Ernesto Read online

  From October until December, Ernest alternated between revisions of A Moveable Feast (300 pages that Mary retyped), The Garden of Eden (still rough, repetitious, and somewhat condescending, but with brilliant passages showing potential), and the chronicles of Africa (843 pages).72 From New York, the Hemingways travelled to Washington, DC, on the way back to Cuba. On the first day of 1958 while Mrs. Hemingway was making a key lime pie for New Year’s Day, her mother’s sanatorium cabled her to tell her she had “expired” after twenty-four hours of sickness the day before. Phoning in the funeral arrangements for flowers, a singer, and a Christian Science reader, she flew home dutifully to Minnesota to attend alone: “My mother rested among flowers in one of her favorite rose-red dresses, her skin made up unobtrusively with rouge, her thin old hands crossed on her stomach. But no artistry could erase the look of permanent distress on her features.”73

  Although their health had been on the mend with Papa’s liver, kidneys, and blood cholesterol, and Mary’s anemia improving, it had been a trying year with the burden of financial problems from Jack, Ernest’s first son, the ongoing shock therapy of his third son, Gregory, the bombings and poverty in Cuba, the fishless barrenness of the Gulf Stream, their dog killed by Batista’s soldiers, and the death of Mary’s mother.74 At the end of December, Gregory Hemingway returned to Miami Medical Center to continue treatment.

  While Castro’s revolution had been gaining popularity by pushing government forces from positions, massive hotels were rising along the skyline of Havana with mafia-run casinos filled with tourists and night clubs in every alley and recess. Having established contacts in the thirties and strengthened them residing in the United States, Batista had returned ready to do business in Cuba on an unprecedented scale—providing protection and incentives that promised to make himself, Meyer Lansky, Santo Trafficante, and their associates a great deal of money.75 Consequently from 1956 to 1958, the Capri, the Riviera, then the Hilton, would compete to become the most attractive, luxurious, and lucrative casinos in the world as the president dispensed public funds and his friends and relatives profited from building and operation contracts. In December, a photojournalist from Paris Match, Enrique Meneses, liaised with Fidel’s forces in the sierra, and stayed with them for four months, publishing humanizing photos of them that endeared their cause.

  Accompanying the hotel and casino boom in this unparalleled “sin city” was a boom in the sex industry. Rivaling those of Paris’s Montmartre, chorus line cabarets opened in all of the major hotels, such as Tropicana, Parisien in the Hotel Nacional, Salón Rojo in the Hotel Capri, and El Caribe in the Habana Hilton. There was a profusion of nightclubs with names that were welcoming for American boys: Pennsylvania, Johnny’s Dream Club, Tally-Ho, Dirty Dick’s, Hollywood Cabaret, High Seas, Skippy’s Hideaway, Surf Club, Zombie Club, Pachin, Rumba, Las Vegas, 21, 212, Sans Souci, Ali Bar, Johnny’s 88 Club, Club Bambu, Topeka, 1900 Club, and Turf Club. On the corner of every street there seemed to be a Cuban pimp leading a gang of young men into an alley where bar-brothels had been stocked with Cuban “B-girls” (bargirls) dressed in blue jean shorts and ponytails, speaking good English, and looking “just like the little blond girls they were afraid to fuck back home.”76

  The Hemingways were weary of gangsters and revolutions, but not yet sure where would be better: “The tunnel is finished and will be opened in February they say. They are talking of filling in the bar from the Maine Monument to the Castillo de La Punta to make more land to build Hotels on. The present Malecón to be an inside street…Havana is more like Miami Beach all the time. I don’t know where to go. Do you?”77 The fish seemed to have disappeared from the ocean, leaving Cojímar’s fishermen more desperate than ever.78 Nonetheless, the Finca Vigía still offered a refuge where most days it was possible to focus on one’s work, to recover one’s health, and live a comfortable life.79

  Through the narrative of his manuscript of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway was studying regret, hunger, memory, evil, and the ephemerality of human paradise—clearly inspired by the paradise disappearing around him. Alternately in another manuscript, The Garden of Eden, he was chasing similar themes, concurrently developing similar characters, sunning, swimming, and riding three bicycles in Le Grau-du-Roi, Aigues-Mortes, Camargue, and Hendaye—drinking aperitifs in the Gulf of Lions—romantic settings as incorruptible as the steep blue slopes of Cayo Paraíso or the unending sky of mighty Africa. As dusk descended on his life and confusion blurred his genius, he painted the world in Impressionist watercolors as natural and enchanting and bewildering as his youth. The themes of the story were insatiable hunger, androgyny, adultery, his writing, and the destruction of paradise.80

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  All of Cuba’s arms, aircraft, tanks, ships, and military supplies had come from the United States, such that Cuba depended upon its ally for parts. The three branches of the Cuban military had been trained by advisors from the US armed forces. By January 1958, Castro’s rebels advanced on Manzanillo, an important sugar refinery port in the east of Cuba. Under pressure from the rebels, the US embassy, and the press, President Batista restored the guarantees of the Cuban constitution and its bill of rights in the middle of February.81

  The rebels raided the Boniato jail on January 26 to break out Felipe Pazos and Armando Hart, who had been arrested by Batista’s police.82 In addition, Fidel explained during a February 4 interview for Look magazine that his rebel army would be using a tactic that had been a part of Cuban warfare since generals Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo had discovered its effectiveness during the one of the three wars for Cuban independence: crop burning, specifically sugar. It was effective because it impacted the businessmen who controlled the country and understood only business.83

  Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo was a Spaniard whose family had fought for the Loyalists and fled to Cuba after the Spanish Civil War. His brother was killed in the assault on Batista’s presidential palace in March 1957. When he identified the body at the morgue, Menoyo vowed to honor his brother by continuing the fight. In November, he began to organize a force of three hundred men from the DRE to open a front in the Sierra Escambray, intending to stick a second thorn in Batista’s side.

  In December 1957, a red-headed, overweight, pasty-faced kid from Toledo, Ohio, had turned up in an all-white leisure suit in Havana, looking like one more tourist on the prowl. When he began asking around for someone to take him to Fidel, it became clear that the chain-smoking twenty-nine-year-old was not looking for a prostitute. William Alexander Morgan had read about the Cuban revolution in the newspapers, including Fidel’s interview in the New York Times. When his friend Jack Turner had been caught smuggling arms to Cuba, then “tortured and tossed to the sharks by Batista,” Morgan had heard the “bell that tolled in the jungles of the Sierra Maestra.”84

  Making contact with potential allies in Old Havana, Morgan met a radicalized student named Roger Rodríguez. Conversing in hushed tones with Rodríguez, Morgan explained that he was not intimidated by the danger and wanted to fight for good: “The most important thing for free men to do is to protect the freedom of others.” Yes, said Rodríguez, distrustful of the gringo and his story, suspecting him to be a CIA agent.

  The rebels who escorted Morgan also suspected that he was a spy, so they took him to Menoyo’s group in the Sierra Escambray rather than endangering their leader by bringing him to Fidel. He was so fat, joked one rebel soldier, that he had to be CIA. There, they ran Morgan ragged over the hills and walked him through poisonous shrubs until his fair skin swelled up and turned red. “No soy mulo!” (“I am not a mule!”) he protested but continued to march, proving himself in the process.85

  Afterward, they began to feel sorry for the gringo who had lost thirty-five pounds and whose appearance had changed dramatically. They began to believe him. When their rebel band was attacked, Morgan showed bravery during the battle and earned their respect. Having served in the US Army, he had more experience than most of the student
rebels, was adept at judo and knife fighting, and soon became a favorite among the men. When the group was later interviewed by the New York Times, the American was a curiosity and so was asked what he was doing there fighting with the rebels. “Here are men who are fighting for liberty and justice in their land and I am here to fight with them,” he replied.86

  Morgan was afterward promoted to the rank of comandante by Fidel Castro. He, Menoyo, and Che were the only foreigners to earn that honor. When US-Cuban relations soured, Morgan had his American citizenship revoked in September 1959, yet many in Cuba regarded him as a hero, including his wife, Olga, who had met him fighting for freedom in the Cuban revolution. Regretfully, after the war ended, Morgan would witness the autocratic tendencies of the revolutionary government firsthand—being imprisoned and executed for treason despite his service to its cause.

