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Ernesto Page 30


  The Cuban Tourist Institute was the first organization to recognize him for The Old Man and the Sea with the Medalla de Honor (Medal of Honor) on September 24. The next day Mary flew to New York to shop and to bask in her husband’s success.46 Weary of the spotlight and of the sort of “heckler” fans he would cross in the streets of New York, Ernest stayed in Cuba aboard the Pilar to pursue the running marlins. Reading perhaps of Ernest’s successes in the newspapers, thieves came to call on the Finca Vigía more than once that year, evading booby traps and dogs (Blackie and Negrita), breaking furniture, rummaging drawers, and stealing Ernest’s knives, war trophies, gold cufflinks, ties, silver picture frames, and nearly all of Gianfranco’s wardrobe.47 Reporting it to the police, but not wanting to post a guard for fear he might be equally corrupt, Ernest and Mary slept with loaded pistols atop their night tables.

  In October, more critics like Mark Schorer of the New Republic and Joyce Cary of the New York Times Book Review maintained that The Old Man and the Sea was a success, while dissenting voices suggested that Life’s publicity, Hemingway’s fame, and his reader’s affection for their hero explained the novel’s popularity and the exaggerated enthusiasm.48 In Commentary, Philip Rhav dumped cold water on the fire of runaway praise: even tough the artist had appeared to reestablish control over an ego that had been declining into morbid irritability, self-love, and self-pity, the novella was “by no means a masterpiece which the nationwide publicity set off by its publication in Life magazine has made it out to be…Hemingway’s big marlin is no Moby Dick, and his fisherman is not Captain Ahab.”49 If some passages could be moving, the artistry was marred overall by unnatural moments superimposing Christian symbols or intruding into the voice of a narrative that did not belong to Santiago but to Hemingway himself—self-pitying, at odds with the world around him, and blaming his critics, “the sharks,” for the failures of his creations and his career.

  Blood in the water, and it would not be long before the other sharks would come in for the kill. As they circled, Hemingway impatiently wrote his old friend, and critic, Edmund Wilson, “You know I was thinking about actual sharks when I wrote the book and had nothing to do with the theory that they represented critics. I don’t know who thought that up…I have always hoped for sound, intelligent criticism all my life as writing is the loneliest of all trades.”50

  Harvard educated and insightful in his eighties, Bernard Berenson was an art historian whom Mary had met and befriended while sightseeing in Florence four years previously while Ernest was hunting ducks (and Adriana Ivancich). Initiating an intellectual exchange with Ernest Hemingway via letter, Berenson, whom the writer had called a “wise old man,” would come in handy when critical wind started to shift against The Old Man and the Sea.51 Catching wind of these developments weeks after his novel’s release, Hemingway wrote awkwardly to Berenson to ask him to write an intellectual’s endorsement of the book in a blurb that Scribner’s could use to market the book.52

  It was only normal that his public should confuse his Homeric novella with Melville, wrote Hemingway, but as conoscitori, he and Berenson knew better. “Then there is the other secret. There isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is the old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are sharks, no better, no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see when you know. A writer should know too much.” As requested, Berenson sent Scribner’s the ammunition—a blurb that could pad subsequent advertisements and book jackets: “Hemingway’s ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ is an idyll of the sea as sea, as un-Byronic and un-Melvillian as Homer himself, and communicated in a prose as calm and compelling as Homer’s verse. No real artist symbolizes or allegorizes—and Hemingway is a real artist—but every real work of art exhales symbols and allegories. So does this short but not small masterpiece.”53 However, some critics like Schwartz and Aldrige insisted, relentlessly, that the work’s overwrought and sentimental passages were not great and only reminded readers of what Hemingway had once been.54

  Just after, another selachian would read the corrosive words appearing in newspapers and academic reviews and repeat them in his father’s ear. Having lost his mother that year, Gregory Hemingway was under pressure to pass pre-med exams and enter UCLA medical school, and he was seeing a therapist for the feelings he just could not seem to shake. On July 3, he wrote his father and his wife to apologize to Mary for stealing her French underpants from her room six years ago: “Give my love to Miss Mary and tell her if I see her I sure as hell would like to be forgiven. I did a terrible thing in lying about that clothes business and I make no excuses for it.”55 Intoxicated and very probably resenting the resurgence of an incident he would have preferred to forget, Ernest replied angrily in a letter to the undisciplined son whose unchecked perversion had killed his mother.

