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| Cojimar - A Cuban fishing village used by Hemingway to dock his boat Pilar |
Earlier this year my family
took our March Break holiday again in Cuba. One of the day-trips I hoped to
make whilst there was a second visit to Hemingway's house - Finca Vigia (Lookout Farm) - where he
lived for twenty years, between 1939 and 1960. I had been at the house (now a
museum) first in 2010; but I had missed
seeing Pilar, his 38-foot Playmate cabin-cruiser
boat built by the Wheeler Shipyard in Brooklyn, New York.
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| Hemingway's boat Pilar with the two outriggers fully deployed |
I met two
fellow-Canadians in Jibicoa, our resort on the north coast of Cuba - located
about an hour's drive east of Havana. They were keen, too, to do a Hemingway
pilgrimage. Not only did we make a trip together to Finca Vigia, we also moved on from there to the village of Cojimar
- a fishing village, where the Hemingways often docked their boat. And on the following
day, I returned to Cojimar with my wife and sister-in-law.
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| Cojimar | | |
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Old cars on Cojimar's main street - Marti Real
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| Many public buildings have fallen into ruin, because of neglect and an eroding climate |
What follows are photographs
I took on these two visits. The first day was dull and overcast; but the next was
hot and sunny - a chance for me to go back there and re-do some shots in bright
sunlight. So here they are: some photographs of Cojimar, and some observations
about Hemingway's links to this quaint Cuban fishing village.
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| Cojimar is on the north coast of Cuba, east of Havana, the capital city |
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| Hemingway's house at bottom; Havana at top-left; Cojimar is on the coast, in the middle |
Ernest Hemingway used
Cojimar as an alternate site for the docking of his fishing-boat Pilar during the 1940s and 1950s. He
also used the main harbour in Havana. Cojimar is a small fishing-village on the
north-coast of Cuba. It sits about 10 km east of Havana in a bay. The harbour is
at the mouth of Rio Cojimar, just before it flows into the protected bay. The
village was founded here in the 17th-century, when houses and ranches began to
be built around a Spanish fort, Torréon
de Cojimar, erected in 1649 as part of the extended fortifications used to
protect the coastline near Havana.
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| The old Spanish fort, Torreon de Cojimar |
An invading British army
landed here in 1762, on its way to attack Havana. And in 1994 thousands of
"rafters", desperate to escape the Castro regime, left from the sheltered
waters of its rocky bay, to attempt a treacherous voyage across the Straits of
Florida to the United States. Cojimar is on the western side of the bay; on the
opposite side is a large housing estate of pre-fab apartments called Alamar - the birthplace of Cuban rap and
the site of an annual hip-hop festival.
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| La Terraza de Cojimar - a restaurant/tavern patronized by Hemingway |
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| The entrance to La Terraza de Cojimar off of Marti Real |
After a long day of deep-sea
fishing out in the Gulf Stream - which is not too far out from the coast -
Hemingway liked to stop by La Terraza de Cojimar. It's a restaurant/tavern on
Marti Real - the main street of the village. This was - and still is - the main
restaurant and drinking establishment in Cojimar. It was opened in 1925. It
soon became well-known; famous international visitors would drop by, and Cuban
film stars of the day could be found there.
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Barb and Margaret in La Terraza de Cojimar
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| Beautiful wooden bar, shelves, cabinets and ice-boxes at La Terraza de Cojimar |
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| Looking towards the front of La Terraza de Cojimar |
La Terraza de Cojimar was a
favourite haunt of Hemingway's and, as usual with him, he had a favourite
corner on the terrace that he always sat in. The proprietors have set up a
small bronze bust of the famous writer in that corner. On two long walls in
that same room of the restaurant, there is an impressive display of
black-and-white photographs of Hemingway in Cojimar.
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| Hemingway's favourite corner of La Terraza de Cojimar |
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| Hemingway encircled by a marlin |
Hemingway was a gregarious
and generous man. He liked to spend time here in la Terraza with the local
fishermen. He spoke Spanish fluently - having spent most summers in the 1920s
in Spain, following the bullfighting season. He would swap tales with the
locals about their exploits fishing out on the ocean. Often his first-mate,
Gregorio Fuentes, who lived in this village, would be on hand in the tavern.
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| One of Hemingway's favourite Cuban drinks - the mojito, made with white rum |
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| Also on a Hemingway pilgrimage: friends Richard and Brenda in La Terraza de Cojimar |
Cojimar became the model of
the fishing village in Hemingway's famous novella The Old Man and the Sea.
Many deep-sea fishermen used its harbour as their home base. Cojimar was the
site of a famous Great White Shark catch in the 1940s. There is some doubt as
to the facts of this catch, but it is considered a contender for the largest
Great White Shark specimen of all time.
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| Spencer Tracy played Santiago in the Hollywood version of "The Old Man and the Sea" |
The fishing story Hemingway tells in
this book is based on an incident that he heard about back in 1936. In the late
40s he had started work on "a big book". He often referred to it as
his "sea, air and land" trilogy. He toyed with this epic for many
years, but eventually had to abandon it. But he did complete much of the first
volume - the sea book. It was structured in four sections, set in Bimini and
Cuba. The first three sections would eventually be published posthumously as Islands
in the Stream (1970) under the control of Hemingway's fourth wife, Mary
Welsh Hemingway. Ernest took the plan for the fourth section and re-worked it
as a separate piece of fiction - a novella. He had begun serious work on it in
1951, and in an intense six-week spell at the beginning of 1952 he finished it.
