Ernesto Read online

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  World War II spread its appendages around all facets of human affairs. With everything at stake, war powers amped up to collect every shard and crumb in mobilization against the enemy, insisting it would take every father, mother, daughter, and son to achieve victory against the Nazis. When the United States declared war on the Axis powers, Batista’s government pledged Cuban allegiance to the cause. Yet among the thousands that had fled to Cuba from the Spanish Civil War were many fascist Falangist elements that had triumphed over the Loyalists due to Hitler’s and Mussolini’s support.9 So American and Cuban officials were justifiably concerned that these elements loyal to the Axis could sabotage Allied interests.

  Ernest had recently written the introduction to an anthology of short stories, Men at War. Eager to participate in the conflicts he had just been touting in the anthology, the author assured American ambassador to Cuba, Spruille Braden, that he could assemble his network of contacts from the Spanish Civil War to weed out Falangists on the island, frustrate Axis missions, and arrest any Nazis operating in their hemisphere. Enjoying the support of both American and Cuban governments, the writer “enlisted a bizarre combination of Spaniards: some bar tenders; a few wharf rats; some priests; assorted exiled counts and dukes; several Loyalists and Francistas. He built up an excellent organization and did an A-One job.”10 Ernest expressively dubbed the spy cell the “Crook Factory,” but whether its informants were behind any of the numerous round-ups and convictions of suspected Axis agents in America and Cuba that year remains classified.

  Observing his anti-fascist campaigns in Spain and speculating on his Communist sympathies, Soviet agents approached Ernest in Havana at the Floridita at least twice in September 1942, but nothing, other than inebriation, resulted from these meetings.11 Yet the author’s “premature fascism” with Loyalist Spain, the Soviet “friends” and spies who pursued him, his recent travels to Communist China, and his rather unconventional involvement in a renegade intelligence ring raised eyebrows among several agents of the FBI in Havana, toward whom the writer had friskily expressed his disgust.12 These agents opened a case on the author and reported his every move to the director of “the Bureau” at that time, J. Edgar Hoover.

  Hoover read these reports with indulgent good humor. But in his own handwriting, at the bottom of the report, the director concluded that Ernest had been an impassioned author with a grand imagination, not a traitor to his country.13 Hoover advised his agents to stand down, for it was only natural for a courageous and inventive artist like Ernest Hemingway to loathe their dull and dutiful kind.14 Thus clearing his name as a loyal American, the director nonetheless advised his agents “to discuss diplomatically with Ambassador Braden the disadvantages” of allowing a civilian, outside the purview of government authority and with a wild imagination, to head up such a mission.15 Though Ernest had hoped to be a spy, the Soviet NKVD (precursor of the KGB), the Office of Strategic Services, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation all seemed to conclude that he never lived up to his full potential.

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  Understanding that supply lines would determine the outcome of the war, German high officials, studying Allied sources of fuel and metal, seized momentum and took to the offensive to cut them off. Admiral Doenitz sent German U-boats to attack key fuel sources in the Caribbean during Operation Drumbeat: mines in Guyana, refineries in Aruba, New Orleans, and Houston, oil tankers as they emerged from Venezuela. From February to November of 1942, the Germans sank over 400 ships worldwide, and 263 of these were in the Caribbean.16 At the entryway to the Caribbean Sea and Gulf Stream leading to the Panama Canal, Cuba occupied a strategic position for controlling naval traffic. On March 12, a German submarine sent tremors across the skins of island residents when it sank the Olga, a freighter, and the Texan, an oil tanker, in the narrows between Wolf Lighthouse and Cayo Confites, very near Cayo Romano.17 With much of its fleet destroyed by the Japanese Pearl Harbor bombing or engaged in the aftermath in the Pacific, the United States Navy found itself outgunned and ill prepared to defend against the imminent threat of German torpedo boats in Caribbean waters, so it called for yachtsmen and small boat owners to arm themselves as auxiliaries in the fight, offering federal funds for those who joined up.18

