• Submitted by: manso
• Arts and Culture
• 05 / 01 / 2011

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By Janice Law. Contributor. Published May 1, 2011. COJIMAR, Cuba — “Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated. He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and of the lions on the beach.”

These exquisitely crafted words, among the most famous literary quotes in the English language, earned their American author and journalist, Ernest Hemingway, both the Nobel Prize in literature and the Pulitzer prize for his novel, “The Old Man and the Sea.”

As our tour group lazed through lunch at Las Terrazas beachside restaurant, mentioned in the book, I snuck away from the salsa music, down the quiet block along the very Cuba shoreline Hemingway uses to set the scene for the novel.

We were 10 miles east of Havanna, en route to nearby Finca Vigia (Lookout House) where from 1940-60 Hemingway novels “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” “A Moveable Feast” and “The Old Man and the Sea.”

Since high school, I’ve longed to see Finca Vigia, now a museum. Vigia was the last stop on my decades-long literary pilgrimage.

I’ve visited his languid house at Key West, his cheerful Chicago birthplace, his loved Pamplona, Spain, Paris, and stood at his poignant gravesite in Ketchum, Idaho — years to the exact day, July 2, 1961, he took his own life.

Hemingway haunts are multiple on this controversial island where I traveled as a U.S.-sanctioned delegate of the American Association of Museums to meet for six days with Cuban museum personnel on issues of mutual concern.

Although tourists are not allowed inside the Finca, it was thrilling to peek through every window, climb the narrow, three-story tower, walk under the arbor where so many of the world’s famous personalities sat and view Hemingway’s fishing boat Pilar. In 2006, Cuba sent 11,000 of his personal documents to the JFK Presidential Library in Boston for digitalization.

In downtown Havana, Room 511 of Hotel Ambos, where Hemingway began “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and other works, military boots and a jacket he wore in World War I share the closet with a matador’s jewel-studded chaquetilla (jacket) once worn by Antonio Ordonez Araujo (1932-98) one of Spain’s iconic bullfighters. The multicolored Suit of Lights seems, in its visual meld of skill, glamour and teasing-death danger, to exemplify the derring-do life of the man to whom it was gifted: Hemingway.

Beside Hemingway’s glass-cased typewriter is a sheet of a “For Whom the Bell Tolls” draft, handwritten in pencil, the lines slanting sharply downward to the right.

Several bar-restaurants in downtown Havanna also were Hemingway favorites, including Floridita and La Bodequita del Medio, which I visited.

Cuba has a robust art scene. Poets, writers and artists are everywhere and music/dance performances abound.

We visited the delightful studio of José Fuser, an effusive artist who works in ceramics, oil and several other mediums to produce colorful artworks — not only in his own home, but on walls and fences in the surrounding neighborhood about 20 miles from Havana.

Source: http://galvestondailynews.com/story/228686/