Ernesto Page 11
Did Jane jump because her husband told her to stay, and she refused to be told what to do? Was she overcome by a sudden desire to patch things up with Ernest before his wife arrived the following day? Had Ernest’s conscience or his preoccupation for the safety of his sons compelled him to break off this vacant, uncontrollable, and potentially destructive relationship by suggesting that he would be travelling with his wife to Africa without Jane? Only Jane knows for sure what was passing through her mind the moment she jumped. The impact broke her back, and she spent the next five months in a hospital in a body cast. The surgery left a seven-inch scar down of the back of the former beauty queen and another on her pretty leg, where the doctors took a bone graft to repair her fractured vertebrae. From the hospital in New York, Jane wrote the Hemingways to advise them that they were fitting her for a new “iron virgin” body cast, which she would have to wear for a year.108
Like Ernest, Jane would later be diagnosed as a manic-depressive personality.109 “If only she had been at rest with herself, with her own talents,” lamented her son in an interview years later as a sort of explanation for a phrase they had had inscribed in an open stone book atop her grave: “Talents too many, not enough of any.”110
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In June, a rumor rustled through Havana that Machado would be stepping down, so the president took to the podium to announce defiantly that he would remain.111 Though his countrymen possessed many interesting opposing opinions, he said, they could rest assured that everything he did, he did for the good of the republic, and cheekily, he suggested a measure for them to reform: “Why not reinstate the office of vice president?” A gratuitous insult for an angry mob.112
Like a stray sniper’s bullet, a review of Death in the Afternoon appeared in June. It was written by a colleague and former friend from the early years when they were journalists covering events in Europe just after the war. Shooting from the New Republic, Max Eastman’s review, “Bull in the Afternoon,” attacked Hemingway for “False Hair on the Chest School of Writing” and challenged him to “Come out from behind that false hair on your chest, Ernest. We all know you.”113 Frothing, Ernest returned fire with a formal letter of complaint to the editors and threats to sue the magazine if they did not issue an apology. Complaining to Perkins about Eastman, a fellow author at Scribner and Sons, Hemingway called him a “groper in sex (with the hands, I mean), [and] a traitor in politics” and announced that he was no longer a friend, but an enemy whom he would soon be beating with his fists.114
With the heat rising to a boiling point at the end of July, the city’s bus drivers had had enough and declared a strike. By August 1, the streetcar drivers joined in, and by the seventh, it was a general strike, with masses of people gathering in the streets of the capital as the president declared a state of emergency and martial law. Crowds advancing up the Paseo del Prado clashed with cavalry and infantry units sent to squelch the rebellion. Killing dozens of people, the army attempted to slow the advance of an angry mob by firing shots into the crowd, but they were unable to do so, or halt the street celebrations that erupted when the rumor circulated that Machado had agreed to resign (caused by Welles’s suggestion that he take a “leave of absence”). The protestors overtook the presidential palace and summarily executed several members of the homicidal secret police that they had long endured.
Refusing to surrender without a fight, the dictator sent his death squads to gun down hundreds of young activists in the street.115 On a short stop in Cuba from August 4 to 7, Ernest, Patrick, Bumby (Gregory, not yet two, was left in the care of nanny Ada in Key West), Pauline, and Virginia Pfeiffer witnessed violent clashes between the rebels and Machado’s army firsthand just before departing for Paris. Having witnessed partidos de la porra billy-club and machine-gun Cuban youth in the back (la ley de la fuga demanded that all who fled were guilty by implication and must be shot) and leave their bleeding corpses in the street, Ernest wrote Perkins on the tenth: “I hope to Christ they get rid of that lousy tyrant. Saw everything that happened—No not everything—but what one person could see—keeping in the streets when supposed to be fatal and with my customary fragility or whatever G. Stein called it had no marks—Pauline and Jinny both fired on in the streets—food cut off for 3 days.”116
On a Pan Am seaplane arranged by the American ambassador, President Machado and his entourage fled safely with twenty-two pieces of luggage to the Bahamas before dawn on the twelfth of August and soon after obtained asylum in the United States where he happily lived out his days on Miami Beach.117
On the first of September, another hurricane pounded the Cuban coast, causing extensive damage and inciting looting in a country with a rapidly deteriorating rule of law.118 A social cyclone would follow, a coup d’état dizzying in its velocity and effects. Gifting asylum to Machado, President Roosevelt deployed US destroyers Taylor, Claxton, and Hamilton to the Cuban coast. Roosevelt told members of the press that he was compelled to respond to rising instability, but he emphasized he did so only to protect Americans and that he had “full knowledge and approval” from the provisional president, Dr. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes.119 A former ambassador to the United States and a personal friend of Sumner Welles, Céspedes was the son of the legendary plantation owner who freed his slaves, the founding father of Cuban independence, but this bloodline, during tense times, inspired a brittle confidence.
