By Angus MacSwan, Dec 16
HAVANA (Reuters) - "You know how it is there early in the morning in Havana with the bums still asleep against the walls of the buildings; before even the ice wagons come by with ice for the bars?''
So wrote Ernest Hemingway in the opening lines of ``To Have and Have Not,'' his novel of smuggling and intrigue in Cuba and Key West, and the memory of the American literary icon is very much alive in today's Havana even if ice is often hard to find in the cash-strapped communist-ruled country.
Hemingway lived in Cuba for more than 20 years, fishing for marlin, holding court in its bars and immortalizing the fishermen of Cojimar in his classic ``The Old Man and the Sea.''
While many Cubans hold him in true affection, he also is a large figure in government efforts to lure foreign tourists to an island still heavy with mystique and a sense of adventure.
``For us he is part of our culture, a great man. In spite of his faults he felt for the humble people of Cuba. He was one of us,'' said Miralys Sanchez Pupo, who is helping the Jose Marti International Journalism Institute organize a conference next June to mark the 100th anniversary of Hemingway's birth by visiting his haunts and discussing his legacy.
For the true aficionado or the tourist seeking the alluring Havana of the 1940s and 1950s, his trail is easy to track. A good place to start is the Hotel Ambos Mundos in the old city, where Hemingway often stayed in the 1930s while still living in Key West, then a ferry trip away across the Florida Straits.
A LOOK AT HEMINGWAY'S OLD ROOM FOR $2
The hotel was recently restored, and for a $2 fee visitors can look at the corner room where he wrote ``For Whom the Bell Tolls'' after returning from the Spanish Civil War in 1938. It is kept as it was in those days, guide Esperanza Garcia says, though the old typewriter on a writing desk was not his. The balcony has a splendid view of old Havana and the harbor.
Even though the U.S. government bans its citizens from visiting Cuba as tourists, there are many Americans among the sightseers, Garcia said.
From the Ambos Mundos it is short walk to La Bodeguita del Medio, once a Bohemian watering hole, now usually packed with tourists clicking cameras.
Here Hemingway downed mojitos -- a thirst-quenching rum drink -- while hobnobbing with pals like Errol Flynn. Other famous past patrons include former Chilean President Salvador Allende and Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen.
Graffiti from legions of customers covers its walls and a sign over the antique General Electric refrigerator in the novelist's handwriting says, ``Mi mojito en la Bodeguita, mi daiquiri en El Floridita -- Ernest Hemingway,'' although some have questioned whether it is the real thing.
El Floridita is within staggering distance, on a corner of Calle del Obispo. It too has been renovated, more elegant now than when Hemingway downed daiquiris there with Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy and bullfighting legend Luis Miguel Dominguin. A bust of Hemingway overlooks his favorite corner and a framed article from an old Esquire magazine describes it as one of the best bars in the world and an international crossroads.
PEOPLE CALLED 'PAPA' AND HE WAVED
``He was a very popular man,'' red-liveried barman Rolando Quinones said. ``I saw him in the streets many times. He would stand on the balcony of Ambos Mundos and people would call up 'Papa,' and he would wave.''
You will not find many ordinary Cubans in the bar today; few could afford the drinks. The daiquiri, which he described in ''Islands in the Stream'' as feeling ``the way downhill glacier skiing feels running though powdered snow,'' costs $6.
``Everywhere you see the name Hemingway it means the price is three times more expensive than anywhere else,'' Franco Divila, a tourist from Montreal, said.
Hemingway kept two drinking cups in El Floridita, Quinones said, one that stayed in the bar and another that he would fill for the drive home to his villa at Finca la Vigia, about 10 miles out of town in San Francisco de Paula.
The villa was found by his third wife, Martha Gelhorn, after she tired of living in the hotel, and he lived there between travels from 1940 until his death in Idaho in 1961.
Visitors can peer through the windows and see it much as it was. There is a huge collection of books, jazz records, stuffed heads of animals shot on African safaris -- ``don't know how a writer could write surrounded by dead animals,'' British novelist Graham Greene once reportedly said -- a ceramic plate depicting a bull that was a gift from Picasso, bullfight posters, a carbine and a collection of bayonets and daggers.
In the lush tropical garden is a swimming pool where Ava Gardner once swam naked. After Hemingway committed suicide, his widow Mary Welsh gave the property to Cuba's Communist government, which was about to expropriate it anyway.
DISLIKED BATISTA BUT WORRIED ABOUT CASTRO
Hemingway's views on the 1959 Cuban revolution remain a matter of debate. He disliked the ``murderers and thieves'' of the Batista dictatorship that Fidel Castro's rebels overthrew and in 1960 he wrote that he believed in the revolution was necessary. But he also worried that the new rulers might abuse power once they held it.
Hemingway and Castro, who cites Hemingway as one of his favorite authors, met only once, at a fishing tournament in 1960. A famous photograph documents the meeting.
It is in the fishing village of Cojimar, where Hemingway kept his boat Pilar and whose fishermen he befriended, that some authenticity survives. The Terraza restaurant overlooking the cove still serves good seafood at good prices, its walls lined with fishing photographs.
At a ramshackle bar on the promenade, locals drink cheap fiery rum, talk about the wars they have seen in Africa and Central America and bemoan the loss of the fishing fleet.
By an old Spanish fortress on the water's edge is a bust of Hemingway made from boat propellers donated by fishermen. In a small house up a hill sits Gregorio Fuentes, the writer's fishing guide and friend for 30 years and one of the models for the ``Old Man and the Sea.''
Now 101, Fuentes shakes a visitor's hand with a strong grip but appears lost in his memories as he peers at the darkening sky, sniffing the weather like the ancient mariner he is. His grandson, Rafael Vargas Fuentes, does the talking.
``Hemingway loved Cuba and the Cuban people,'' he said. ``If tourists come here and learn why, then that is good.''
Reuters/Variety
18:37 12-16-98
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited