Cuba's Adopted Son


Ernest Hemingway, affectionately known as “Papa” to the Cubans who claimed him as their own, was one of the most famous American novelists, short-story writer, and essayist. Cuba adopted him after he adopted Cuba, an island he called home for more than two decades. Even today long after he left this life and his beloved country, Cubans still idolize Hemingway.

Hemingway was an admirer of Hispanic culture. Throughout his life he navigated his way in and out of the Spanish-speaking peoples, from Spain to Cuba. Beginning in the late 1930’s, Hemingway lived out his life in Cuba. He first resided at the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Old Havana, frequenting two bars in particular, El Floridita and La Bodequita del Medio, now internationally famous through his writings. In 1940 upon completion of For Whom the Bell Tolls, he used its earnings of $18,500 to purchase a 15-acre estate outside Havana called “Finca Vigia” (“Lookout Farm”). The Finca presented a spacious, quiet place for him to work, and he settled there to the extent that a man as restless as Ernest Hemingway could settle anywhere. At all the old haunts he frequented, he cultivated a status as a man larger than life, a figure who could out-drink an alcoholic and reel in bigger marlin than professional fishermen.

Finca was where Hemingway kept his fishing boat the Pilar, immortalized in his Nobel Prize-winning novel, The Old Man and the Sea. The protagonist of this novel is an old Cuban fisherman named Santiago, who catches a giant marlin after weeks of disappointment, only to have sharks eat the fish on his return to the harbor. It is believed that a Cuban fisherman who had served as the captain of the Pilar in the late 1930’s was the model for Santiago.

In 1960, the Cold War tensions between the United States and Cuba forced the American writer to choose between his birth home and his home of choice. He supported Fidel Castro’s revolution, but ultimately and sadly left Cuba, his “home,” for good when the living became too complicated. Castro returned the compliment of the much-loved and honored cultural hero in Cuba by preserving Hemingway’s house, Finca, as a museum, with Pilar as the core attraction.