?”
In November admitted for psychiatric treatment for the first time. In April of 1961 he was interned again. It is subjected to electroshock sessions. On July 2 is suicidal.
In 1962 , published The Old Man and the Sea in Cuban edition tribute to its author and everyone they knew the story of the old man who fished alone in his boat in the stream of the Gulf, when fourscore and four days did not pick a fish. The story ended the evening he arrived a party of tourists to the terrace, looking down at the water , including empty cans of beer and dead Picúas, a woman saw a great white espinazo with a huge tail stood and it rocked with the tide as the east wind raised a strong and continuous wave at the entrance to the harbor.
Since then, Ernest Hemingway was one of the historical inhabitants of Havana. His ethical code — in some way — is also that of the Cubans, without it being possible to say whose original he is: because man can be destroyed, but never defeated.