Hemingway Adventure (1999)

by Michael Palin

  Granma is sold by all sorts of people, including the man who accosts me outside my hotel with what is probably the world’s worst sales pitch.

  ‘Granma?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Well, fuck off then.’

  Irresistible.

  It’s 33 degrees and heading higher. The humidity must be nudging 100. Wandering the streets isn’t such a good idea and I am relieved that our film schedule is taking us indoors to the Corona cigar factory. Relief is short-lived. Though the small tourist shop where the credit cards are exchanged for elegantly wrapped boxes of cigars is air-conditioned, the huge factory behind it isn’t. As the factory is far more interesting than the shop there seems no getting away from the stickiness.

  I once visited the production line for a range of ‘hand-finished’ chocolates produced for a world-famous London department store. The ‘hand-finishing’ process consisted of a pair of elderly ladies waiting for the items to emerge from a coating machine, then dipping their gnarled forefingers into a bowl of melted chocolate and anointing each one with a twirl. What they did with their fingers in between each one was not always clear.

  There are those who believe that the thighs of Cuban virgins are an integral part of cigar production, but in the long open room where 250 workers sit in rows at their workbenches there was no evidence of any below-the-belt work, and very few virgins.

  At one end of the room is a stage with microphones set at a table and a large, badly reproduced photo of Che Guevara on an easel to one side. He is, of course, sporting a big cigar. Occasionally there are readings to encourage the workers. Whilst we are there a lady exhorts them to higher cigar production with a passage from The Old Man and the Sea.

  The workers are comparatively well paid. If you can roll more than 170 cigars in a working day you can earn 300 pesos a fortnight. That’s about twelve pounds, or nineteen dollars. By comparison, a doctor or similar government employee would take almost a month to earn this much.

  The irony is that the cigars which communist Cuba produces are one of the symbols of unrestrained capitalism, and there are those who would pay a hundred dollars or more for a hand-rolled Havana cigar. Which is about two and a half months’ wages for the hand that rolled it. Or five months’ wages for the teacher of their children.

  Still very hot and today the wind has shifted to the east, blowing a sulphurous stench across the city from a chemical works down by the docks.

  As usual, no sooner have we stepped outside the hotel than heads turn our way and people sidle across offering us everything. Basil’s christened it Vampire City but in my experience this happens in the vicinity of any tourist hotel where there are rich people in a poor country. Two streets away you will be totally ignored.

  Today the Granma salesman who told me to fuck off is full of good cheer as he has with him Granma International - English edition.

  I fork out 50 cents for a copy and scan it as I walk down a narrow street incongruously called O’Reilly. I read of Cuba’s record tourist figures, with Canadians and Italians leading the way, ahead of Germans and Spaniards. When Hemingway first walked these streets in the 1930s, Cuba was virtually another state of the USA, with its stranglehold on sugar, fruit canning and organised crime. All that changed with the Castro revolution, secured and bankrolled as it was by the Soviet Union. In the early 1960s Cuba abruptly became off-limits to Americans, a volatile flashpoint, the country most likely to spark off the third world war (though the US, inexplicably, held on to their naval base at Guantanamo).

  Now the Russians have packed up and left and Castro is more interested in co-operation than confrontation. There are over 340 separate joint-venture projects and this week alone Mexican, Guatemalan, Norwegian and Spanish trade missions are in town.

  The US government is not so keen to make up. It is not being allowed to by those Cubans who fled to America when their land was confiscated without compensation by Castro. They wait and watch from the comfort of nearby Florida and insist the pressure be kept on. Congress obliges them by maintaining a trade embargo. The Helms-Burton Act not only forbids American companies from carrying on trade with Cuba, but seeks to penalise non-American companies as well.

  Meanwhile the locals still drive around in pre-Revolution American cars, Castro allows the dollar to be traded, the Afro-Cuban All Stars band wins a Grammy award and an American novelist remains one of Cuba’s biggest tourist attractions. Crazy.

