Old Havana, close to the port and the sturdy Spanish colonial forts and palaces, is lively and picturesque and being slowly, carefully and beautifully restored. Which is a pity, as the mottled and peeling facades seem much closer to the spirit of this hot, steamy, hard-pressed city.
It’s not difficult to pick up the Hemingway trail. Its epicentre is the Ambos Mundos Hotel, on the corner of Obispo and Mercaderes in the heart of the old city. On the wall are two plaques - one commemorating the frequent residence of Ernest H., who stayed here on numerous bachelor trips in the thirties, and the other dedicated to one George Washington Halsey who established the first daguerreotype photo studio in Cuba on this spot.
I’d never heard of him. Which must be the fate of many who share a wall with Ernest Miller Hemingway.
On the fifth floor of the Ambos Mundos Hotel is the room in which Hemingway reputedly began work on For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1939. (Michael Reynolds, one of his biographers, disputes this, saying that Hemingway was so famous by then that he used the Ambos Mundos as a public front, and actually double-booked a room in the Sevilla-Biltmore to give him space and peace for writing.)
Whatever the truth, I prefer to think that it was in Room 511 of the Ambos Mundos that Hemingway wrote the words that firmly established him in the post-coital lexicon by having Robert Jordan ask Maria, ‘But did thee feel the earth move?’ Maybe it’s just because I’m a romantic and I’m right next door, in Room 509.
My good Cuban escort who is called Ernesto, but prefers the Beatles to bullfights, takes me to a small bar called the Bodeguita del Medio, on the grounds that it’s old, established, traditional and noisy enough to anaesthetise jet lag.
The speciality of the house is mojito - a mix of rum, lime-juice, sugar, mint and ice - which is sharp and refreshing and agreeably addictive. There is a band playing in the tiny, breathless space, urging awkward foreigners into that state of constant rhythmic gyration that seems the natural state of most Cubans.
Fighting my way up to the bar, I’m rewarded not just by finding chicharrones - the best pork scratchings this side of Huddersfield - but also an endorsement of this establishment by one of the great barflies of our century. There, above the bottles, is written, in the now familiar curly script: ‘My mojito in La Bodeguita, my daiquiri in El Floridita. Ernest Hemingway.’
Less eminent literary tributes are scrawled over every spare inch of the interior, including the bar and the bar stools. Someone has even managed to reach a seemingly inaccessible position twenty feet up on the wall, only to leave the frankly disappointing contribution, ‘Geoff, You Fat Bastard.’
Later, in a Biblical upper room above the bar, its open balcony tempting in the faintest trace of a breeze, I sample my first Cuban meal. The roast pork is hardly exotic but the deep fried slices they call smashed bananas, the crispy sweet potatoes and a combination of black beans and rice known as moriscos - Moors and Christians - are unfamiliar, and very acceptable.
By the time I return to Room 509 at the Ambos Mundos, I have quite forgotten how I got here and where it was that my journey began twenty-three hours ago. Pretty soon, I can hear the trumpets of the bullfight, high-pitched laughter, and the clatter of typewriter keys from the room next door.
I’m into my first Cuban dream.
As I fumble for my room key a woman with long legs and golden hair passes by and goes into Hemingway’s room. Even beyond the grave, his sexual magnetism hasn’t deserted him.
Later, after a thin breakfast, but a great view, on the roof of the hotel, I realise that I too can visit Hemingway’s room, for two dollars.
There isn’t a lot there. Esperanza, the woman with long legs and golden hair who looks after the room, points out the bed in its alcove. It isn’t actually the bed, but the Art Deco lampshade above it is the lampshade beneath which Hemingway lay - and which he must have seen flying around the ceiling after many a night out.
In the centre of the room is an ancient Royal typewriter, entombed beneath a Perspex cover like the relic of some long-dead saint. Esperanza’s high heels click across the cool, tiled floor as she goes to the window and pulls it open, admitting a suffocating fug of warm, stale air and revealing The Famous View.
‘The rooms on the north-east corner of the Ambos Mundos Hotel in Havana’, wrote Hemingway in Esquire in 1933:
… look out, to the north, over the old cathedral [they still do], the entrance to the harbour [yes], and the sea [not quite, an ugly modern block with yellow plastic water tanks has gone up since then], and to the east to Casablanca peninsula, the roofs of all houses in between and the width of the harbour. [With its long line of Spanish fortifications, that view can’t have changed much since the beginning of the seventeenth century.] If you sleep with your feet toward the east … the sun, coming up over the Casablanca side and into your open window will shine on your face and wake you no matter where you were the night before.
That’s one thing I admire about Hemingway, he was never a hangover bore. He never let the night before spoil his enjoyment of the morning after.
Esperanza closes the window of Room 511 and apologises for the lack of memorabilia. His size 11 boots, some of his coats and a pair of his spectacles were here once but the people from the Hemingway museum at San Francisco de Paula took them away.
The village of San Francisco de Paula stands on a hill nine miles south of the city. It is not one of the smart suburbs of Havana, but then the Ambos Mundos was not one of Havana’s smartest hotels.
As Hemingway got older, he may have enjoyed the kudos of being wined and dined by those who lived in commodious villas but, as a writer, his inclination was to live closer to the common people.
The approach to the gates of his house, Finca Vigia (‘Lookout Farm’) is off a rowdy main road whose bars, including El Brillante, once patronised by Hemingway, are now hard and basic drinking sheds. The short street that leads to the Finca is lined on both sides with modest wooden houses and cannot have changed much since Hemingway’s time. The front of one of these houses has literally just fallen apart and as I walk by quite a crowd has gathered.
Everyone is out helping to prop it up and there is a lot of noise and debate and gesturing and making of helpful suggestions and general good humour and I think I can see why Hemingway would have preferred the street life of San Francisco de Paula to dinner parties in smart Miramar.
The house, which his third wife Martha Gellhorn found through the small ads in 1939, was left to the Cuban government by Hemingway when he decided to leave his adopted island following Castro’s revolution twenty years later.
It is looked after with meticulous care. Every object is noted and catalogued and located, as far as possible, in the same place it had when the Hemingways left. Nine thousand of his books remain on the shelves, each one hand-cleaned by the loyal staff. The public is allowed only as far as the doors and windows, which are thrown open but roped off.
Hemingway’s ghost is in a mischievous mood today. In order to set up our filming, a small number of us are allowed over the cordon and into the precious interior. We fall silent. So perfect is the feat of preservation that it conveys the eerie impression that the Hemingways might have left the room only five minutes earlier. I stare at the armchair with its most un-macho pattern of leaves and blossoms and try to shift my imagination back forty years and put Hem in there and me opposite watching him pour a huge Gordon’s gin from the tray that is still there with all his bottles on it, when my reverie is abruptly broken by a clatter, followed by a sharp intake of breath. Our thorough, careful, utterly mortified director has dislodged a piece of Venetian pottery from its precarious stand and it now lies in several pieces on the floor. Shock, horror, apology. We expect to be sent home immediately.