Hemingway's Notebook

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Ernest Hemingway, tired of life at Key West, where friends of his second wife kept him from his work, retreated to Cuba in 1939. In April that year, at the insistence of a friend named Martha Gellhorn, he rented a house at Finca Vigía, which is in the hills of San Francisco de Paula south of Havana. He eventually bought the property and it was his principal residence until he killed himself in Idaho in July 1961. His house is preserved today as a museum by the government of Fidel Castro.

Castro apologists insist that Ernest Hemingway was a longtime “friend of the revolution.” This is based on his affinity for the down-and-out waterfront characters he wrote about, drank with, and sailed with. However, Hemingway was a closet patrician and his associations with gangsters and revolutionaries, simple fishermen and smugglers, however genuine at the time, was a form of “slumming” for the doctor’s son from Oak Park, Illinois. A number of the late writer’s friends have said Hemingway’s obvious distaste for Batista in the days before the Cuban revolution was matched only by his later distaste for Castro’s people.

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