  On November 3, Greg replied to his father: “If you ever write another letter like that I’ll beat the shit out of you.” Ten days later, when Gregory turned twenty-one, he sent his father another letter, calling him a “gin-soaked abusive monster,” naming Mary as a shameless hireling, and asking God for mercy on his soul for the misery he had caused him by accusing him of killing his mother. “You accused me of killing her—said it was my arrest that killed her…If I ever meet you again, and you start pulling the ruthless, illogical, and destructive shit on me, I will beat your head into the ground and mix it with cement to make outhouses…I suppose you wonder what has happened to all my filial respect for you. Well, it’s gone Ernestine, dear, it’s gone.”56

  Father responded with the request that his son stand down: “Your threats to beat up your father are comic enough…Right now I could use a good flash of your old charm and decency. I cannot use any more obscene or threatening letters. Mary can do without your thefts and insults. Your father, E. Hemingway.”57 However, when his son reopened the subject of cross-dressing—“Please understand…please understand…please understand…This clothes business is something I have never been able to control”—his father would refuse to continue the dialogue even though all indications suggest he himself had been exploring transgender yearnings at that time, not only in the fictional scenes with Littless and “Devilish” Catherine, discussed previously in “The Last Good Country” and The Garden of Eden, but also in recent real-life sexual encounters with Mary in Cayo Paraiso and in Africa where he wrote in his wife’s journal:

  Mary is an espece [species] (sort of) prince of devils…She has always wanted to be a boy and thinks as a boy without ever losing femininity…Mary has never had one lesbian impulse but has always wanted to be a boy. Since I have never cared for any man and dislike any tactile contact between men…I loved feeling the embrace of Mary which came to me as something quite new and outside tribal law. On the night of December 19th, we worked out these things and have never been happier.58

  During the three weeks following the release of The Old Man and the Sea, eighty to ninety letters a day arrived at the Finca Vigía from high school kids, soldiers, sailors, columnists, professors, old pals from Italy, Montana, and Bimini, and many strangers praising him and wishing him well.59 While the letters continued, the Finca Vigía and the Floridita had become a zoo with an endless stream of visitors, house-guests, fans, friends, solicitors, and hangers-on.

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  When Senator Estes Kefauver sought to eradicate organized crime and tightened gambling regulations in Las Vegas, the Mob looked to Cuba for friendlier business territory. As Variety magazine reported in 1953: “It was the chill of the Kefauver hearings which to a large measure induced the Americans to seek warmer and more hospitable grounds to the south.”60 Thus in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather II, character Hyman Roth (played by Lee Strasberg and representing Meyer Lansky) would declare with glee, “These are wonderful things that we’ve achieved in Havana, and there’s no limit to where we can go from here…We have now what we have always needed: real partnership with a government. Here we
are, protected, free to make our profits, without Kefauver, the God-damned Justice Department and the FBI—90 miles away, partnership with a government.”61 Cultivating long-established business relationships with American investors and organized crime, President Batista provided incentives and protection in exchange for a percentage of the profits.62 Supported by Batista’s government, Santo Trafficante, Jr., expanded operations in casinos, hotels, cabarets like the Sevilla-Biltmore, Havana-Hilton, the Capri (the largest and most extravagant hotel casino outside of Las Vegas, with actor George Raft as its famed greeter, until it was outdone by the Riviera, and until the Havana Hilton outdid the Riviera), the Sans-Souci, El Comodoro, and the Deaville, with Mrs. Batista’s “bagman” depositing nightly 10 percent of their cut.63 Concurrently, brothels, burlesques, drag shows, and peepshows under Mafia purview, such as Casa Marina, Aunt Nena Club, the 212 Club, the Mambo Club, the Palette Club, the Bohemian Club, and the Shanghai Theater (a world depicted by Graham Greene) multiplied and made millions.64

