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Hemingway Fidel
HAVANA – The celebration of the 50th anniversary of a meeting between former Cuban leader Fidel Castro and famed American writer Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) has begun in a small fishing village east of Havana, where specialists, admirers and fishermen who knew the Nobel Prize winner gathered to pay him homage.

The cultural program began Wednesday with an exhibition of objects and photos donated by local fishermen in the village of Cojimar who used to swap sea stories with Hemingway and through whom the author met Gregorio Fuentes, the first mate of his boat Pilar for many years.

The tribute by the community in Cojimar – the setting for Hemingway’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novella “The Old Man and the Sea” – also included the laying of a wreath at the foot of a Hemingway statue erected in that town in 1962.

The celebration will conclude on Saturday at the Hemingway Marina in Havana, the same facility where Castro and the American novelist met on May 15, 1960, during a marlin fishing tournament that bore the author’s name.

According to the director of the Hemingway Museum in Cuba, Ada Rosa Alfonso, that was the “known meeting” between Castro and the writer, although the former Cuban leader was later quoted in the book of interviews “Cien horas con Fidel” (100 Hours with Fidel) as saying that he had met the author on another occasion, though he did not reveal the location.

Alfonso told Efe that “Fidel was not exactly a fisherman” and so his participation in the tournament was “a way of showing Hemingway his goodwill” and telling him that he was welcome in Cuba following the 1959 revolution that brought him to power.

The expert noted that the “significance” of that moment was Castro’s gesture, although in her judgment it also put an end to an attempt by Washington to pressure Hemingway into leaving the Caribbean island.

“They were two great men who admired each other,” Alfonso said, adding that there are details about the relationship between Castro and the 1954 Nobel Prize winner have still not been clarified.

On July 25, 1960, Hemingway left Finca Vigia, the home outside Havana where he had lived since 1939, and traveled to New York.

That house has since been turned into a museum where more than 22,000 of Hemingway’s books, photos, hunting trophies, weapons and other personal objects are preserved. EFE

Source: www.laht.com/

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