  As one of the first yachtsmen to respond, Ernest received five hundred dollars per month from the US Navy for his reconnaissance. The money equipped the Pilar with depth charges and machine guns (and bait and alcohol), transforming his boat into an emergency defense vessel that would patrol the Cuban coast.19 He named this mission “Operation Friendless,” after his favorite cat. Just after the operation began, his sons, released from school for summer vacation, rushed down to Cuba to join their father and his crew of friends, a band of rag-tag sailors and would-be warriors on a real war mission against the Nazis: pursuing U-boats in the cayos while fishing, swimming, and sunning in the endangered straits of tropical paradise. During the war when gasoline was in short supply and strictly rationed to others, Ernest received tanks of gasoline, discreetly delivered from the US embassy to his home where they were routinely buried by drunken Basques in his backyard.20 The month that Ernest began his mission, the first gas chamber was operational at Auschwitz-Birkenau in order to exterminate Gypsies, Sinti, Jews, resistance fighters, and other prisoners of war en masse.

  Along for the ride were beefy British polo champion Winston Guest; wild-eyed, balding Spanish Loyalist Roberto Herrera Sotolongo; Basque pelota player Francisco Ibarlucia, or “Paxchi”; such seamen as marine-gunner Don Saxon, “Sinbad” Juan Duñabeitia, ribald priest Don Andrés, Cuban first mate Gregorio Fuentes, communication specialist (from the American embassy) John Saxon, Catalan barkeep Fernando Mesa; and others, like José Regidor and Félix Ermúa, aboard a few weeks but not possessing the stamina to stay with Captain Hemingway until the end.21

  Armed with machine guns, anti-tank guns, bazookas, hand grenades, and a communication tower, a crack team of Ernesto’s closest friends headed directly to the source of the torpedo attack in the crystalline waters between Cayo Guillermo and Santa Maria, between the palms, beneath the sun, and guided by boat captain and tavern owner Augustín Tuerto, “Guincho,” who knew the terrain and took the author through the mangroves in the straights near Cayo Francés to the exit point near Nuevitas.22

  Ernest considered mounting heavy machine guns to the Pilar but later recognized this idea as impractical. Instead, his crew would have to lure the “Krauts” to the surface, direct fire at the U-boat’s steel hull (to suppress use of their 88 mm deck guns), and move in just close enough for one of his jai alai players to lob a grenade in the conning tower with his special skills.23 An insane plan, which he pursued with the same wild imagination and delight as he did his childhood adventures in the Walloon woods with his father. Now the son hunted the bad guys with his own children and a passion resembling obsession.

  At first praising her husband’s bravery, Martha avoided inconvenient questions and accepted an assignment with Collier’s that summer, taking a two-month hiatus to study the effects of the war on several Caribbean islands. When she returned and found Operation Friendless continuing, Martha departed to New York and Washington, DC. When she was away, he complained of loneliness—he might “die of sadness” without her and without sex: “[Mr. Scrooby] probably will be permanently ruined for disuse.”24 Countering her husband’s grumbles, Martha reaffirmed a necessity for fulfillment and invited him to celebrate advancements of her career: “Will you be able to come back and celebrate with me? You must be nearly nuts now, in your floating sardine box, with all those souls and all those bodies so close to you. I admire your patience more than I can ever say. You are a disciplined man. I love you Picklepot. Are the childies having fun?”25

  While Ernest and Martha Hemingway’s letters continued to profess their mutual longing, periods of self-imposed exile grew ever more frequent, on assignment, or at sea, with conflict kindling each time they re
united. In their relationship there was intimacy, love, gratitude for their good fortune and the moments they shared together, as well as acute sensibility to each other’s personalities, nostalgia, neglect, frustration, and bitterness. Writing him at their home, Martha entreated her husband, who had exiled himself from her on a mission in the cayos: he had been married so much and so long that she could not affect him and longed to become like they once were in Madrid or in Milan, unmarried, and happy together.26 Immersing herself in writing during Ernest’s absences at the edge of the sea, Martha finished a novel called Liana in June.