  With the inheritance from his mother, Ernest’s middle son, Patrick, had acquired a 2,300-acre homestead in Tanganyika and a house with several servants and twenty-two rooms. Benefiting from letters of introduction from his father to Philip Percival, the young man became a professional hunter and would live in Africa shooting wild animals during the next twenty-five years. By the middle of October, Ernest and Mary Hemingway were preparing a return trip to Africa so that he could write a series of articles (at ten thousand dollars per article with fifteen thousand dollars in expenses) for Look magazine that would take his readers on a photo safari through the camera of Earl Theisen, with stops in Paris, Spain, and Italy en route. In November, former general Dwight D. Eisenhower beat a progressive candidate, Adlai Stevenson, during a landslide election.

  In December, Ernest attended the burial of Floridita bartender Constantino Ribalaigua and hosted Slim and Leland Hayward who flew into Havana to discuss the details of their deal with Warner Brothers for a film version of The Old Man and the Sea. For the rights, and agreeing to serve as consultant to the film, Ernest would receive $150,000. “In search of suitable fish footage” in Peru, the film’s $2 million budget grew to $5 million, and the author, catching the largest fish of his life to assure the realism of the movie, had the last laugh.65 “We’ll never make it to Africa before the long rains,” said Ernest to Mary, wishing to free himself from a life of obligations: he told her that he felt like a juggler with one hand tied behind his back.66

  One day in 1953, the Hemingways suffered a great loss when Ramón Wong, their cook, died of a heart attack. When the author offered to take care of funeral expenses and provide for his family, his widow declined; it turned out that the cook had been a shrewd businessman who had made a small fortune as a partner in a restaurant in Havana’s Chinatown.67 In January when thieves returned for the third time since July, Ernest chased them off with a .22 rifle, shooting at the last one escaping through the window, and drawing blood that they would find on the terrace and track down the hill, over the fence, and into the village below.68

  From dying friends, persistent thieves, financial anxieties, and familial disagreements, Mary and Ernest again sought sanctuary aboard the Pilar. While they were anchored off Cayo Paraíso and fishing from Purgatory Point, the infamous “razzle-dazzle” scandal broke in Havana smearing the reputation of the city’s gambling joints and potentially discouraging the future business of American tourists. The cover of the Saturday Evening Post read, “Suckers in Paradise: How Americans Lose Their Shirts in Caribbean Gambling Joints,” and was followed by a “crack down” two days later entailing the arrest of thirteen “cardsharps” and the deportation of eleven of them.69

  Duty compelled the Hemingways to return to Havana at the beginning of April to receive the Haywards, to discuss the details of the film with them, and Spencer Tracy, the actor who would play Santiago, and to receive the writer’s first son, Jack, his wife, Puck, and their daughter, Muffet. During his visit, Tracy was able to “catch a glimpse” of Anselmo Hernandez in his natural element exhaustedly sleeping in his shack after fishing all night, and he spoke with Gregorio and Felipe at length about the specifics of fishing marlin from a one-man boat.70

  Fishing and hiding off Cayo Paraíso again, the Hemingways heard the announcement on the radio that The Old Man and the Sea had won the Pulitzer Prize on May 4, 1953. Two days later, Ernest wrote a letter to Wallace Meyer fondly thinking of Leopoldina and wondering how she would react to the news: “Am sure my old whore Leopoldina whose favorite book is the one she calls Too Many Short Stories by Ernest Hemingway celebrated the award with my other friends at the Floridita. It was on the Cuban radio too at fifteen minute intervals all day. Leopoldina and Co. probably think it is the Nobel Prize and they are waiting for me to come back and spend that money.”71 In his hard-boiled style, Hemingway seems to employ the epithet “my old whore” ironically. It was one of his habits to employ disparaging nicknames for people he loved dearly: “Feo” (“Ugly”) for Dr. José Luis Herrera Sotolongo, “Mousie” for his son Patrick, or even “Mr. and Mrs. Fathouse-Pig” for himself and Martha Gellhorn.

  Departing from Havana at the end of June for Africa via New York and Europe, they boarded the transatlantic vessel Flandre, docked in Le Havre, then drove to Paris, reaching Spain by July, for the feria of Pamplona—then onward to Madrid, Paris, and Aix-en-Provence.