  Hemingway’s presence is never very far away. Fifteen minutes’ walk from the Ambos Mundos - or three or four days if you stop to talk - there stands, beneath a fine old sign of swirling neon, his favourite Havana bar, El Floridita. It’s little changed from the days when he would be snapped at the bar with Errol Flynn or Gary Cooper. Hemingway drank there a lot and drank a lot there.

  Though I’m not allowed to sit in the hallowed corner which was, and still is, reserved for Hemingway, I’m as near as I can get to the altar, and I can see why he liked to sit here, back to the wall with a good all-round view. But then, Hemingway didn’t just sit. He presided.

  I can also understand why, as a connoisseur of the cocktail, he always preferred a seat at the bar to a seat at the table. From here I can follow every tip, twist, shake and stir of the mixing process.

  In Islands in the Stream, he pulls off his old trick of selling self-destruction as exquisitely seductive:

  Thomas Hudson had been ashore about four days when he got really drunk. It had started at noon at the Floridita … He had drunk double frozen daiquiris, the great ones that Constante made, that had no taste of alcohol and felt, as you drank them, the way downhill glacier skiing feels running through powder snow and, after the sixth and eighth, felt like downhill glacier skiing feels when you’re running unroped.

  Never having experienced the thrills of downhill glacier skiing, roped or unroped, I sit myself down and order Hemingway’s legacy to the Floridita, a variation of the daiquiri now known as the Papa Doble (lime-juice, dash of maraschino, double rum, no sugar, over crushed ice). Pretty soon, if not skiing, I’m certainly going downhill.

  After my third Papa Doble I don’t even care about the regular parade of tour groups, forty or fifty strong, who are herded into the Floridita to take photographs, buy nothing and leave. After four Papa Dobles, I’ve ceased to weep at the sight of Hemingway T-shirts and baseball caps piled up at the other end of the bar and, after five, I can even smile sweetly at the persistent irritation of the man who wants me to get the hell out of my seat so he can take a picture of his girlfriend on it.

  All in all, I think Papa would have been proud of me. Except for the fact that I’ve only managed five of his specials. His average was twelve at a sitting.

  Still, it is only lunch-time.

  Hemingway once called drink ‘my best friend and severest critic’. I know what he means. This afternoon the daiquiris are my friends, making the blotchy, mouldering walls of old Havana glow with health, making the street life with all its complicated system of looks and glances and smiles and beckonings no longer aggressive and oppressive and claustrophobic but dramatic and endlessly entertaining. This is not a city for the inhibited. If you just let it flow over you, Havana is truly intoxicating.

  The notes I made yesterday seem to stop in mid-afternoon, after three failed attempts to spell the word ‘intoxicating’. The phone rings. Louder than usual, I swear. It’s my producer, Martha. We have secured an interview with Gregorio Fuentes, Hemingway’s 101-year-old skipper of the Pilar. He lives at Cojimar a few miles along the coast, and can see us at eleven thirty.

  Wash and shave and reach for the towel. It’s been wound in the shape of a swan. Take a while to undo it.

  My head is a bit sore - inside rather than outside - and before setting off for Cojimar, I cross the street to find something to soothe it at Johnson’s, a venerable chemist’s shop whose scantily laden shelves and old wooden galleries stretch off into the depths of a cool and mercifully dark interior. I explain my malady to one o
f the staff who disappears into the gloom leaving me to contemplate a display-case full of dusty condom packets.

  There is a passage in Islands in the Stream in which Thomas Hudson, after several too many at the Floridita, struggles to find a Seconal capsule with which to head off a hangover. (He knocks it off his bedside table and it’s eventually found by his cat.) It sounds so like an autobiographical detail that I ask the lady who brings back my preparation if Hemingway ever came in here on his merry way up the street from hotel to bar. There is some mirth as this is translated and they nod and giggle and tell me he always used to come in here for his PPG 5. Thinking I have a scoop, I write this information down with laborious care. This only seems to increase their amusement, and it’s not until later in the day that I learn that PPG 5 has only been on the market for five years, and though its primary purpose is to reduce cholesterol it’s been found to have distinctly Viagran side effects. All of which would have suited Papa admirably. If only he’d been alive.

