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• 01 / 21 / 2010

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US and Cuban experts are teaming up to try to save the Cuba home where Ernest Hemingway lived for more than two decades and penned his classic "The Old Man and the Sea," official media said Wednesday.

Cuba's National Patrimony office chief Margarita Ruiz inked an agreement with the private US Finca Vigia Foundation to step up efforts to preserve and restore Finca Vigia villa.

The colonial home outside Havana is now crumbling in some places, the Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma reported.

It did not put a figure on the cost of saving the whitewashed home the US foundation says is "filled with original furniture, 9,000 books, artwork, and several thousand irreplaceable letters, photographs, documents, and manuscripts.

"The preservation of the documents and repair of the villa must occur immediately, before all is lost forever," the Boston-based US foundation says on its website.

The Nobel Prize winner's home here officially has been a Cuban museum since 1961.

Though Cuba and the United States do not have full diplomatic ties they have seen cultural exchanges increase somewhat since US President Barack Obama took office a year ago.

Source: AFP