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 of 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.)