Ernesto Page 31
Recovering in Nairobi, Ernest wrote “The Christmas Gift,” recounting his escape from the burning aircraft for his readers in Look magazine. Aboard the return ship, he would write a letter to Hotchner, who was coming to join him in Italy: “Today’s check up shows—rupture of kidneys, collapse of intestine, severe injuries liver, major concussion, severe burns legs, belly, right forearm, left hand, head, lips, paralysis of sphincter, large blood clot left shin outside above ankle, dislocated right arm and shoulder etc.” Yet, discretion not getting the better part of valor, he joined in for sea fishing off Mombasa.79
By the middle of March, the Hemingways had boarded SS Africa for their return trip to Italy through the Red Sea. In Venice they stayed at the Gritti Palace, where Ernest needed to recover. Though they had planned to go duck hunting, he really was not well. “His face was emaciated, his hands nearly transparent and without energy, the body broken by his inner injuries and fractured bones. But he did not yet renounce the fight for life. He did not want pictures taken of him. He said, ‘You should not photograph a beaten man,’” his translator, Fernanda Pivano, recalled.80
Adriana Ivancich, whose cover illustration had recently appeared on The Old Man and the Sea, came to visit Ernest at the Gritti. Having believed what the newspapers had reported, Adriana was ecstatic to see her friend alive, but also heartbroken by his condition, such that she broke into tears as soon as she saw him, and Ernest responded in kind. “Watch me, now you can say you saw Hemingway crying,” he said.81 At the Gritti, he received the news that he had been accepted for a Merit Medal and a thousand-dollar prize from the Academy of Arts and Letters, which he accepted.
Her injuries only slightly less severe, Mary caught a plane to Paris, then travelled to London, Seville, and Ronda with friends. In the Lancia with Adamo Simon as their driver, Papa and Hotch visited Adriana at her palazzo, then departed Venice, ultimately headed for Madrid, with stops in Milan, Nice, Aix-en-Provence, Nîmes, Arles, Montpellier, Carcassonne, Biarritz, San Sebastián (picking up Juan Quintana), Burgos, and attending the San Isidro feria in la capital. On a side trip to El Escorial, they watched Luis Miguel Dominguín practice with the bulls and take photographs for publicity. In May, Robert Capa, his dear friend, died in Indochina after stepping on a landmine while covering the conflict raging between the French and the Vietnamese. By the beginning of June, the Hemingways boarded the Francesco Morosini in Genoa for their return voyage to Havana. No sooner had they arrived home than Mary would have to repack her bags and depart to attend to her dying father in July.
In Gulfport, Mary found her father looking as sickly as a man in an El Greco painting. Having endured much as a companion and friend, Ernest’s fourth wife received a letter while she was helping her parents in Gulfport: “Honestly Kittner, he should go to a hospital. Cost means nothing. He can have what I have. But he is going to die and he should die with some dignity and some regard for other people.”82 With her husband complaining of feelings of loneliness and depression, Mary returned the day before his birthday. The following day Ernest received the Order of Carlos Manuel Céspedes, Cuba’s highest honor.
When Batista’s regime suggested that they hold the ceremony at the presidential palace, Ernest tactfully declined, sensing it might send the wrong signal to “appear to support a dictator.” Instead, he agreed to accept the award at their “little yacht club on the bay,” where Batista’s undersecretary of state delivered a “pleasant, not-too pretentious speech.” In the company of a dozen of their closest friends congregating at the bar, Ernest thanked all for the honor and emphasized his esteem for “the Cuban pueblo—the common people—and his best wishes for their welfare.”83 Afterward, the Hemingways celebrated in grander style, for Mary’s sake—after a difficult week in Gulfport—with a big, boisterous lunch at the Floridita.