  Hunkered down near Cayo Confites hunting German submarines with his “crew,” Ernest received Martha’s manuscript, and between mission reports, mosquito attacks, pig roasts, and poker games, he read by oil lamp and edited it assiduously.27 Returning it to her, he offered reconciliation: “Let’s be friends again. ‘Lest we be friends there is nothing. It is not such a long way to go.’ Rilke wrote, ‘Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.’ I haven’t protected you good, and touched you little and have been greeting you scoffingly. But I truly respect and admire you very much. And of this date and hour have stopped scoffing, which is the worst of all.”28

  She would integrate his feedback and responded to his note with appreciation and affection: “Bug my dearest, how I long for you now…Oh my I love you and oh my I am homesick for you. I want to fix up your beard in beautiful braids like my Assyrian.”29

  When Martha learned during prepublication from her publisher, Charles Scribner, that the Book of the Month Club and Paramount had passed on Liana, she wrote her husband defiantly, “In my heart, I always knew it was not destined to be a best-seller.”30 Yet the novel was positively reviewed by the Washington Post, the Nation, the New Republic, the New Yorker, and the New York Herald Tribune, who respectfully said that Gellhorn was an artist with “splendid sultry grace,” who had “come of age” and written a simple story with sensitive reverberations. Its 27,000-copy first printing sold quickly, making it a bestseller despite Martha’s misgivings.31

  Her production and literary victories contrasted roughly with her husband’s frustration at his typewriter at this time, one of the least productive of his career, sowing ill feelings between them. He clucked, “You’re the writer in the family now, Marty. Let’s give Marty a chance. She deserves one.” When she responded that it disgusted her to see that he was giving up at the age of forty-four, he fired back bluntly, “So you don’t think I can write anymore?…Conceited bitch.”32

  Unable to stand the strangling silence of those tropical flowers encircling their Finca that seemed they could swallow cows whole, Martha departed for Europe at the end of September 1943 to follow the war while he stayed on his boat to fulfill his “true mission” of chasing German U-boats.33 Having seen too many wars up close, he said, he was in no hurry to return to Europe. Martha accused him of being a slob and a phony as well as a drunken scold; in return, he rebuked her ambition, her preference for war, nobility, and history to an idyllic life together in paradise. While Martha chased stories and churned out copy, in addition to the manuscript that she had recently knocked out, she had had enough of his drinking, carousing, his ambivalence to his talent, and his not writing. Soon after she departed during one of countless trips to clear the air, he wrote her during a moment of clarity and sobriety to apologize. “I love you truly, love you always, and never love and never will love anyone else. I know from what you said how thoughtless, egoistic, mean-spirited and unhelpful I have been.” He reassured her that, no matter what, he would never be “uncooperative, selfish, or depreciatory about [her] work,” which he respected.34

  “Beloved Bug…It happened like a whirlwind; I heard I had a place for Saturday morning at ten…I have $2000 expense money in my purse and a wide open field ahead and I will have a very interesting and instructive time.” She wrote him after her first flight, “It’s great fun to see the world from 250 miles per hour,” and reported that during her layover, she had amused herself with the captain, copilot, a young radio engineer, and a scientist from Montana, who were “all solid drinkers and good dancers and very attentive to your wife so I am having a fine, brainless time.”35

  To this he protested that she was “selfish and ambitious” and did “exactly as she wants to do willfully as any spoiled child, always for the noblest motives,” while he “had not done a damn thing [he] wanted to do now for well over two years…except shoot live pigeons occasionally.”36 To his mother-in-law, he complained of a gut-wrenching loneliness, which felt like he was dying a little every day. His suffragist mother-in-law observed that “men generally can’t manage loneliness. Women are better at it, perhaps because traditionally men have gone and women have waited, so we learn from being left from our fairy story times straight throughout lives.”37

  Urging her husband to join her in Europe in a letter dated December 12, 1943, Martha opened up her back hatch and let the remaining bombs fall. If he did not come at once, he would regret it.38 The following day, she wrote again declaring a “national holiday,” for she had received four of his letters in one day, and because these letters outlined his “absolute opposition to leaving Cuba,” she promised to respect his decision, but refused to accept his criticism of journalism as a profession.39

  While Mrs. Hemingway lamented the squandering of his talent, he was writing at this time—passages that would become Islands in the Stream and The Old Man and the Sea. Perhaps contributing most to his unhappiness was the realization that they did not yet meet the murderously exacting standards that he had set for himself and maintained from the beginning.

