Hemingway’s long rap in Green Hills of Africa is not all celebration. Like the good reporter he once was, he notes, with equal relish, the ‘high-piled scow of garbage’ which the tugboats of Havana dump into the deep blue waters, ‘the flotsam of palm fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep-floating corset, the torn leaves of a student’s exercise book, a well-inflated dog, the occasional rat, the no-longer-distinguished cat’.
Nevertheless, Hemingway elevated marlin-fishing on the Gulf Stream into one of life’s last great adventures. He went at it day after day after day, so much so that local fishermen christened the stretch of water east from Cojimar ‘Hemingway’s Mile’. And when he wasn’t fishing it he was writing about it and even working with scientists from the Smithsonian to classify the various marlin species. It was a very serious obsession.
In 1950, never really happy with any activity unless some sort of contest was involved, Hemingway started an International Marlin Tournament. Ten years later the competition was named after him, though he resisted this - ‘A lousy posthumous tribute to a lousy living writer’ - and the first prize that year was won by Fidel Castro.
One of this year’s main fishing tournaments has been running for two days and has two more to go. There is only one Cuban boat in the competition, a couple of Canadians, and the rest, surprisingly, are American. The Cuban organisers are helpful and suggest we wait until the boats come in and ask if any would be happy to take us aboard tomorrow morning.
At six, the boats start to come back in and the lucky ones can be picked out long before they dock by the number of white pennants they have run up. One for each catch.
I notice straightaway that there has been a major change since Hemingway fished here. This is the age of tag and release. Not only is it not necessary to kill the marlin to score points, you actually get fewer points if you do kill one.
So there are plenty of pennants but no one hoisting dead marlin up on the weighing post and posing for a photo as Ernie loved to do.
I approach an American boat with two fluttering white pennants and introduce myself.
‘I’m from the BBC.’
Instant recognition. ‘Ah yes!’ says the skipper, shaking my hand warmly. ‘The Bahamas Billfish Championship.’
In the world of deep-sea fishing, the BBC means only one thing.
They’re a friendly crew and lead the competition after two days. They’re happy to play host to us tomorrow, but they warn us to be on time. The starting gun goes off at nine sharp.
The starting gun is not quite as impressive as it sounds. It’s a small brass cannon, carried from the clubhouse to the shore in the back of a car and set up at a point opposite which the sixteen competing boats are lined up.
With due ceremony, the breech is filled with rifle powder and the barrel stuffed with sheet after sheet of toilet paper, laboriously folded, inserted and rammed home with a plunger.
On the stroke of nine o’clock a match is applied and the rifle powder and the toilet paper combine to raise a respectable thump, which sends the cannon reeling back and the boats gunning their engines and racing off toward the waiting marlin.
This is quite a thrill. To be about to hit what Hemingway called ‘the great blue river’. Conditions are good as our wooden-hulled 55-footer slaps and bounces on a lively sea. About three miles out from the shore, perhaps a little less, the colour of the water indeed changes very abruptly, from milky green to a blue, more royal than navy, with lines of wind-spun silver foam slanting through it.
Our hosts are five Americans out of West Palm Beach. I ask them why the majority of boats in the tournament are from the USA when that country forbids trade with Cuba.
They come, they say, because this is the best marlin-fishing in the world, and for this they are prepared to accept certain restrictions. All supplies, right down to bread and water, must be brought with them from the States. They are not allowed to buy anything Cuban, nor are they allowed to accept anything from the Cubans by way of prize money or on-shore hospitality. American customs pay them a lot of attention when they return to Florida.
The organisers have issued a map of the fishing zone, divided into alphabetical squares. Square F is the best. It is where the coastline juts out to meet the stream and the marlin are most likely to stop and feed. It’s also right at the mouth of the harbour, opposite the old city, visible once upon a time from Room 511 at the Ambos Mundos.
It’s also the busiest and our skipper, up on the flying bridge, decides to head a little further north and east before putting out the lines.
Four rods are fished, but apart from one false alarm, there is a lot of watching, waiting and application of sun cream. Little else. Explanatory theories are concocted - the wind has slipped away from due east, the most favourable direction. There’s too much direct sunlight. The middle of the day is always the worst time. No one mentions the Palin effect.
The sun climbs, hangs and begins to fall. The skipper puts the boat about and we begin to readjust our position a little nervously. But still nothing breaks the waters.
At the end of the day’s fishing, at six o’clock, we return to shore empty-rodded, hoping everyone else will have done so too. But there have been strikes and other people’s flags are flying and one boat is still out there. A huge marlin was hooked early on this morning by one of the women in her crew and she has held on to it all day long and is prepared to hang on all night if necessary.
Now that is hard to take. A Hemingway adventure is happening out there and we have no way of getting to it.
Our crew is still optimistic. They were unlucky today, but their first two days’ tally keeps them up with the leaders and in with a chance. They’ve invited us to return tomorrow, the last day of the tournament.
Anxious to sample all the myriad forms of Cuban transport, I ride out to the Marina today in a motorcycle sidecar. They were very popular in Sheffield when I was a lad, but they tend to be consigned to transport museums nowadays.
Cuba is a living transport museum, so you still see plenty of them, jostling for road space with Chevy Bel Airs from the 1950s, stretch Skodas from the 1960s, horse-drawn buggies from the 1740s, and lots of bicycles and scooters of indeterminate age, often with parilleras aboard. Parilleras are the girls who sit sideways on the back of bicycles, usually wearing eyecatching fluorescent Lycra shorts. My driver points to them as we speed along the Avenida Zoologico, and expresses a warm enthusiasm.
‘Especially the ones with big bottoms!’ he yells into the slipstream. A sign of beauty in Cuba, evidently.
Aboard ship and out onto the famous blue water. Except that it isn’t so blue today. The wind has turned again and slabs of iron-grey cloud loom over us, blotting out the sun and washing out the colours of yesterday. The competition ends at two o’clock and by then our boat has not even a false alarm to show for its last days’ sailing. Very sportingly they allow me on the fishing chair for the last few hours of daylight. And, of course, everyone hopes that beginner’s luck might yet save the day.
The swell heaves and sighs and I learn how to let my line out and how to control the reel and I grow mesmerised by the dot of colour that is my float, bobbing on the water, and desperate to feel some sort of pull on it. My instructor tells me exactly what to do in the event of a huge marlin impaling itself on the end of my line. Pump and reel, pump and reel.
But the light begins to go and there’s still no one down there in the marlin department. We head back to the Marina for the last time. For all his action writing, Hemingway understood failure pretty well. I re-read the opening lines of The Old Man and the Sea, and don’t feel so bad.