The book tells the story of Santiago, an old deep-sea fisherman, who had gone
84 days without catching a single fish. He is cared for and supported by a
young boy called Manolo. This character is based on the young son of the owner
of La Terraza named Mandito. And the old man of the story, Santiago (St. James
- the patron saint of Spain) is thought to be based partly on a local fisherman
called Anselmo Hernandez, and partly on Hemingway's first mate, Gregorio
Fuentes.
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| Hemingway and Anselmo Hernandez (Santiago?) in La Terraza |
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| Interesting portrait of Gregorio Fuentes on wall of La Terraza de Cojimar |
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| Gregorio Fuentes - the first mate on Hemingway's boat Pilar - here in Cojimar |
A friend of Hemingway's,
Leland Hayward, read the manuscript of the finished novella. He loved it; and
he advised Hemingway to try to get it published in a national magazine like Life or Look. Ernest followed his advice, and he eventually got Life to pick up the option to publish.
They decided to publish it in a single edition, with a portrait of Hemingway on
the front cover.
Famed photographer Alfred Eisensstaedt was dispatched to Cuba
to get some photographs of the author. It turned into a major ordeal for
Eisensstaedt - the most difficult photo shoot of a celebrity that he had ever
encountered. Hemingway must have been in one of his "black-ass"
periods - a phase of serious depression. The photographer recalled the
unpleasant experience many years later. He said that, instead of the
fellow-artist and man of letters that he expected to deal with, he was having
to cope with a "thoroughly disagreeable, paranoid, booze-sodden
lunatic". Most of his conversation was peppered with obscenities; and Hemingway
would erupt into violent rages over some minor slights - some of them real, but
many imagined.
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| Alfred Eisensstaedt portrait of Ernest Hemingway on a walk in Cojimar |
But Eisensstaedt did manage to get a few serviceable images,
after he followed Hemingway on a walk through Cojimar. And the eventual
portrait that was used on the magazine cover was a rather riveting, revealing
image of the 52-year-old writer.
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| Alfred Eisensstaedt's front-cover portrait of Hemingway |
Life
magazine
published The Old Man and the Sea on Labour Day - September 1, 1952. The
story filled twenty pages. 5,000,000 copies went out on sale; the entire run
was sold out in two days! Six days later his book publisher, Scribners
published a first edition hardcover release of 50,00 copies. They agreed a very
generous royalty of 20% for sales beyond the first 25,000 copies.
And the
Book-of-the-Month Club selected it as a featured title; they published 153,000
copies. The novella spent 26 weeks on the best-sellers list. By the end of the
year it had been translated into nine different European languages. In 1953 The
Old Man and the Sea was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. And the Nobel
Committee cited the work as a contributing factor in their decision to award
Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
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| Santiago and Manolo take equipment up to the old man's hut |
On the third page of the
book, the old man and the boy are sitting on "the Terrace" [La
Terazza de Cojimar] and "many of the fishermen made fun of the old man and
he was not angry. Others, of the old fishermen, looked at him and were sad. But
they did not show it and they spoke politely about the current and the depths they
had drifted their lines at and the steady good weather and of what they had
seen." It was a familiar topic of discussion for Hemingway and his friends
in the Cojimar tavern.
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| The display of Hemingway photographs taken in Cojimar in La Terraza de Cojimar |
When I took a close look at the
impressive collection of black-and-white photographs of Hemingway (unfortunately
I don't remember the name of the photographer, but I'm trying to find it on the
internet!) taken by a Cuban photographer right in Cojimar, I noticed in the
background of one of them the neo-classical monument that stands next to the
old Spanish fort, Torréon de Cojimar.
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| Note the monument behind Hemingway's left arm |
I don't know if there was something
displayed originally in the centre of this circular, colonnaded memorial, but in 1962 - just one year
after Hemingway's death by suicide in Ketchum, Idaho - a group of his Cuban friends
and fellow-fishermen in Cojimar got together and collected old pieces of metal
from around the village: chain links, propellers, anchors, and so on. These
remnants were then fashioned into a bust of Ernest Hemingway by Cuban sculptor
Fernando Boada Marten.
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| Hemingway friends who organized the Hemingway monument (Fuentes third from left) |
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| A pretty good likeness of the great man - the Hemingway Monument in Cojimar |
After checking out the old
fort, the Hemingway Monument, and la Terraza de Cojimar, one can finish one's
stay in the village, as we did, by strolling around some of the back-streets.
It's interesting to see the styles of the houses and the materials from which
they are built. There are also the ubiquitous 1940s and 1950s American cars beside many
of the local homes.
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| Cojimar back street |
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| Cojimar parish church |
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| Cojimar house |
We enjoyed a half-hour walk - eventually working our way
back to the taxi we had rented, sitting in the driveway beside La Terraza. It
was interesting visiting this former Hemingway haunt. I recommend it to anyone
keen to follow the great man's footsteps in Cuba. It's out of the way of the
usual spots in Havana, but much quieter, therefore, and more comfortable in the
gentle afternoon breeze.
Resources:
Hemingway's Boat by Paul Hendrickson (2011);
Lonely Planet Cuba (2011); Hemingway: The Final Years by Michael Reynolds (1999)
Photographs ©
Clive W. Baugh
(using
a Nikon D7000 with a Nikkor 18-105 mm zoom lens)
