Dear Friends,
Ken Burns recently underscored the importance of our on-going project to preserve Ernest Hemingway’s house in Cuba.
And indeed, we very much need your help now. The Boston-based Finca Vigía Foundation is about to launch a major project to shore up a weather-beaten Finca Vigía, Hemingway’s beautiful Cuban villa where he wrote some of his best works.
Hemingway’s Cuban home, where he lived for the last 22 years of his life, is suffering from termite infestation, water damage and destruction from tropical storms. The Foundation’s conservation efforts, Burns said, is “incredibly critical” in preserving this literary shrine.
“The Foundation really needs support,” he told viewers in a recent webinar with co-producer Lynn Novick, promoting the three part Hemingway documentary that recently aired on PBS.
“It really behooves us if we care about it and not just pay lip service …,” he added.
Like Hemingway scholars and others who deeply appreciate his place in American literature, Burns and Novick understand the importance of the Finca among all the places where the writer lived and worked.
“This is the one that’s central to understanding Hemingway,” he said. Visitors, he noted, “feel his presence is in every room.”
The Finca is the only Hemingway house that contains his possessions—among them his furniture, his 9000 book library, his diverse record collection filled with opera and American gospel, his clothing, fishing rods, animal trophies from his time in Africa—and the Royal Arrow typewriter that he used to write many of his great works, including The Old Man and the Sea, A Moveable Feast, and Islands in the Stream.
To learn more about the work of the Finca Vigía Foundation, and to make a tax-deductible contribution please visit https://fincafoundation.org/support-us/
We are grateful for your consideration.
With warm regards,
Bob Vila
Co-Chair, Board of Directors
Frank Phillips
Co-Chair, Board of Directors
Ambassador Vicki Huddleston
Director and Chair, Development Committee