  The soggy clouds have departed and it is a roaring furnace of a day as we approach Cojimar. Grey concrete-slab blocks loom to the south but the shoreline of the little bay is still dominated by the graceful Spanish fortress at its mouth and the stone jetty that snakes into the water beside it. It doesn’t look to have changed much since the days when Hemingway kept Pilar in the harbour and chose the local fishing community as the setting for his most successful book The Old Man and the Sea. They have returned the compliment by raising a memorial to him, a small colonnaded shrine which circles a bronze head of Hemingway, made from melted brass off local fishing boats. It just misses looking like the man. From one side it’s George V, from the other, Lenin.

  The Terraza, the waterside watering hole that Hemingway frequented, still flourishes, and it’s here that Gregorio will talk to us.

  It has a long polished-wood bar and at the back, overlooking the sea, is a smart restaurant with photographs of Gregorio and Ernest hauling in various sizes of marlin sharing the wall with an interestingly mis-spelled pottery dish on which is engraved a recipe for ‘Ceviche a la Himisngway,’ a traditional fish stew.

  As we are looking for a good filming position, a dark shadow blots out the sunlight. It is cast by an enormous double-decker tourist coach which has drawn up outside and which disgorges an obedient crocodile of tourists all heading for the room in which we are hoping to talk to Gregorio. There has been a double-booking between ourselves and fifty Belgians, and the manager makes his preference quite clear.

  Gregorio and his grandson and minder, Rafaelito, sportingly agree to relocate the meeting at a boat-yard down by the shore, where the Cojimar River runs into the bay. Tourists don’t come down here, certainly not in groups of forty or fifty, and it’s rather peaceful and local. By the bridge, a father is teaching his small son to fish with a hand-line and families cluster round a hut drinking guarapo, an iced sugar-cane drink, out of brown glass tumblers. Nearby stalls sell staple snacks - fried bananas, sweet corn, toasted bread. An old man studies the sky, critically, through a pair of old binoculars. It looks perfect to me, but he doesn’t seem happy. (We didn’t know then that Hurricane George, one of the fiercest of the season, was slowly gaining strength in the eastern Caribbean.)

  In the yard the local fishing boats, which sport endearing names like Gladys and Doris, are being painted and repaired, mostly without the aid of modern technology. Handsaws cut timbers, rivets are driven home by hand. Into the midst of all this, sitting in a 1957 Hillman Minx driven by Rafaelito, comes Gregorio Fuentes, the longest-surviving of all Hemingway’s old pals, a man who has spent eighty years of his life in boats and is now one of the most famous fishermen since St Peter.

  He is simply, smartly turned out in grey trousers and a crisp, clean shirt with a green stripe. He sports a dark blue cap with the words ‘Capitan Gregorio Fuentes’ unnecessarily printed across it. He is tall and stoops only slightly and carries a crutch but seems not to depend on it. He smokes a cigar with obvious relish and when he shakes all our hands, I notice he holds on to Martha’s much longer than anyone else’s.

  A hundred and one? I’d like to be that active at sixty.

  Rafaelito has given me certain guidelines about the interview. I should ‘avoid philosophicals’ - and he’ll not answer questions involving drinking habits or female relationships. This, of course, suggests there is a lot to ask. He fills me in quickly on things I ought to know. They were good friends, Hemingway and Gregorio; Hemingway came to the house. It was not a boss-worker relationship. It was a relationship of mutual respect.

  Gregorio is a little tired, Rafaelito goes on, there was a South African crew talking to him yesterday and some Indians are expected tomorrow. In addition people keep dropping in to see him at the house (paying fifty dollars for fifteen minutes). The old man, he says, is ‘a living museum’. And clearly doing a lot better business than most museums.

  By now Gregorio is seated and impatient to begin. As soon as I put the first question, hammering starts somewhere in the yard and we have to wait until Martha has located and placated the source.

  Despite the midday heat Gregorio replies to my questions with the patience of a saint. He looks like one for a start. With his long craggy face and big tired eyes he resembles the victim in a medieval temptation painting.

