Saturday, 5 February 2011. So to Cuba then, at LAST, 45 years after I first got into Hemingway in Uganda after a teacher gave me his copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls. I was a melancholic teenager drawn to stories of extreme courage and stubborn idealism and weepy endings. My family life was wretched and crying over fiction provided relief. The author was in East Africa twice, in the Thirties and Fifties, when my uncle supplied him with guns. Mr Hemingway, said Uncle, had overcome near-death accidents and illnesses and was unafraid. Unafraid. I wanted to be unafraid, too. In the year he killed himself (1961), I read all his books. Some twice.">Saturday, 5 February 2011. So to Cuba then, at LAST, 45 years after I first got into Hemingway in Uganda after a teacher gave me his copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls. I was a melancholic teenager drawn to stories of extreme courage and stubborn idealism and weepy endings. My family life was wretched and crying over fiction provided relief. The author was in East Africa twice, in the Thirties and Fifties, when my uncle supplied him with guns. Mr Hemingway, said Uncle, had overcome near-death accidents and illnesses and was unafraid. Unafraid. I wanted to be unafraid, too. In the year he killed himself (1961), I read all his books. Some twice.">

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Ernest Hemingway's Cuba

Saturday, 5 February 2011. So to Cuba then, at LAST, 45 years after I first got into Hemingway in Uganda after a teacher gave me his copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls. I was a melancholic teenager drawn to stories of extreme courage and stubborn idealism and weepy endings.

My family life was wretched and crying over fiction provided relief. The author was in East Africa twice, in the Thirties and Fifties, when my uncle supplied him with guns. Mr Hemingway, said Uncle, had overcome near-death accidents and illnesses and was unafraid. Unafraid. I wanted to be unafraid, too. In the year he killed himself (1961), I read all his books. Some twice.

It was obvious why Hemingway was excited by the wilds of East Africa. But for me, Cuba – his home for 20 years – felt more exhilarating, far away, a land of danger and dance, dazzle and death. Magazine articles described island fishermen (including Hemingway) who caught huge marlins and sharks, cock fights, the edgy culture, high passion – love and hate, brutality and tenderness – and political rebellions led by compelling anti-imperialists with lots of dark hair.

Che T-shirts were worn by Lefties across Africa as the Cold War spread through the continent. I had the T-shirt and the politics and, at long last, the trip. As we planned the visit, what struck me was how long the plucky island had stood up to the overbearing USA and its petulant sanctions.

Source: www.independent.co.uk/travel/americas/

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