Ernest Hemingway’s Final Triumph in Cuba

AN FRANCISCO DE PAULA, CUBA—The secret to improved U.S.-Cuban relations overlooks Havana from a proud bluff about 20 kilometres west of the Cuban capital.

Built in the 1880s, the beige stucco mansion known as La Finca Vigia is still standing after all these years, bordered by royal palms and casuarina trees — its roof intact, its plaster walls whole and its massive library mildew-free — despite more than a century of tropical glare, withering temperatures and occasional hurricanes, not to mention dust, pollen and insects.

By rights, the building should have crumbled long ago, and it almost certainly would have, were it not for a surprising collaboration between a group of Cubans and Americans, citizens of two long-feuding countries, who happen to share an over-riding bond — their passion for a certain Nobel-prize-winning American writer who used to live in Cuba.

As diplomats from Washington and Havana work to re-establish diplomatic relations following a half-century of bitter discord, they might consider examining the minor miracle known as La Finca Vigia — proof positive that the two countries can get along.

All it takes is a common cause. In this case, the Cuban legacy of Ernest Hemingway.

Revered in two countries A source of national pride in the United States, Hemingway is also revered in Cuba, a country he lived in and loved for more than two decades.“We are the longest-running cultural project Cuba has had with any country,” says American Mary-Jo Adams. “We are very proud of that. How ironic that it’s with the United States.”

Adams is executive director of the Finca Vigia Foundation, an organization based in Boston that works from a distance to preserve Hemingway’s Cuban home and its priceless contents, including art works by Pablo Picasso and Roberto Domingo, as well as room after room of spare modernist furniture, plus myriad white-plaster walls decked by African wildlife trophies. Hemingway’s Cuban possessions also comprise what may well be the late author’s most precious possessions of all — a vast archive comprising more than 9,000 books, thousands of vinyl LPs, more than 3,000 photos, 2,000 miscellaneous documents and hundreds of personal letters.

For the past 10 years, technical experts and academics from both countries have laboured together to salvage and conserve La Finca Vigia, Hemingway’s home from 1939 to 1960, the year he reluctantly left the island due to failing health. Not long after his departure, he killed himself in Ketchum, Idaho, with a shotgun blast to the head.

Operated by the Cubans as a museum since 1964, the building steadily deteriorated. By 2004, La Finca Vigia was in a parlous state.

Cuban workers had to drag all the furniture out of Hemingway’s studio — the very room where he wrote The Old Man and the Sea — because the ceiling was ready to crash down.

“It was a mess,” says Adams. “There was mildew and mould leaking into the house, dangerously close to the books.”

So, they replaced the roof — adding a vapour barrier — while also restoring the interior and exterior walls and repairing a watchtower that rises above the mansion’s southeastern corner. The tower lends La Finca Vigia its name, which is Spanish for The Watchtower Residence.

To replace the stucco faithfully, experts from the two sides managed to locate the quarry that had provided sand for the original façade. They also were able to obtain an exact colour match from the original paint manufacturer.

They also exposed a panel in the main bathroom, revealing inscriptions penned in Hemingway’s own hand. These turned out to be a daily record of his weight fluctuations and blood pressure, maintained over a period of three years, an incongruous pattern of behaviour for a man who would eventually take his own life.

“He was obsessed with keeping track,” says Adams.

Hemingway the packrat

For their part, the Americans provided technical expertise, including architects and engineers. The Cubans produced the materials, the manpower and the money.

“We are not allowed to bring money,” says Adams, citing just one of many restrictions the Americans face owing to the economic embargo their country has maintained against Cuba since 1961.Working within the narrow constraints of the law, the experts have managed to rescue the buildings at La Finca Vigia. They are now striving to preserve the contents, too.

For the past eight years, U.S. and Cuban preservationists have been cataloguing, conserving and digitizing the vast array of documents Hemingway — a packrat, it turns out — accumulated during his long Cuban sojourn.

“Of all the Hemingway archives in the world, this is the most complex,” says Ada Rosa Alfonso Rosales, Cuban director of the Finca Vigia museum. “There are scrapbooks, photos, maps. We have many art pieces. There are originals and lithographs that are very valuable. There are stamps, lottery tickets.”

About a quarter of the books are inscribed with marginalia in Hemingway’s own hand. The contents have to be photographed page by page, an intricate operation considering that many of the books are in such delicate state their bindings would burst if the covers were fully opened.

“Not all of the books will be preserved, says Adams, “but those with writing in the margins will.”

A lifelong love

Hemingway began visiting Cuba in 1928, generally staying at the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Old Havana, where his customary room is preserved as a shrine. In 1939, he rented La Finca Vigia, later purchasing the property. He shared the home with Martha Gellhorn, his third wife, and later with Mary Welsh, his fourth.

Whenever he could, Hemingway repaired to the coastal town of Cojimar, where he and Gregorio Fuentes — reputedly the model for the old man in Hemingway’s magnificent novel about the unforgiving sea — would set out aboard El Pilar to hunt for tuna or sailfish. Restored several years ago, the yacht is now on wooden blocks by the swimming pool at La Finca Vigia.Like the house, the yacht is monitored around the clock by electronic devices that record humidity, temperature and other conditions.“Sunlight is the most dangerous,” says Adams. “They need window shades, but that falls under commerce.”

So American experts obtained permission from Washington to provide the shades, and now carry them to Cuba with their luggage, six or seven units at a time.

This might seem an onerous process but at least Hemingway’s Cuban legacy is being preserved.

Rosales is hopeful the job will become smoother once diplomatic relations have been restored, but she isn’t taking anything for granted.

“I prefer to say, ‘Let’s wait.’ I’m optimistic but with reservations.”