Ernesto Page 39
Leaving dozens of fans and a cloud of cigar smoke in America, Fidel Castro returned home. Although he had made many friends, his perceived impertinence had also made him many enemies. When one considers that Fidel emphasized with the best of intentions that he was not visiting America to beg the “yanquis” for money, one wonders if a meeting with a wordsmith could have helped to refine his rhetoric.41
Absconding to a golf course, Eisenhower, with no intention of meeting with Fidel Castro, shunned him during his visit. He sent lackey Vice President Nixon in his place. After their meeting, Nixon emerged with a “somewhat mixed” impression: he possessed qualities that made him a leader of men, and whatever they thought of him, he seemed destined to be “a great factor in the development of Cuba and very possibly in Latin American affairs generally.” He seemed sincere but was “either incredibly naive about Communism or under Communist discipline.” Nixon’s guess was the former, and his ideas on how to run a government or economy were “less developed than those of almost any world figure I have met in fifty countries.” Still they had no choice but to try to educate and guide him.42
Perhaps put off by Castro’s effusive nature, Nixon emerged from their meeting stiffly concerned about the leftist leanings of Fidel’s brother, Raúl, and those of his intimate associate, Che Guevara. Dulles’s replacement as secretary of state, Christian Herter, seconded Nixon’s reservations. Should we attribute Nixon and Castro’s missed connection and opportunity to innocence, arrogance, or misunderstanding? Whatever was lost in translation might have been intentional or accidental.43
Shortly after his return, Fidel Castro fulfilled the promises of his Moncada agenda by signing the Agrarian Reform Act on May 17—limiting the size of land holdings to one thousand acres, divesting foreigners of the right to own land, expropriating thousands of acres of farmland, and redistributing it to the Cuban people like Robin Hood.
CHAPTER 14
El Comandante Meets His Favorite Author (1960)
The Hemingways departed on April 22 on a plane for New York City, then boarded the Constitution for Algeciras, Spain. For the second consecutive summer, Ernest would be reporting on the bull fights, this time for Life magazine. Mrs. Hemingway noted that they had left the Finca “fully staffed, expecting to return in the autumn or winter” and with “all its silver, Venetian glassware, eight thousand books, a number of them autographed first editions, and Ernest’s small collection of paintings, one Paul Klee, two Juan Gris, five André Masson, one Braque and several good lively paintings of bulls by Robert Domingo. At my bank in Havana we have left reams of unpublished manuscript.”1
That summer at the home of Bill and Annie Davis in La Consula, Ernest wrote “The Art of Short Story” as an introduction to a student edition of his short stories for Scribner’s. At the Hotel Suecia in Madrid during San Isidro, the Hemingways met nineteen-year-old Valerie Danby-Smith, “purportedly” there, wrote Mary, to interview Ernest for the Irish press. With a “creamy complexion, pink cheeks, and tangled dark hair” (reminding some of Goya’s Duchess of Alba), she was “seldom far from Ernest’s side” after that.2
From June to September, Ernest followed the Ordóñez-Dominguín corridas. During the Pamplona Feria from July 7 to 14, young Valerie Danby-Smith rejoined their party, irritating Mrs. Hemingway. Ernest was planning a “little country fiesta” for his sixtieth birthday party at La Consula, including Chinese vegetables from London, champagne from France, a long table by the pool with Japanese lanterns, an orchestra, a procession of guitarists and flamenco dancers, a shooting gallery, silly hats for people to put on, a burro for them to ride, photographers, and fireworks. As one of many enchanting guests, friends old and new, travelling over land and over sea to attend, the matador Antonio Ordóñez remembered: “The Consula party was only a party, but it was a very good one.”3
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Enticed by high returns for sugar, Cuban agriculture became increasingly dependent on the crop. When the sugar market yo-yoed, only those who were well-insulated and well-positioned could ride out the storms and influence the market to their advantage—for the majority, the economy proved unsustainable. Faced with a period of austerity caused by civil strife, the falling price of sugar, the flight of tourism, and rising unemployment, the people demanded the promised revolution now.4 Public perception was that President Urrutia, living now in the presidential palace, was an anti-Communist, while Prime Minister Fidel Castro was determined to represent the people, and it had been rumored that a rift had been growing between them. When Castro resigned from his Prime Minister position in protest, a ground swell of public opinion asked him to reconsider during a demonstration with signs painted “With Fidel to the Death! We are with you Fidel!” ending at the presidential palace with union leaders like Conrado Bécquer calling for Urrutia’s resignation instead.5
