The curator gives a stern lecture, mercifully tempered by his admission that this particular piece has been broken once before. By Raisa Gorbachev. Our director, now a member of one of the most exclusive clubs in the world, feels a little better.
Hemingway’s love of animals, dead or alive, permeates the house, from the stuffed heads of impala and kudu projecting from the dining room wall to lion skulls from Africa, pickled lizards in the bathroom and books on cats and cat care beside the bed. There were as many as fifty-seven cats living at the Finca, all of them given names with an ‘s’ or a ‘z’ in - Crazy, Christian, Ecstasy, Funhouse, Fats, Friendless. Hemingway had a theory that this enabled them to hear their name called more easily.
Boise, the most spoiled cat of them all, was, as far as I can tell, the only living creature Hemingway ever allowed in the room when he was writing, apart from his beloved Black Dog.
My favourite room in the Finca is the bathroom next to his study. It has the best view in the house, a panorama of Havana with the sea in the distance, which can best be enjoyed from the lavatory seat. It also has a bat preserved in a bottle of formalin and a set of manually operated scales, alongside which is a most revealing and intimate glimpse of the man - a chart of his weight, inscribed in pencil on the wall, together with scribbled comments of explanation: ‘17 days off diet, 5 drinking’, 203 lb, ‘after Chinese dinner’ and against one entry ‘with slippers on and pyjamas’.
By now tour buses are filling the driveway and groups of Dutch, Germans and Italians are circling the house. We slip away through the gardens, to film on Pilar, the forty-foot boat which Hemingway bought in 1934 and gave in his will to his boatman Gregorio Fuentes. Fuentes, still alive at 101, gave the boat to the government who decided it should be preserved up here at the house. It’s set, rather gloomily, in a concrete base with a massive timber cover, surrounded on three sides by swaying bamboo.
Filming in it isn’t easy. I’m treated rather as we might treat a Cuban who wanted to roller-skate in Westminster Abbey. They are clearly worried about letting me on deck at all, but eventually agree to my climbing aboard, provided I take my shoes off. When I make to sit on the fishing chair, shrieks of horror go up and I have to abort the attempt in mid-squat. It’s a little sad to see this sturdy, practical, unflashy, walnut-hulled working boat ending her days as an untouchable object on a hill nine miles from the sea, but I suppose that’s the price of fame.
Every night my bed at the hotel has a hand towel sculpture on it and a message from the girls who look after my room. Yesterday the towel had been ingeniously twisted into the shape of a bow tie, with a sheet of loo paper forming the knot in the middle. Tonight it’s a heart, and the message beside it reads:
‘Sr Michael, have a nice night. Your maids, Lilian and Isis.’
Having a nice night in old Havana can be interpreted many different ways. This is not a city for going to bed early with a good book. The streets are alive with all manner of temptations, most of them announced with the Havana hiss. This short sharp sibilance is quite normal amongst the locals but when directed at tourists it can mean an offer of anything from a guide or a Castro coin, to a cigar or a woman. I don’t smoke and I’ve never seen the attractions of numismatics, so I’m left horribly vulnerable.
One of the odd things about Cuba is that, although only ninety miles away from the US coast, the island exists in a virtual news limbo.
Some of the hotels have CNN but I could find no foreign language magazines or newspapers on sale. There is one Cuban paper and it is called Granma. This eccentric title refers to the cabin cruiser Granma which brought Castro and Che Guevara back from exile in December 1956 to begin the struggle against the Batista government which led to its overthrow in 1959.
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).