After Machado’s flight to Nassau, Bahamas, the discovery of the bodies of sergeant Miguel Ángel Hernández, student Félix Alpízar, and labor leader Margarito Iglesias, tortured then murdered in the military fortress of Atarés, fueled the anger of dozens of enlisted men hitherto humiliated by their superiors.120 On September 4, under the emboldened direction of a lowly sergeant named Fulgencio Batista, a cadre of sergeants from Camp Colombia commenced arresting officers in what would later be known as the “Sergeants’ Revolt.”121 The tables turned on Machado’s death squads, who now found themselves at the mercy of an angry mob or behind the walls of the secret dungeons like Principe Hill, where many of them had once been wardens. US warships moved into position on September 5 but did not attack; their mission was to keep the peace, not incite more disorder, violence, and instability.122 In the vacuum of power left by Machado, a five-man pentarchy formed, composed of José M. Irisarri, Porfirio Franca, Guillermo Portela, Ramón Grau San Martín, and Sergio Carbó.123
Of mixed race and from a family of cane cutters from Banes in Oriente Province, Batista originated from humble roots, a product of the masses and possessing the intelligence and industry to work his way up through unassuming professions (barber, tailor, carpenter, cane worker, railroader on the sugar central lines, and later a solider and stenographer). From his unglamorous billet of stenographer, he observed Machado’s trials make mockery of justice in Cuba’s courts and saw the suppressed anger of the attendees. Representing the enlisted men, Batista benefited from an army at his back and formed alliances with the pentarchy that represented the interests of students, teachers, journalists, doctors, and workers of the ABC and DEU.124 The younger student militant groups distanced themselves from charismatic old guard members like Menocal. The pentarchy, specifically Sergio Carbó, a respected journalist and a key link between the students and the sergeants, told Batista on September 8 that they had voted to promote him to the rank of colonel and make him military chief of staff.125
When President Céspedes returned on September 9 from a visit to the hurricane-strewn provinces of Santa Clara and Matanzas, the pentarchy was awaiting him in the presidential palace, supported by Batista’s sergeants. They forced Céspedes to resign and named Dr. Ramón Grau San Martín as their new president and Antonio Guiteras, a proponent of revolutionary socialism, as their vice president, to the American ambassador’s surprise. With warships floating in Havana harbor, President Roosevelt, Ambassador Welles, and his successor Jefferson Caffery reiterated the United States’ “commitment to nonintervention and Cuban autonomy,” yet privately discussed t
heir options. In their communications, their distaste for the left-leaning elements coming to power was clear: Grau San Martín’s group was “utterly impractical,” “communistic,” “radicals,” “irresponsible,” and “mislead[ing] the people” with “utopian dreams.”126
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Depositing their children in a maid’s care in an apartment in Paris, the Hemingways set sail for African adventures while his first “Cuban Letter” surfaced in Esquire. Reeling readers in as the star of the new magazine, Ernest crowed to the largely male audience of Esquire that “they are a fish all right!” and he ought to know, for that summer he had bagged fifty-two marlins and two sailfish.127 The article appearing in the autumn of 1933 was called “Marlin off the Morro: A Cuban Letter.” It would be the first in a series of four others, called “Out in the Stream,” “On the Blue Water,” “There She Breaches! Or Moby Dick off the Morro,” and “The Great Blue River”—articles vividly describing the marvels of marlin fishing off the Cuban coast. Though he had occasionally resisted the legend, the Esquire articles seemingly embraced it, calcifying a sensationalized version of himself—a sporting, adventuring, larger-than-life, and international man of letters. In total, he would write twenty-five articles and six stories for Esquire, whose editor had agreed that he would remain the highest paid contributor. The first edition of the magazine sold 105,000 copies, and two years later, it sold half a million copies per month: a record number due to the fame phenomenon that was becoming “Ernest Hemingway.”128
In Esquire, this character, called Hemingway, told readers how to sleep with the hotel curtains open in Havana so the sun hit them in the morning (not too harshly but just early enough so that they could get up in time for fishing), what kind of breakfast to eat so that they would not get nauseated on the boat, what brands of beer were best to drink, what varieties of mangoes and avocados best accompanied a sandwich, and he even suggested a recipe for a delightful “French” dressing.129