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  In his wife’s absence, Ernest had begun spending more and more time in the company of an attractive Cuban woman, closer to his age, named Leopoldina Rodríguez. In anticipation of his commissioning as an officer of the US Army in February, Bumby requested papers from his father to certify his citizenship. Promising he would attend to it, Ernest invited his son to Finca Vigía and offered Leopoldina as Martha’s replacement, a “favorite other mother” and personal chaperone.40

  Subsequently assigned to special command of a unit of black soldiers during the war, Jack would become an intelligence officer working for the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. After parachuting with a rod, reel, and flies into occupied France, Lieutenant Bumby crossed paths with Martha Gellhorn in Algiers, while he was on leave and while she was on her way to cover the war in Italy.

  Perhaps because of limited access to Cuban sources, caused by strained US-Cuban relations or the difficulty of obtaining certain key interviews in English, none of Hemingway’s major American biographers mentions Leopoldina Rodriguez, Carlos Baker being the sole exception. Cuban and Russian biographers, on the other hand, have explored the topic in depth. Interviews with Leopoldina’s niece, the Cuban journalist Ilse Bulit, as well as translations of interviews from Spanish-language sources, analyses of Cuban scholars’ works, and original documents at the Finca Vigía Museum reveal that Leopoldina Rodriguez was not only Hemingway’s longtime friend, confidant, and—in all likelihood—lover, but she was also an important influence in his life and on Islands in the Stream and even The Old Man and the Sea.

  Close Cuban friends of Hemingway’s, such as journalist Fernando G. Campoamor, writer Enrique Serpa, doctor José Luis Herrera Sotolongo, accountant Roberto Herrera Sotolongo, and his majordomo René Villarreal remember Leopoldina Rodriguez as a regular presence at the Floridita bar and in Hemingway’s life.41 They describe “Leo” as having had ivory-smooth, olive-colored skin, black hair, a “ship-like” body, and an aversion to unkind words and actions; for this reason they often called her “Leopoldina la Honesta.”

  In Islands in the Stream, Hemingway’s character Lil would make “her stately progress to the far end of the bar, speaking to many of the men she passed and smiling at others.” She had “a beautiful smile and wonderful dar
k eyes and lovely black hair,” and Floridita regulars “treated her with respect” because “nearly everyone she spoke to had loved her at some time in the last twenty-five years”; they called her “Honest Lil” for her aversion to unkind words and obscene actions.

  Lil is the same age as protagonist Thomas Hudson, whose attentive gestures and loving descriptions show his enduring fondness for her. When Lil’s hair turns gray at the roots, Hudson buys her hair dye: “When it would begin to show white at the roots along the line of her forehead and along the line of the part, she would ask Thomas Hudson for money to have it fixed and when she came back from having it dyed, it was glossy and natural-looking and lovely as a young girl’s hair.” Hudson bought the coat Lil wears and adores, which causes her to declare with pride that she could have sold it a “half dozen times,” but would not have dreamed of doing so.

  Cuban biographer Norberto Fuentes also reports that those who frequented the Floridita remember Leopoldina as a “very elegant, refined, well-educated mulatto” who started going to the bar when “the walls of the place were made of marble.” The Floridita’s marble walls date such memories to before the 1930s and correspond with Hemingway’s description in Islands in the Stream of Leo’s having frequented the bar for more than twenty-five years. According to Campoamor, Leopoldina often spoke with Hemingway alone for long hours at the Floridita or read his tarot cards there, but their relationship was not limited to the bar; she frequently accompanied Hemingway to sports clubs, stadiums, and boxing rings, as on the occasion when they went to the Palacio de Deportes to see mutual friend Kid Tunero fight against Joe Légon, a Havana favorite, in the company of the Cuban writer Enrique Serpa. Serpa recalled Hemingway attending the event in a state of “deep drunkenness.”