  He tells how Hemingway came across him whilst both were fishing in Key West and how he had told him he was having a boat built and wanted Gregorio to come and be her skipper. Hemingway was a man, he assures me, ‘who had a human heart for everybody, especially kids and poor people’.

  He was with Hemingway when they came across the lone fisherman who became the inspiration for Hemingway’s best-known story.

  ‘I suggested to title the book The Old Man and the Sea,’ he adds modestly.

  Despite the warning, I feel I can’t completely avoid the forbidden areas, but I phrase my question carefully.

  ‘I read somewhere that Hemingway never drank whilst fishing …?’

  Gregorio replies without a pause. ‘No! He always drank.’ Then his eyes fix on me. And his eyes are quite something. Though the rest of his expression may seem tired and detached, his eyes are big and full of life. They give away what he’s really thinking and I think it is that I’m a bit tiresome.

  ‘Many people saw him with a drink in his hand and they thought he was always drunk, but go to hell, they didn’t know what they were talking about.’

  ‘Which of his wives was the best fisherwoman?’

  ‘None of them.’

  ‘What do you think of the American blockade of Cuba? D’you think that will change soon?’

  Gregorio removes his cigar, but the smoke lingers a long time around his mouth.

  ‘I heard Hemingway once say that there was going to be a big war and the whole world was going to defeat the United States and leave them even less powerful than a small island like Cuba.’

  ‘Do you believe this?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  By the time we’ve finished both myself and Ernesto, who has been making a brilliant instant translation, are exhausted. Gregorio looks fresh as a daisy. For the first time in half an hour I take my eyes off his and look around. All work in the boat-yard has ceased and behind the camera, a crowd of local fishermen has downed tools to stand and watch the local hero.

  *

  Havana is full of music and musicians, especially after dark. Not just in clubs but in the streets and in the bars and in the restaurants. There is no hiding from them. The bands will seek you out, wherever you are. Tea for two can easily become tea for twelve. No nook or cranny, back room or dimly lit alcove is safe from a few choruses of ‘Guantanamera’. The lobby of the Ambos Mundos Hotel is no exception. Every evening a portly tenor and his even more portly accompanist thunder out their operatic repertoire as the life of a busy hotel lobby goes on around them.

  This evening is particularly busy and the only table we can find is next door to the lavatory. A big middle-aged Cuban lady sits pat
iently on a chair outside and occasionally acts as a guide to very drunk tourists who can’t find the entrance. She also has to go and look for them when they don’t come out. We all like her, but Basil has taken a particular shine and tonight she confides to him that she was once a pretty fair opera singer herself.

  Encouraged by us all, she waits until the portly tenor has crescendoed yet again, and as he mops his brow and looks swiftly round for any response, she rises from her seat, draws herself up to an impressive height and silences the lobby with a heartbreaking Spanish love-song. Leaving not a dry eye in the house she graciously acknowledges the thunderous applause and resumes her seat beside the lavatory.

  Later, we eat at a paladar. Owing to a serious shortage of restaurants, the authorities have licensed an arrangement whereby families can charge for providing meals in their homes, as long as they are limited to twelve chairs and staffed only by members of the family. It’s an odd sensation to be giving our order to the waitress at one end of the room, whilst her grandfather and two children are watching television at the other. Our menu has an English translation and includes Hot Entrances and Cream Soap.

  When someone said that I should not leave Havana without seeing Marina Hemingway, I scuttled back to my books to see if there was a sister I’d missed. Or perhaps a secret daughter no one talked about.

  But the search for Marina Hemingway doesn’t lead to any undiscovered relatives or skeleton-filled closets. It leads along the Malecon, the crusty peeling crescent of seafront, through a tunnel and out past the green-lawned villas of Miramar, which is the nearest thing to a Beverly Hills in Havana, over a creek at Jaimanitas, where run-down fishing-boats are huddled at crazy angles on the shore, and through a security gate, above which flutters a Cuban flag.

  This is Marina Hemingway. One of the most ambitious waterfront developments in Cuba. An international ‘sports port’ as they call it, themed, relentlessly, after the most famous non-Cuban of them all.