  Taking the offensive, Fidel Castro gave his brother Raúl command of fifty to eighty riflemen and ordered him to create a second front in the Sierra Cristal. He gave command of another column to Juan Almeida to create a third front in Santiago de Cuba. Taking up positions in the mountains within striking distance of the northeastern plantations of the Oriente, Raúl Castro at first had the mission of applying economic pressure burning fields of sugarcane, but as rebels witnessed the United States continue to prop up Batista’s Army and US rockets raining on the houses of Cuban peasants who were supporting them in the mountains, Fidel wrote Celia Sánchez about other options: “When I saw the [US-supplied] rockets being fired at Mario’s house, I swore to myself that the Americans would pay dearly for what they are doing. When this war is over a much wider and bigger war will begin for me: the war that I am going to wage against them. I know that this is my real destiny.”87

  Staging a protest off on Pier 16 within sight of the Brooklyn Bridge, a group of Castro supporters picketed the Villanueva, a ship that had been reported to contain rifles and machine guns destined for Batista. Raúl Castro’s men began to observe and photograph Guantánamo Bay, gathering intelligence, with Che Guevara as his second in command.88 When one hundred rebels ambushed at Pinto del Agua on February 18, Batista’s forces withdrew. On February 24, Guevara assembled an antenna and transmitted his first broadcast of Radio Rebelde, sentimentally selecting that day, for it was the anniversary of the beginning of José Martí’s War of Independence. Using mobile transmitters, the rebels would continue to broadcast “from the free territory of Cuba” to the island’s people in a powerful message of propaganda that inspired further subversion and hope.89

  At the end of the month, the 26th of July Movement received an open letter signed by forty-five civic associations and guilds—architects, public accountants, dentists, electrical engineers, social workers, professors, and veterinarians—announcing their support. Fidel himself had received a visit in the Sierra Maestra from an influential delegate from the Communist Party and a former member of Batista’s government, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, who had formerly expressed reservations, told Fidel not to attack Moncada Barracks, and refused his support; however, a new alliance formed between these two men that day in the hills.90 Returning toward the end of July to the mountains with a dozen men, Rafael Rodríguez would allegedly donate eight hundred thousand dollars to El Comandante’s cause. Hugging Rodríguez, Fidel supposedly shouted, “Now we’re ready to win the war.”91

  “Batista Insisting on Holding Vote: Determined on June Election Despite Spreading Revolt and Forecasts of Fraud,” declared the New York Times on March 1. Prevented by the constitution of 1940 from seeking a second consecutive term and planning to take over supreme command of the Cuban armed forces to avoid going into exile, Batista propped up Andrés Rivero Agüero, his “obedient and colorless” prime minister whose face had already been plastered on campaign posters everywhere.

  Promising “ballots not bullets,” former president Grau San Martín seemed favored to win, though his previous reign of eight years had caused most Cubans to view his administration as both corrupt and incompetent. The other opposition candidate from the new “Free People’s Party” was Dr. Carlos Marquez Sterling, a former provisional president, lawyer, and Economics professor at the University of Havana. “This is Batista’s dilemma,” he pitched, “If the election is honest, he will have to yield the government to the political opposition; if it is a fraud, he will have to yield the government to the rebels.”92 In a now-familiar refrain, Márquez Sterling vowed to return to the 1940 constitution, promised amnesty for all offenders, and warned a victory for Castro would result in the death of democracy for Cuba.93 Later jailed by Castro’s government and exiled in Miami, Márquez Sterling would assert that he had been cajoled by Fidel and Herbert Matthews to abandon the elections and support Fidel in exchange for a high position in the revolutionary government.

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  In April, George Plimpton’s “The Art of Fiction” interview with Ernest appeared in the Paris Review, allowing the readers to peer in on the writer at work in San Francisco de Paula. It documented the ritual of rising at dawn, standing in front of a bedroom bookshelf, shifting weight from one foot to the other, scribbling on the onionskin paper on his clipboard—“excited as a boy, fretful, miserable” during the ecstasy and agony of the process—and the chart on a piece of cardboard, set up against the wall beneath the stuffed head of a gazelle, tallying the daily word-output so that he would not feel guilty about a day off to fish the Gulf. Before knocking off work at noon to stroll down to the pool with his knotted walking stick to take his daily half-mile swim, Hemingway enlightened readers with words of wisdom. George Plimpton asked him if the actual process of writing was pleasurable. He responded, “Very.” Pressed by Plimpton to “say something of this process,” Hemingway reiterated his mantra for would-be voyeurs: “When…working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light…There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice.”94

  In April, Mary and Ernest received his old friends and former Chicago roommates Bunny and Bill Horne at the Finca Vigía. The group had driven together to Folly Ranch near Sheridan, Wyoming in July 1928, and their visit evoked memories of the old days in the Old West that arguably, combined with wistful reports from Mary’s recent trip, would tempt the writer to return there again.95

  After a prolonged letter campaign by Arnold MacLeish, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, and T. S. Elliot, the US government dismissed treason charges against Ezra Pound—brought on by his pro-Mussolini tirades—and in May, set him free from Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital. In June, Ezra was photographed as he arrived in Italy giving America the fascist version of flipping the bird. Heil! Ezra said he had never been released from the insane asylum in America because the entire country was an asylum. Pound, although outwardly insane, seemed to remember lucidly that the US Army had locked him in a steel cage during three summer weeks of 1945 at the Disciplinary Training Center north of Pisa. To his most patient mentor and friend from Paris, Hemingway had sent a check for one thousand dollars, the “end of the Nobel Prize money,” while he was still in the asylum in July 1956, and another fifteen hundred dollars upon his release to help his “Muy Querido Maestro Ex Lunacy” continue what remained of his days with his daughter at Schloss Brunnenburg in Merano, Italy, in July 1958.96

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  While the US government had officially committed to a policy of strict noninterference in Cuba’s internal conflict, the rebels suspected that they were not strictly following through. Operating in mountains above Guantánamo, Raúl Castro was now the comandante of Column Six. Taking heavy bombardments from Batista’s planes, Raúl believed the dictator’s aircraft were being repaired and refueled at the American air base of Guantánamo. Base workers in communication with Raúl furnished photographic evidence
of this and of a delivery of three hundred missiles to Batista’s forces on May 18. This counterintelligence justified Raúl’s enactment of Military Order no. 30, Operación Antiaérea (Operation Anti-Aircraft) on June 22.97

  On June 27, two hundred rebels surrounded a Nickel Mining Project at Moa Bay to kidnap ten Americans and two Canadians (a mixed bag of construction superintendents, engineers, a chemist, and a geologist) working for the company investing $79 million in development of nickel mining there. It was the kind of money that the United States would not wish to see jeopardized. The following day, a busload full of sailors and marines were returning to Guantánamo base after a night of drinking and womanizing in Caimanera, the town just north of base. Suddenly, a rebel with a rifle appeared on the road and fired a warning shot into the air. So sedated were the marines by their Cuban shore leave that they stopped the bus and surrendered on the spot. At the end of these insurgent operations, the rebels counted fifty total hostages in their care. They were clear in their communication: they had taken the hostages to retaliate against the United States’ financial and tactical support for a dictator—interference in a civil war.

  At pains to let his captives know that “he meant no offense,” Raúl let five who professed medical problems go, then three more, then five more the following week. Feeding and housing the others, he “drafted an apology note to their parents, wives, and sweethearts.” Received with such graciousness and consideration, quite a few of the kidnapped men became “equally gallant,” sympathetic to the rebels’ cause, and all in all, rather “amused” to be involved in a revolution they had previously only read about in newspapers or heard about on the radio. Time correspondent Jay Mallin reported on the scene: “‘A swell guy, that Raúl Castro,’ said Edward Cannon, a builder from Cornwall, Ontario, as he stepped off a helicopter at the base upon being freed. ‘We had good food and plenty of it, and beds with clean sheets,’ chimed in Henry Salmonson of Portland, Oregon.”98 Keeping tabs on these events, Ernest wrote Bill and Bunny on July 1 to thank them for their visit in April, relaying the Cuban news where “kidnappings are the latest local sport. They now have mining engineers, sugar mill technicians, consular officials, seamen (all ratings) and Marines—I called the Embassy to ask when they were going to start picking up the F.B.I.—the latest gag is that F[idel] Castro will entertain more Americans on July 4 than Ambassador Smith.”99 And indeed, to celebrate America’s independence on the fourth of July, the rebels prepared a roast pig for their guests, attempting to sway the press and the American public to their cause.