THE WRITER AND THE ISLAND. HEMINGWAY AND HIS DAYS IN CUBA

by Fabio Massimo Penna

Visiting Cuba also means retracing the years that have passed on the Caribbean island by the great American writer.

Hemingway and Cuba. A great love. He arrived on the island of the Great Antilles in 1939 and remained there until 1960. To attract him in an irresistible way was the Cuban sea in which he could devote himself to deep-sea fishing of marlin, he who from a young age had been started by his father in hunting and fishing activities. His life in Havana is also prolific at the literary level there, in fact, the masterpieces For Who Rings the Bell (1940), written almost entirely in Cuba, and The Old Man and the Sea (1952). Hemingway's passage to the Caribbean island has left many traces, starting with Finca Vigia, the hilltop house near Havana where the author of Fiesta (1926) lived from 1939 to 1960. Finca Vigia currently houses the museum dedicated to Hemingway, where everything is preserved exactly as it was when the writer left the island. Other notable tracks are the locals he loved to frequent. Favourites for his evenings were the Bodeguita del Medio and the cocktail bar El Floridita, where he used to taste excellent daiquiri. Inside the room is a statue of the American novelist. Immortal memory of Hemingway's passion for Cuba and for fishing is The Old Man and the Sea, alate masterpiece in which he describes the daily struggle for the survival of the elderly Cuban fisherman Santiago. The story sees Santiago fighting desperately first to catch a huge and stubborn swordfish and then confronting a group of sharks who intend to feed on the fish tied to the boat. The story narrated reflects the main theme of Hemingway's poetry, that is, the continuing challenge that man is forced to engage with nature for his own survival. It was his harsh experiences of war that led him to mature this conception of existence as a continuous struggle to stay alive. This attitude prompts him to record in his works the clash with the hostile environment of the peoples with whom his wandering existence brought him from time to time in contact.

Hemingway has moved steadily in his life from the United States to Italy, France, Spain to Cuba. His commitment to the war front both as a fighter (in Italy he is wounded and receives decorations such as the American war cross and the Italian silver medal) that as a special invitation (he is a chronicler during the Spanish Civil War) testifies to his frantic desire to live and his impatient curiosity. Important is the experience in the Iberian Peninsula where he had arrived in 1936 sent by the North American Newspaper Alliance for a report on the Civil War. During this time he wrote the texts of the documentary Tierra de Espana and offered his voice to comment on the images of the fighting in order to push the Americans to stand against the Francoists. His active participation in the great events of history finds its counterbalance in a writing that rests its foundations on the exaltation of honor and courage. Hemingway's writing, which was born as a journalist and chronicler, shows a style that is affected by this formation: dry, incisive, with the prevalence of short and synthetic periods. This quick and essential language allows a direct grip on events and the maintenance of the freshness and immediacy of the facts. From his experience on the Italian front was born Farewell to Arms (1929), a story of the events of an American who fought in Italy during the First World War while the period of chronicler of the Spanish Civil War returns in the pages of For Who Rings the Bell, a novel that tells the story of an American who in Spain joins the republicans against the Francoist side and while everything falls lives a love story with the 19-year-old Spanish Maria. The traumas of war always have dramatic consequences for Hemingway's heroes as for Jake, the protagonist of Fiesta, who a wound in battle has made sexually powerless. Hemingway's work is global, and the accolades are wasted from the 1953 Pulitzer Prize to the Nobel Prize in Literature he was awarded the following year. The return to the United States from Cuba coincides, however, with a period of severe depression: after a first suicide attempt the writer took his own life in 1961.