Robust, rubicund, sunburnt skin and the grey hair of the beard by the Caribbean sun, that image accompany in Havana many inhabitants from San Francisco de Paula who faithfully treasure it as one of their most affectionate memories from childhood or adolescence, when they played baseball on the plots and streets, and occasionally shared with the American who inhabited, a long time ago, Finca Vigía among books, magazines and trophies.

It is a quasi mythic picture of the American writer Ernest Hemingway, the same that used to set off for the capital at noon, to the center of the city, to have lunch with his friends at “lunch” time and above all, to take a good daiquiri, the famous “Papa”, without sugar, in the old bar of El Floridita.

Many times he did it with his own guests, with the actress Ava Gadner, or the actor Gary Cooper, his interpreters on the films. She, always beautiful, splendid from her feline beauty. He, brave and tender, the eternal antifascist fighter who had, on the screen, a romance with Ingrid Bergman, in the cinematographic version of that novel For whom the bell tolls that came from pain and experience in the biographic Hemingway’s period of the Spanish civil war, within the narrator’s personal life, the same that wrote on the novel A Farewell to Arms about those other years of his youth when he was a journalist of the Star from Kansas City and above all, when he was an ambulance driver during the First World War; his stories always based on personal life experience in a game of fiction and testimony.

Hemingway left Cubans the writing of one of his most emotional narrative pages with The Old Man and the Sea, Pulitzer award, and then Nobel prize which was received in the Island and that he dedicated, as a tribute and offering to the patroness of Cuba, Our Lady of Charity, in El Cobre sanctuary, at Santiago de Cuba’s door, where you can find copper mineral opencast and the ancient marks of the slaves from colonial time as well.

That Hemingway, alive and sportsman, is a memory we treasure in our minds since we always prefer, in this archipelago, evoke the writer in his prime of life and not in his fall when he was sick and decided to end his life with his own hands, 45 years ago. This tragic fact took place on his father’s destiny years ago, also marked by suicide.

Ernest Hemingway is a legend for Cuban men and women, an adventure symbol, full of energy on the plains of Africa, dreamer and lover, epic in his own horizon, performing heroic feats in the wars, testifying those events that touched Humanity and that found echo in his work to translate existence with the eternal language of beauty.

Article by Mercedes Santos Moray

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