On July 26, with their movement gathering stream, Haydée Santamaría and Melba Hernández organized a protest at Colón Cemetery that commemorated the anniversary of the Moncada attack. That same month of July, Batista enthusiastically announced his presidential candidacy to the disgruntled masses. The Hemingways received visitors at the Finca Vigía, such as Ava Gardner, swimming naked in his pool and fishing aboard the Pilar while Gregorio, eyes widening with glee, sloshed pails of sea water across the deck, and later in the Floridita, Ernest’s old nodding acquaintances, rich, paunchy sugar growers, politicians, and simple men of business became instant intimates enchanted and jostling for position in an attempt to meet the North American starlet.84 In the meantime, another guest, Luis Miguel Dominguín had been impressing their chauffeur, Juan, with his stamina as he lurked in Havana’s many brothels: “Señora,” said the bullfighter to Mrs. Hemingway afterward, “[Juan] knew places I never even heard of. And such beautiful girls. So friendly.”85 Hemingway took Dominguín to cockfights in Cotorro and to Guanabacoa to see high priests of Santería.86 In October, the rebels published Fidel’s “History Will Absolve Me” speech and spread it across the island.
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On October 28, Ernest, having heard rumors from friend and man of letters Harvey Breit, had not yet heard definitive news about the long-coveted Nobel Prize. They must have figured it was now or never, he thought, when they phoned and told him. At dawn, he tiptoed into his wife’s bedroom, tapped her arm softly as she slept, and said, “My kitten, my kitten, I’ve got that thing. Maybe you better get up.” His smile was hesitant, his voice soft and happy.
“Huh?”
“You know. The Swedish thing.”
“Hell’s bells. You mean the Prize, the Nobel Prize?” his wife asked, already all over him, clinging and hugging and smooching.87
They had to get going, realized Mrs. Hemingway, slipping into her shorts and shirt and hurrying into the kitchen to prepare to host press and visitors. There she found her staff, who had heard the announcement on the servants’ radio, already abuzz, polishing silver trays, and Mary joined in, arranging bocaditos of fresh pineapple, Spanish and English ham, and cheeses, and opening bottles of Marqués de Riscal wine in anticipation of the flash-flood party that she had somehow neglected to anticipate.88 The old-fashioned wall phone was soon ringing continuously while Ernest penciled a wry little speech in Spanish to read to the three US wire services, correspondents from Stockholm, Havana newspapers, movie photographers, American and Cuban television, and other “friendly spongers” in attendance.89
Getting his start as a cub reporter at the Kansas City Star, Ernest had always been somewhat of an anomaly in the literary world. He had never attended university. Self-taught, he was the embodiment of American individualism and self-realization. Travelling to the source to witness places and events, he had prided himself on being a man of action rather than letters.90 All the years fishing in Cuba had given him a story of a humble fisherman that had caused the European committee to recognize him and Cuba as a part of the civilized world.
When Harvey Breit phoned from the New York Times to interview him that day, he could not believe it. “I do not know what Man (with a capital M) means. I do know what a man (small m) is. I do know what man (with a small m) means and I hope I have learned something about men (small m) and something about women and about animals…I have learned very much from criticism.”91 Humbled, he said he would have been happier if the prize had been awarded to greater living writers, like Isak Dinesen, Bernard Berenson, and Carl Sandburg: “As a Nobel Prize winner I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain, nor to Henry James, speaking only of my countrymen. Greater writers than these also did not receive the prize.”92 Then, he said, “What a writer must try to do is to write as truly as one can…to invent out of what he knows…to make something…that…will become part of the experience of those who read him.”93
In a clean gray suit and dark sunglasses, a handsome and joyful young man from Cuban television soon appeared on the front steps of the Finca Vigía asking to speak with the author of The Old Man and the Sea. At fifty-five years of age, corpul
ent Papa had a full white beard, although his hair was still gray on top. As was his habit, he wore a white guayabera. In contrast to the journalist’s pomp and fanfare, the writer was noticeably shy in front of the camera throughout the interview. He stood stiff, fingers fumbling for his shirttails in front of him. Sheepishly avoiding the eyes of his viewers on the other side of the camera, the author’s gaze drifted to the floor as the interviewer presented him.
Although his contentment was clear, he seemed embarrassed by the spotlight. During the interview, Hemingway spoke in slow, measured, American-accented Spanish. He made a few mistakes—but through his simple declarative sentences, the author reached across cultures and moved diverse listeners with the terse sincerity of his message and his determination to accept this honor with humility and to dedicate it to his second homeland.