  That same June, a student named Ernesto “Che” Guevara, having returned from a five-thousand-mile trek through South America, completed his studies and graduated from medical school in Buenos Aires, Argentina, while insurgent leader Fidel Castro organized 165 men and women to attack the Moncada Barracks. Inspired by Batista’s illegal coup d’état, twelve hundred of Castro’s men had been training at the university and at firing ranges in Havana, and disguising themselves as businessmen and hunters shooting clay pigeons.72 Their plan was to take the garrison, use its transmitters to confuse the Cuban military, then take control of Santiago’s radio station, in order to broadcast the speeches of Eduardo Chibás, and by this means incite the general populace to revolt. Before the attack, Fidel told his men that their victory was part of an irrepressible Cuban movement: “This movement will be victorious…from the people will arise fresh new men willing to die for Cuba. They will pick up our banner and move forward…The people will back us in Oriente and in the whole island. As in ’68 and ’92, here in Oriente we will give the first cry of Liberty or Death!”73

  The attack on July 26, 1953, failed and killed most of Castro’s men. Most of the captured were executed, and many were tortured by police. Among those involved but who escaped were former president Carlos Prío Socarrás and his minister of education and foreign affairs, Aureliano Sánchez Arango, whom Chibás had so often criticized for embezzlement on his radio show. A few of the rebels managed to escape and retreat into the highlands. Lying in a shack on the first of August in the backcountry near Santiago de Cuba, Fidel Castro was awakened in the middle of the night by the police. Arresting him and other rebels, they took them to the local jail in Boniato.74

  Five days after Fidel’s arrest, the Hemingways boarded the Dunnottar Castle in Marseilles and sailed for Mombasa. Ernest and Mary spent August to December on safari in Tanganyika, in Kenya, and in Uganda with Philip Percival (and with invited guest from Cuba, Mayito Menocal), and on the vast new property with son Patrick. In September, Scribner’s published The Hemingway Reader.

  Of the 122 Cuban rebels indicted, 99 were detained and tried from September 21 to October 6, 1953.75 Fifty-five were convicted and given sentences ranging from seven months to thirteen years in the prison on the Isle of Pines.76 During a separate trial, Fidel, a licensed attorney, confessed, accepted full responsibility, and delivered a historic defense that appealed to his judges as human beings and concluded with, “Condenadme, no importa, la historia me absolverá.” (“Condemn me. It doesn’t matter. History will absolve me.”) Throughout the trial, he referred to the Moncada attack as “th
e 26th of July Movement,” transforming himself into a legend and defining a platform for future action. Evoking José Martí as the father of Cuban independence, Castro openly attacked Batista for selling the country’s resources for personal profit while unemployment soared among his people who did not have access to health care or education. Calling for a return to the constitution of 1940, Castro insisted upon agricultural reform, profit-sharing among Cuban workers in industry and on sugar plantations, and seizure of assets deceitfully acquired. The court sentenced him to fifteen years.

  Castro was sent to the Presidio Modelo on the Cuban islet to the southwest. Batista announced that elections would be held the following November 1954, but that the Communist Party would continue to be prohibited and its adherents systematically deported.77 In Mexico City the following month, a group of influential exiles signed the “Pact of Montreal,” declaring their unity against Batista.

  On January 21, the Hemingways ended their safari. During the return, their plane en route to Murchison Falls struck a telegraph wire. “HEMINGWAY, WIFE: KILLED IN AIR CRASH” declared the Daily Mirror, with pictures of the author posing beside a leopard with a rifle, and another of Mary. “No Sign of Life at Wreck…Mrs. Mary Hemingway, fourth wife of Pulitzer Prize winning author Ernest Hemingway, is believed to have perished with him in the crash of a charter plane in the East African jungle where they had been on safari.”78 Picked up by a passing riverboat, the couple was taken to Butiaba along Lake Albert, then to Entebbe on Lake Victoria where, the next afternoon, they hired another rickety plane that caught on fire as it took off. The newspapers again declared the Hemingways dead; they would have to telegram their families and inform them that they were alive.