As his ship churned through the Red Sea toward Africa, Ernest wrote his five-year-old son Patrick, whom he had nicknamed “Mexican Mouse,” a letter describing all the animals, birds, and trees that he had seen along the way, telling him they would soon be arriving to the Indian Ocean, and ending: “I miss you, old Mex, and will be glad to see you again. Will have plenty of good stories when we come back…Give my best to everybody in Piggott. Go easy on the beer and lay off the hard liquor until I get back. Don’t forget to blow your nose and turn around three times before you go to bed. Your affectionate papa.”130
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Back in Cuba, President Grau San Martín and Vice President Guiteras succeeded in passing a series of reforms that Cuban people believed to be long overdue—raising the minimum wage, guaranteeing free university tuition to the poor, and nullifying the Platt Amendment and Permanent Treaty May 22, 1903. They replaced them with the Treaty of Relations, which guaranteed the United States’ right to rent Guantánamo base, established the Labor Department, conceded women’s suffrage, established an eight-hour workday, helped leasing farmers to buy land, granted autonomy to the University of Havana, and nationalized the Cuban Electric Company. Though the Grau San Martín–Guiteras government courted the American ambassador, the progressive agenda—what would later be known as “the Government of 100 days”—worried Welles, and Caffey, his successor, who both gravitated toward Batista as a source of authority, stability, and prosperity, for he controlled the army, could crush the Communists, and protect American businesses on the island.131
Retreating from Batista’s sergeants, four hundred of Machado’s army officers holed up in the Hotel Nacional, which was also the temporary residence to the American ambassador and other diplomats. The sergeants and their student allies encircled the hotel in September and would not allow them to leave.132 On October 2, they ended the siege with light shelling and a frontal assault; during the “Battle of Hotel Nacional,” Batista’s artillery guns from positions on land and sea sent projectiles crashing through the outer walls of the hotel and into its deluxe suites. When the fog of battle lifted, Batista’s sergeants had taken the day with each side suffering twenty casualties. More than 280 more officers were in prison, and the opposition’s hopes were squashed.133
As astute at business as he was at politics, Batista benefited from the financial support of the Mob.134 That the Sicilian Mafia had been importing rum from Cuba since the era of Prohibition was no great secret. The Atlantic coasts of the island—privileged leeward and windward, yet offering plentiful coves and inlets for smugglers—were known as “rum row.” The “smugglers’ paradise” that was Cuba blossomed into a hotbed of black-market business through the perfect marriage of mafia bosses and politicians, like Jimmy Walker, the Irish-American New York mayor who visited Havana in 1927 and was given first-class treatment by a gang of real estate developers, bank presidents, the president of the Cuban Tourism Commission, the mayor of Havana, and the chief of police as he visited Oriental Park Racetrack and the Jockey Club.135 When the boisterous Chicago mobster Al Capone came to Havana, he took full advantage of the city and made no attempt to hide his presence: booking the entire sixth floor of the Sevilla-Biltmore Hotel, staying in room 615, and visiting the racetrack and opera house. In 1928, the same year that Ernest and Pauline first arrived from Paris, Capone had opened a pool hall near Oriental Park Racetrack in Marianao but closed it soon afterward; leering, he told a reporter from the Havana Post that Havana had not been the right fit for “this particular type of business.” He had pulled one over by using the joint as a distraction and control point for the import of contraband.136
In Havana on business during the twenties, mobsters Joseph “Doc” Stacher and Meyer Lansky guided Fulgencio Batista into their room at the Hotel Nacional and opened a suitcase of money. After gaping at it for a long moment, Batista understood and shook their hands. Before leaving the room, the mobsters had guaranteed Batista $3 to $5 million in cash annually and a percentage of their profits in exchange for a monopoly on his island’s casinos, but the timing could not have been worse.137
The stock market crash and the Great Depression gutted tourism in Cuba and revenues plummeted from $26 million in 1928–29 to less than $5 million in 1933–34. The economic downslide, combined with political upheaval, cooled prospects and put mafia plans for expansion on hold until complications could be resolved. Brutality and chaos were bad for business, repugnant to the international press, and ever more unbearable for inhabitants.