“I am very happy to be the first Cubano sato to have won this prize, and happy because it’s been said that it is based on a Cuban landscape, which is Cojímar, more or less my town.”94
Hemingway said he was donating his prize to Cuba to demonstrate his appreciation. Cojímar was a “very serious thing” to him, something sacred. He felt at home in Cuba, among family and friends, so he expressed his desire to receive the prize as “just one more Cuban.” He had been fishing Cuba’s waters for two decades and considered himself one of Cojímar’s fishermen. Fishing with Cubans over the years, Hemingway had learned to share their respect for the power of the sea, their solidarity, and their humility. These are the values he expressed in The Old Man and the Sea, which resounded the world over and bestowed him with enduring international fame. After all his wretchedness and in spite of his pride, Ernest Hemingway had found Cuba, the story of Santiago’s simplicity and strength, and a sincere gesture that offered him some redemption.
Hurricanes having just grazed the island during the stormy month of October, this day was calm and dry with sunlight pouring in the open windows. While Papa fielded questions from reporter after reporter on the front steps, revelers streamed in, sipping drinks, lunching on bocaditos, and clamoring to a steady rumble as they gathered in the sitting room. At three o’clock, the author squeezed into the sitting room to read a slightly more inebriated speech in Spanish: “Lacking are those types by which one can see the good which is humanity and those who manage to eat their failures. So, these are many words. I don’t wish to abuse the word and let us now go to acts. I wish to give this Swedish medal to Our Señora the Virgen de Cobre.”95 His guests whistled and cheered. Still jabbing, he informed them that there was no point in breaking into the house to hunt for the prize money, for it had not yet arrived.
Having delivered his “discourse,” he set words aside. Noting the happy fiesta catching fire in the heart of his home, drifting out his doors, and spilling onto the terrace that bordered a jungle, the writer joined the celebration of his victory, fanning its flames with good cheer and alcohol and by insisting that “his Cuban family,” eleven employees in all, be included. By the time they had finished drinking, said gardener Publio Enriquez, they could not find the door.96 Hemingway was realizing perhaps that he had enjoyed a unique friendship from the Cuban people since 1928 that not only enabled him to win the Nobel Prize but also stood out in stark contrast to political tensions between an America that supported Cuban dictators and his adopted country, offering hope for a more peaceful future. “This is one prize that belongs to Cuba, because my work was conceived and created in Cuba, with my people of Cojímar, where I’m a citizen. Throughout all the translations, this, my adopted country is present, and here I have my books and my home,” he told one reporter.97
Having learned the power and importance of good publicity from the disaster of Across the River and into the Trees and from several failed Cuban leaders, Hemingway requested that Campoamor, a journalist and one of his best-connected friends in Cuba, organize a ceremony so that he could underscore his donation as a sign of his gratitude to Cuba and friendship with her people.98 According to Campoamor, Leopoldina had influenced the writer’s decision to donate his Nobel Prize to the Cuban people.99 Although Hemingway pretended otherwise, said Campoamor, his close friends understood that he had dreamed of the Nobel Prize. “During one of our visits to the Avenue along the Port,” he recalled, “Leopoldina read [Hemingway’s] cards, and predicted that he would win the greatest prize of his life for his writings that had to do with Cuba.”100 Skeptically, Ernest retorted that he would donate his prize to the shrine of the Virgen del Cobre in Santiago (in accordance with the Cuban tradition) if her prediction ever came true. Cubans often ask the Virgin for favors and promise to make a pilgrimage when their wishes are fulfilled.
Dr. José Herrera Sotolongo joked that the donation was also pragmatic, since at the time the church was one of the few places in Cuba that Hemingway felt he could be sure the medal would not be stolen. José Luis also offers interesting insights concerning Hemingway’s observation of Afro-Cuban religious practices and superstitions: Hemingway was unusually superstitious in a characteristically Cuban manner (carrying lucky stones, lucky rocks, insisting on the number 13 in his license plate number, etc.).