On the evening of July 17, Castro took to the air waves to set himself apart from Urrutia, distinguishing himself as a man of the people. His differences with Urrutia had, he said, led to his resignation. He never wanted the post in the first place. “I had never wanted to be prime minister, but in the first month of government I saw no moves in the council of ministers toward any measures of social character…When I became prime minister, I proposed the reduction of government salaries beginning with my own.” But while sugar workers’ salaries were being cut, Urrutia had insisted that his remain at $100,000 annually and purchased an expensive villa, an excess in Castro’s opinion that betrayed the revolution’s ideals.6 Repulsed, Urrutia sought asylum in the Venezuelan embassy, then fled to New York. In his place, Fidel Castro named the pliable Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado president and reinstated himself as prime minister.
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Throughout his “Dangerous Summer” for Life magazine, Hemingway had been following two dueling vedette toreros with Bill Smith, Hotchner, Valerie, Mary, and Annie Smith in Málaga, Valencia, Madrid, Saragossa, Bilbao, and other cities in Spain.7 The season resulted in brutal gorings for both the talented newcomer, Luis Miguel Dominguín, and his brother-in-law, a more established veteran, Antonio Ordóñez (their fathers were also legends in the sport). One fight in Bilbao ended the competition and nearly took Dominguín’s life. Maintaining an exhausting pace throughout the summer, Hemingway, a true aficionado of the bloodsport, called the last match the greatest bit of bullfighting he had ever seen, favoring Ordóñez as the sport’s true master and comparing him to Pedro Romero.8
Tired of corrida after corrida in the summer heat, of eating and drinking in excess without sleep, and in the company of flattering fans like Slim Hayward or Valerie Danby-Smith, Mrs. Hemingway wrote that she felt “inaudible and invisible,” underappreciated if not outright ignored, and told her husband that she was leaving him for good. “Neglect, rudeness, thoughtlessness, abusive language, unjust criticism, false accusations, failures of courtesy and friendliness” were among the reasons she cited in a letter, the last straw being when Ernest invited the Ordóñezes to Cuba without first consulting her, the matron of the house.9 “Most hurtful of all,” Mary wrote her husband, “were your compliments and attentions and interest and kisses for many girls and women, nothing for me. Nothing spontaneous toward me on your part, not even on the night of your birthday party…if I went to ask you a simple question…your face took on a look of irritation and impatience and you would say, ‘I haven’t got time. I have to go shit now. I have to go swim now.’”10
In New York, she resolved to rent an apartment for herself first, then return to put the Finca Vigía and the Ketchum house in order in advance of his guests’ arrival, then return to New York to begin a new life alone.11 Expressing regrets, but by and large ignoring the drama, Ernest allowed his wife to withdraw while he travelled from September 27 to October 27 with Valerie and Bill Davis to Nîmes, Aigues-Mortes, and Le Grau-du-Roi, “to ensure the accuracy” of scenes in The Garden of Eden.
While Hemingway was on this tour, Havana was strafed on October 21
by two private planes from Miami that also dropped bales of anti-Castro propaganda. Two people were killed by strafing from the aircraft and fifty were injured as Fidel Castro denounced the attack as terrorism. Uncomfortable with the rising influence of Communism in Cuba, evidenced by the displacement of President Urrutia, Huber Matos, a comandante who played a pivotal role in the revolution, resigned his post as military commander of Camagüey Province on October 19.12 Dispatched by Castro to attend to Matos’s acts of treason, General Camilo Cienfuegos, a much-loved popular hero, disappeared mysteriously in an airplane crash and joined the list of martyrs, dying in service of la Revolución.
