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 patiently 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.
You can take one of the 186 rooms at ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ Hotel, or one of the 314 rooms at ‘The Garden of Eden’. You can wander down to Wild Ernie’s for a drink, stuff yourself at ‘The Green Hills of Africa’ and sweat it all off in Papa’s Solarium.
I drive past these various temptations until I reach the waterfront. Out there beyond the harbour mouth is what, more than anything else, drew Hemingway to Cuba. La Corriente, the Gulf Stream. A sixty-mile-wide, mile-deep fisherman’s paradise.
This Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man, and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it … That stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone.