Smithsonian.com, April 2, 2019
New Conservation Center to Preserve Hemingway’s Legacy in Cuba
by Brigit Katz
The facility is located at Finca Vigía, the property where Hemingway lived for more than two decades and where he wrote some of his most lauded books
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Finca Vigía photographed in March 1997. (Photo by Marc DEVILLE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-conservation-center-preserve-hemingways-legacy-cuba-180971847/#Fx96DPX8PBQ8ikig.99
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When Ernest Hemingway left his large, Spanish-style house on the outskirts of Havana amid rising tensions between Cuba and the United States, he didn’t know he would never again return. But in 1961, just shy of a year since leaving the country suddenly at the urging of the U.S. Embassy, the author committed suicide. Thousands of documents and possessions belonging to Hemingway and his family were still at Finca Vigía, or “Lookout Farm,” as the sprawling Cuban property was known, and many of them remain there to this day. Now, according to the Associated Press reports, a new conservation center on the grounds is working to preserve the relics Hemingway left behind.
The state-of-the-art center, which cost $1.2 million to build, has been under construction since 2016. It is a joint project between Cuba’s National Cultural Heritage Council and the Boston-based Finca Vigía Foundation, which works in collaboration with Cuban partners to maintain the Hemingway’s home. The facility will be responsible for handling the mammoth task of cleaning and preserving the author’s papers; when he died, his library alone contained 9,000 books, many of which had Hemingway’s scribbles in the margins. There were also thousands of photographs, letters and telegrams, along with a collection of manuscripts and galley proofs, according to the foundation.
Many of those documents are now held at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston. After Hemingway’s suicide, his widow, Mary, received special permission from former President Kennedy to retrieve personal items from their Cuba home at a time when Americans were not allowed to travel there, reports WGBH. After Kennedy was assassinated, Mary donated a trove of her husband’s papers to his library. But other documents remained at Finca Vigía.
At a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the center, Grisell Fraga, director of the Ernest Hemingway Museum in Key West, Florida, praised the faculty. “[I]t will allow us to contribute to safeguarding the legacy of Ernest Hemingway in Cuba,” Fraga said, as the AP reports.