Just a few days later, Ernest Hemingway boarded the transatlantic liner Liberté with Antonio and Carmen Ordóñez on the return trip to Cuba via New York. Of course, given America’s anti-Communist anxieties, Hemingway’s support for the revolution generated some publicity, which the press relished as news-generating scandal. Arriving in the United State, Hemingway was accosted by a group of gossip columnists as he descended the gangplank. After patiently waiting for the disparaging insinuations about Cuba and the revolution to subside, he snapped, “Are you through, gentlemen? I think everything is fine there.” Then he precised: “We, the people of honor, believe in the Cuban Revolution.” A longtime inhabitant of Havana, Hemingway had seen dictatorships come and go—as they conspired with American investors and organized crime to rob the island blind—in addition to the violent uprisings and reprisals. Because of what he had seen and what he understood, he remained firm in his opposition of continued injustice, made several financial contributions to the cause, putting his reputation and his property at risk as tensions intensified, and finally, speaking out in support of the people’s revolution. In New York, he delivered a copy of his Paris memoir to Scribner and Sons.
Three days later, when the group landed in the Havana airport, they were again greeted by reporters. When asked to comment on the revolution, Ernest reiterated: “We, the people of honor, believe in the Cuban Revolution, I am happy to be here again, because I consider myself one more Cuban…I haven’t believed any of the reports published against Cuba in the foreign press. My sympathies are with the Cuban government and with all our difficulties…I don’t want to be considered a yanqui.” He kissed the Cuban flag, but too quickly for reporters to capture it on film. When they asked him to do it again so that they could photograph it, the author responded: “I kissed it with all my heart, not as an actor.”13 Appreciating his style, they applauded.
Flying ahead via Chicago with her servant, Lola, Mary travelled in advance of her husband’s arrival to make the Ketchum house presentable for his matador guests. On November 19, Ernest, Roberto Herrera Sotolongo, and Carmen and Antonio Ordóñez arrived. During a hunting expedition, eight days into their visit, Mary tripped on a root on the slippery frozen ground and shattered her elbow. Scolding her for her inattention, Ernest complained that she had ruined their plans and that he had to do the servants’ work in her absence. The injury became a pretext to delay her threat of leaving him.14 In Cuba, the administration of death sentences was suspended for the holiday season.
During the icy December after the bullfighter and his wife departed from Ketchum, Ernest was becoming more paranoid and withdrawn. What was causing him to behave that way? Did Hemingway’s sudden mental breakdown have anything to do with Cuba? Is it possible that the precariousness of his longtime residence was somehow contributing to Hemingway’s instability and eventual destruction?
Suffering from a broken elbow, insomnia, and hypertension between them, Ernest and Mary took the train to Chicago, then returned to Havana by plane at the end of January 1960. Setting forty-five chapters of The Garden of Eden aside, Ernest forged ahead with his “Dangerous Summer” pieces. Receiving a ticket from the Hemingways, young Valerie Danby-Smith travelled to Cuba to serve as Ernest’s “last secretary.”
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In February, First Deputy Premier of Russia, Anastas I. Mikoyan, visited Cuba with an offer of $100 million in trade credit with 2.5 percent interest. Over the course of the next five years, the Soviets agreed to buy 5 million tons of sugar and to supply Cuba with crude oil, wheat, machinery, fertilizers, and petroleum products. During his stay, Mikoyan paid a special visit to the Finca Vigía bearing gifts of wooden dolls, caviar, and a collection of Hemingway’s works translated into Russian. In addition to Papa’s declaration that vodka was good to gargle for sore throats and colds, the writer made sure to communicate sentiments that would keep him out of trouble during tense times: “As a result of the revolution, I can say one thing for sure: for the first time in Cuba, there is a clean government.”15
In February and March, Hotchner’s adaptations of The Fifth Column and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” aired on CBS, continuing to enhance the income and prestige of Ernest Hemingway through the medium of television. Fearing libel and doubting his work, Ernest wrote Scribner in March to ask him to return his Parisian memoirs and to suspend its publication until further notice. By the end of March, Ernest had written sixty-three thousand words of The Dangerous Summer.
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On March 4, the French freighter La Coubre, delivering Belgian arms to Havana harbor, exploded, killing 101 people. Fidel Castro immediately denounced the United States for “sabotage.”16 To protest the “heinous act,” commanders Che Guevara, Ramiro Valdés, Camilo Cienfuegos, William Morgan, Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, Osvaldo Dorticós (who would remain the president of Cuba until 1976), and Fidel Castro walked arm in arm down Calle Neptuno, forming a dramatic contrast between the street’s garish neon signs and the plain green of their uniforms and the sobriety of their mission.
In a photo taken on March 5, 1960, by Alberto Korda at a ceremony for the victims of the tragedy, Che appears full of sorrow, anger, and determination. That image would become ubiquitous across the world, a trademark, appearing on T-shirts and countless other commodities. Che transcended his personhood and became both a symbol for the struggle against tyranny and of tyranny itself. His spirit seemed to impress even nihilist philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre who, with Simone de Beauvoir, was there that mournful day when Che’s picture was taken.
One of Che’s first questions in taking over as president of the Banco Nacional de Cuba in November was where Cuba had deposited its gold reserves and dollars. When he was told Fort Knox, he said that the gold would have to be sold and converted into currency in Canadian and Swiss accounts. During a speaking engagement at the bank two months later, Che apologized “because my talk has been much more fiery than you would expect for the post I occupy; I ask once more for forgiveness, but I am still much more of a guerrilla than President of the National Bank,” and as if to prove it, he signed banknotes with his nom de guerre, “Che.”17 The agenda was the struggle, and so it would remain, and La Coubre only confirmed the necessity of his resolve and commitment to the bitter end.
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Most every Thursday evening that season, Ambassador Phil Bonsal dined with Ernest Hemingway. One evening he came also to deliver an upsetting message. The US government was going to break off relations with Cuba. As the island’s most conspicuous, high-profile expatriate, Washington decreed that Hemingway should leave Cuba as soon as possible and publicly proclaim his disapproval of Castro’s government. If he did not, he could be sure that he would face serious and unpleasant consequences.18 Hemingway protested: his business was not politics, but writing, and for twenty-two years Cuba had been his home. Be that as it may, Bonsal replied that high officials maintained a different view, had used the word “traitor,” and saw his collaboration as a nonnegotiable.
That was the message he had to deliver, said the ambassador, and he believed that Ernest should take it quite seriously. As the course of dinner conversation drifted to other subjects, the Hemingways and their dinner guests tried to think about happier things but found it difficult to forget what had just been said. Hemingway was not one to
take orders, and one can imagine that this news and the imminent loss of his cherished home would have been very unsettling. From Bonsal’s warning, it is also difficult to know the severity of the “consequences” that might have come as a response to Hemingway’s acts of “treason.” A letter of reprimand, loss of citizenship, a fine, imprisonment, or something much more sinister?
On his next visit, Phil told them that he had been recalled, and diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba had officially been broken. He was leaving the next day. They tried to be cheerful, saying it was just temporary, that it would pass. Before leaving, however, Phil softly reminded Ernest of the warning he had made on his previous visit. From her unique vantage point as Hemingway’s “last secretary,” Valerie Danby-Smith witnessed these scenes firsthand: “He felt now more than ever that Ernest would have to make an open choice between his country and his home—loudly and clearly, so that the world would know where he stood. We all embraced, promising to meet again before too long, believing things could only improve. While we waved to Phil from the steps as he left, I noted the sadness in Ernest’s eyes. None of us would see Phil again.” It was time for Ernest to “review his narrowing options. The noose was tightening.”19