His back still too badly injured from two plane crashes to travel to Stockholm, Hemingway appeared at the American embassy in Havana at the end of November to deliver an acceptance speech that Ambassador John Cabot read December 10 when he accepted the medal on the author’s behalf in Stockholm: “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.”101
On December 13, Hemingway’s face appeared on the cover of Time magazine: “An American Storyteller.” When Cabot returned, he delivered the author’s Nobel Medal to the Finca Vigía himself, not wanting to miss it for all the world. The prize stimulated a resurgence of interest in all his works, establishing him as a legend.102
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Later that winter, smiling as he shook hands at President Batista’s inauguration was Richard Nixon. Vice President Nixon flew down to meet with Cuba’s leader and represent American interests, nineteen years before “Tricky Dick” resigned as president of the United States. Before departing to Havana, Nixon held a briefing with his corps of US diplomatic officers: most Cubans were against Batista, but the army was “the key to the situation.” Batista is “friendly to the U.S., admires the American way of life, and believes in private enterprise.” In Cuba, there were “25,000 hard core commies,” but Batista, “master politician” had these “under control.”103 After his return to Washington, Nixon reported to President Eisenhower and his cabinet that the new president of Cuba was a “remarkable” man, “strong, vigorous,” and “desirous of doing a job more for Cuba than doing a job [for] Batista.”104 By April, Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, visited and organized the Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities (BRAC) with Batista and self-proclaimed “father of the BRAC,” US ambassador, former banker, and industrialist Arthur Gardner.105
Following Batista’s second coup in 1952, the US government had been steadily increasing aid for weapons and military goods to Cuba from $400,000 in fiscal year 1953, to $1.1 million in 1954—as Batista’s officers filled out requisition orders for submachine guns, recoilless rifles, hand grenades, incendiary bombs, rocket launchers, armored cars, T-33 jet-trainer aircraft, radio equipment, trucks, and more. When resistance mounted, Washington spent more: $1.6 million in 1955 and $1.7 million in 1956. When the revolution came to a head in 1957 and 1958, the Pentagon sent $2 million and $3 million respectively so that Batista could keep the world safe (from Communism) and suppress his domestic enemies.106
Since the rebels had been imprisoned for attacking the Moncada Barracks on July 26, 1953, their families, their comrades, journalists, and politicians had been petitioning and campaignin
g for their release. On May 15, the Cuban congress passed a bill granting amnesty to thirty rebels. They had served twenty-two months of their sentence when the bill was ratified by President Batista’s signature. Among them was Fidel Castro. Facing the impossibility of organizing his revolution in Cuba, Fidel boarded a small tourist prop plane departing for Merida, Mexico, on July 7, and continued to Mexico City.107
There he met the Argentinian doctor and activist Che Guevara, who soon after joined their cause. In Mexico, Castro and Guevara sought out General Alberto Bayo. Cuban-born Bayo had fought Moorish rebels in Morocco and against Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War.108 He was a seasoned combat veteran, serving both as a pilot and an infantry officer, and as an instructor at military academies. By 1956, he was a sixty-four-year-old exile who liked to write poetry and owned a furniture factory. But he had trained other rebel groups, understood warfare and guerrilla tactics, and, agreeing to administer a crash course in insurgency training, proved himself as a skilled teacher and mentor to the architects of the Cuban Revolution.
In July, more pressing matters of business disrupted Ernest Hemingway’s progress on an African manuscript. He and Mary had to travel to Key West to prepare the Whitehead Street property for rental. There they met Ed Hotchner, who returned with them to Havana. When The Old Man and the Sea film crew arrived from Hollywood at the end of August, Hemingway set his writing aside to collaborate on the script and filming during the first half of September. He insisted on employing as many of Cojímar’s fishermen as possible.
During the shoot, Leland and Slim Hayward stayed at the Finca, as did Spencer Tracy, who would play Santiago, and actress Katharine Hepburn, all pickling themselves in alcohol with the author. Tracy’s appearance, out of shape and refusing to exercise, irritated Hemingway: he “looked more like a rich, overweight actor than an old starving fisherman,” he complained to René.109 To create the most “authentic” set for the film, the Warner Brothers crew planted new palm trees and built new huts in the village of Boca de Jaruco. Sneaking across the border at Reynosa, Mexico, to meet with former president Prío on September 1 in a hotel room in McAllen, Texas, was Fidel Castro. It was humiliating, said the rebel leader much later in an interview, to ask Prío for funds he knew were stolen from the Cuban treasury, but he needed to finance his revolution by the means that were available to him at that time.110 After Castro outlined his plan, Prío promised him fifty thousand dollars and assisted him in making contact with others in the United States.