President Roosevelt, hoping to stimulate positive change, sent Jefferson Caffery, Welles’s replacement, to Cuba on December 18 as the new ambassador.138 Though expectations were high that a new man in Havana would mean a change in policy, Caffery’s arrival dampened the mood. “My country’s policy toward Cuba will remain the same.”139 Or as he put it shortly after: “Diplomacy, as I interpret it, nowadays consists largely in cooperation with American business,” assuring his place as the American ambassador for the next three years.140 With support from Caffery and the army, Batista pressured Grau San Martín and Guiteras to tender their resignations and depart for Mexico, leaving Carlos Hevia as provisional president for six hours and setting off a workers’ strike. By January 20, 1934, the National Union had negotiated a place at the table, with Carlos Mendieta as their puppet president. But as commander in chief with American support, Batista secured the reins, ruling the island as a strongman for stabilization of legal and illegal business during the next fifteen years as presidents came and went.
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Laid up with dysentery at the well-appointed New Stanley Hotel in Nairobi during the first two weeks of the safari, Ernest returned to the hunt with something to prove and spent the rest of their African trip competing with gentle Charlie Thompson and feeling like an inferior hunter.141 According to his own nonfictional account, he entangled himself in rivalry, comparing every shot, pelt, and act of bravery with those of his friend in a vain compulsion
to demonstrate his superiority that he could not for the life of himself shake. Charlie’s shots seemed to hit their marks while his were always slightly off-center. Next to Charlie’s kudus, rhinos, and lions, his own kudus, rhinos, and lions appeared small and insignificant. Recognizing the pointlessness of his inferiority complex, Ernest made a joke later of his inimical tendencies in Green Hills of Africa, a book in which he poked fun at himself in the pursuit of waterbucks, elands, buffaloes, oryx, zebra, greater kudus, rhinos, leopards, and lions, and chased meaning in the spectacular open country of East Africa—an experience that surpassed his expectations, improved his marriage, and stimulated his imagination tenfold. Pauline’s enlistment of her uncle’s funds for this expedition, her willingness to accompany her husband when other friends had bailed out, and the time that they spent together during the safari seemed to benefit and sustain a marriage…during the following year.142
Travelling back through Paris, the Hemingways retrieved their children and visited old friends, like Sylvia Beach and James Joyce, who got so sozzled during dinner that Hemingway had to sling the Irish writer over his back like a “sack of potatoes” and lug him up several flights of stairs.143 Boarding the liner Paris at Cherbourg, they traversed the ocean to return home via New York. While at sea, Ernest ensorcelled Marlene Dietrich by standing in as her date one evening at dinner with six other couples. Afterward, he began a correspondence and a more-or-less platonic relationship with the famous German-American actress, to whom he often referred fondly thereafter as “the Kraut.” Passing through New York, the Hemingways called on the Murphys, Waldo Peirce, Max Perkins, and Scott Fitzgerald, who was struggling in his personal life and to finish his novel, Tender Is the Night.