History

 Organizational Background

The Finca Vigía Foundation, formerly the Hemingway Preservation Foundation, was founded in 2002 by Jenny and Frank Phillips and Congressman James P. McGovern. Jenny Phillips was the granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway’s editor and long time friend, Maxwell Perkins.

The Phillips’ enlisted the support of Congressman James P. McGovern (D Massachusetts) and began the bi-national process to save the documents and to preserve the architecture of this historic property. With Congressman McGovern’s leadership, they gained support at the top levels of the Cuban government, including President Fidel Castro who signed the agreement to undertake the preservation project.

The Finca Vigía Foundation’s mission is to provide the research and technical assistance necessary to restore and preserve Ernest Hemingway’s home and its contents at Finca Vigía in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba.

The Foundation became recognized by the IRS as a 501(c) 3 tax-exempt organization in 2004. Frank Phillips and Bob Vila are the Co-Chairs of the Board of Directors. Congressman James P. McGovern Chairs the Foundation’s Advisory Committee. Prior to his death, author Russell Banks Chaired the Board of Literary Advisors. Mary-Jo Adams is the Executive Director.

Hemingway and Cuba: Cultural Significance

Ernest Hemingway, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature, lived in Cuba longer than he lived anywhere else—from 1939-1960, one third of his life. His Cuban home, Finca Vigía, or Lookout Farm, was the only stable residence of his adult life. At the finca, he wrote many of his finest works: For Whom the Bell Tolls, Across the River and Into the Trees, The Old Man and the Sea, A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, and numerous short stories and articles. At Finca Vigía he learned he had been awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature, and donated his gold medal to the Cuban people as a token of the kinship he felt with Cuba. Hemingway’s long and productive life in Cuba is the period that has been studied and understood the least. Hemingway once said, when asked why he lived in Cuba, that it was complicated… but “I work as well there in those cool early mornings as I ever have worked anywhere in the world.”

Finca Vigía has been maintained as a museum for the past 58 years.

Recent Work in Cuba: Overcoming Obstacles, Generating Success

In 2005 the Finca Vigía Foundation began a partnership with The National Trust for Historic Preservation. The partnership gave the Foundation access to some of the finest preservation architects, engineers, and museum curators in the United States.

Since September 2005 the Finca Vigía Foundation has sent technical teams to Cuba comprised of preservation architects, structural engineers, landscape architects, document conservators, and museum collection specialists. We have sent librarians and metadata specialists to Havana to train conservators in Cuba and obtained a visa for the Cuban director of conservation to come to the United States for a three week training course at The North East Document Conservation Center in Andover, MA.

Cuban preservationists have worked closely with specialists from the United States. While Cuban museum authorities did not have all the resources necessary to complete the scientific analyses necessary for comprehensive preservation of the house and its contents, our colleagues in Cuba have made significant contributions by assigning outstanding architects, engineers, conservators and arborists to collaborate with members of the U.S. technical team.

With advice from our technical teams, preservation work on the house by the Cuban team was completed in 2007. Hemingway’s yacht, Pilar, was also restored at that time. A preliminary assessment of the landscape was also made. In June 2008, the first phase of document conservation was completed. More than 3,000 flat documents were conserved and digitized. Images were brought to the United States, encrypted, and stored in cloud by EMC. External hard drives containing the images were given to the John.F. Kennedy Library in Boston and the Consejo Nacional de Patrimonio Cultural in Cuba.

In January 2010 the Finca Vigía Foundation signed a second three-year accord with the Consejo Nacional de Patrimonio to formalize the document conservation efforts going forward. A third accord was signed in 2014, a fourth in 2018.

To date, more than 10,000 documents have been conserved or received initial stabilizing treatments. Digital images of the documents have been brought to the United States.

Most recently a Restoration Center was built on site at Museo Hemingway using U.S. materials. The Center contains wet and dry conservation laboratories and a climate controlled archival storage vault to ensure the longevity of the irreplaceable Hemingway documents. The Restoration Center is the first building constructed in Cuba, using US materials and ingenuity, since the late 1950’s. The Cuban Ministry of Culture views this project as a potential prototype to be replicated across the country.

Click here for more details about this unprecedented accomplishment.

Workforce development, mentoring, training, and workshops continue. The construction of the Restoration Center required teaching new building techniques using tools and equipment generally unknown in Cuba, establishing maintenance routines, and creating plans for emergency disaster planning.

Document conservation workshops are on-going in the new Center. Conservators from Museo Hemingway as well as specialists from other museums in Havana have taken part. New equipment in the Center including HVAC systems, an external generator, fume hoods, water tables, and drying racks also requires workforce training and maintenance planning.