Enchanting journey to Havana

A nostalgic journey to that certain Havana of the fifties' Havana, one time referred to as The Sexiest City in the World. The land of Cohibas and Chicas passionately blended with balmy breezes, the smoothest rum and the rhythms of the rumba beat.

I was always drawn to the fantasy of a slightly dangerous but sensual Havana, a place of intrigue and romance after having heard of this popular international playground of the rich, the famous and the infamous, from my father, who was an importer of Cuban sugar from the famous Galban Lobo Sugar Company in the fifties.

The fields of sugar cane, the aroma of cigars, the vibrating tempo of the salsa, the clear blue sea, a city occupied and influential by a variety of nations in a country of a diverse and complex culture. A colourful, enchanting Island paradise inhabited by an enticing, friendly large hearted people, despite the severe economic difficulties, but holding on to a subtle innocence and a unique identity.

My school-mate Michael Modder from Brighton, England and I have been aficionados of 'that certain Havana of the fifties'. Rumbling to the Latin beat, the flashy American cars and movies depicting or made in Cuba in the 50s.

The Mafioso extravagance that made dazzling Havana, a kingdom of tolerance where anything could be arranged with the greatest of impunity and the hedonistic lifestyle of that time. Mike and I, like many others, are ardent fans of Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene and most of all of "Papa" Ernest Hemingway.

This then, is a nostalgic tourney to "that certain Havana of the fifties", sometimes swaying, intoxicated by one-too-many mojitos and the strumming of a trees, in search of our youthful fantasy of that exciting era. The exquisite architectural sophistication and garish art-deco, the Collectors Models of Detroit designed pleasure on wheels and the life and styles of the giant sized personalities of that romantic, reckless and exciting decade.

We don't cover it all, but we hope that we have touched the sometimes elusive essence of those heady times. A little taste of the most exotic and controversial Island basking in the Caribbean sun.

Kissed by the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean sea and the waters of the Gulf of Mexico Cuba is the largest Island in the Greater Antilles situated just South of the Tropic of Cancer. It lies only 112 miles from Florida and 130 miles from Mexico and 50 miles from Haiti and 87 miles from Jamaica.

Havana is the city that made Hemingway want, "to stay forever". Havana is inhabited by a cultured and sensual people who could very well be characters out of the novels by Graham Greene and Ernest Hemingway. Their human values, their kindness, hospitality, helpfulness is unequalled.

The exquisite old buildings are still holding their own, still rich in historical character and have not been overtaken by shiny modern structures, shopping malls and fast food outlets. Now is a fascinating and exceptional moment in the history of Cuba, as it emerges from the 50s time warp. Slowly but surely, still preserving its fragile magic that may very well disappear.

In 1950s, Havana was North America's premier playground, with beautiful lissome dancers imported from various parts of the world and dark haired senoritas swaying to the musical rhythms of the Caribbean.

One of the great historical cities of the New World - Havana (pop. 2.2 million) It has a flavour of its own. a combination - surreal and sensual of colonization, capitalism and communism. Neapolitan streets, Spanish colonial buildings. A spectacular blend of styles, new classical and baroque modern art-deco and art nouveau.

At the heart of the city's enchanting Habana Veija (old Havana), 4.5 square Km of a living museum that contains the finest collection of Spanish colonial buildings in all the America's Churches. Convents and Castles. Shaded city streets with walls of faded tropical pastels. It consists of two major plazas of great significance.

Ernest Hemingway in Cuba

The great American author fell in love with Cuba on his first visit in 1932, attracted initially by the martin fishing. It was not until 1939. However, that Hemingway decided to move to the Island, initially settling down in the Ambos Mundos hotel in Old Havana.

Having decided to stay on, he found a quiet villa outside the town in which to write. Finca La Vigia, where he lived at first with journalist Martha Gellhorn, whom he married in 1940.

His bond with Cuba lasted 20 years, through the Batista period and the beginning of the Revolution, and longer, in fact, than his relationship with Martha Gellhorn.

Hemingway's last wife, Mary Welsh whom he married in 1946 joined the writer in Cuba and lived with him at Finca La Vigia. The villa is now a museum. He eventually returned to the US in 1960, a year before his suicide.

The year 1928 became very complicated. Settled in Key West, Hemingway began to write in the back of a tavern.

Then in June he moved with his wife to Kansas City as they prepared for the birth of Ernest's second son, Patrick.

Towards the end of the same year, on December, his father committed suicide in Oak Park.

Also in 1928 Hemingway came into contact with people who would influence his future. Caught up in the complex process of finishing and revising "A Farewell to Arms", whenever something confounded him, he took up some other activity, in the evening or at night, or he stopped working for two or three days. and Key West was no exception.

In those days, Hemingway began to visit routinely a place filled with adventure, the virtually unknown Sloppy Joes of Key West.

Of all the people he met in Key West, the one who made the greatest impression was Joe Russell, the owner of Sloppy Joe's. He was a man who lived on the edge. Joe made repeated trips to Havana to acquire rum and other alcohol for the consumption of the restless clientele who frequented his establishment, thumbing their noses at Prohibition.

That same year, Hemingway began his first journey in the Gulf Stream, in the company of Joe Russell. He also became acquainted with Eddy Bra Sanders, who told him how he had plundered the steamer Varbanera. In the midst of a cyclone this ship had not been able to reach the port of Havana and had to face the storm at sea, which resulted in its being stranded on the sands of the Bahamas. Based on that tale

Hemingway later wrote the story "After the Storm". By the end of 1929, Hemmgway's place in the literary panorama of his country had been solidified, from journalism to masterpieces. It was a heroic time, with three novels published. He had also published a few poems and a number of short stories.

In April 1929 Hemingway returned to Havana, this time with Joe Russell on his yacht Anita. It could sail strong currents and difficult seas. It is said that Hemingway rented it for twenty dollars a day, which seems improbable if we consider that Joe always accompanied him. They planned to spend several days deep-sea fishing in the Gulf Stream. But for very special reasons, that stay in the Cuban capital was prolonged for more than two months.

They occupied their mornings with fishing trips, and in the evenings they would go to the horse races, when the writer was not revising the gallery proofs of "Death in the Afternoon". The night was for eating and drinking and for visits to the jai alai court. There were parties and strolls through famous streets and quarters of Havana, and some womanizing.

Papa and Jane

Hemingway paid two dollars a day for a room (the room that would become his favourite, his permanent room) in the Ambos Mundos Hotel on Obispo Street.

Furthermore, everything indicates that it was during this second stay in Havana that Hemingway met one of the most beautiful and unpredictable women of the time, the charming Jane Mason, when she was barely twenty years old.

Beginning in 1929, Hemingway was constantly on the Cuban coast, as his fascination for the Cuban capital grew, and he could not resist the temptation to enter the port of Havana time and again.The ultimate purpose of those trips was to see the radiant Jane Mason. As a result, the writer saw his ties to Havana become ever more complicated, knowing full well that he had written one of the most important novels of the period.

The Masons, Jane and Grant, owned a beautiful mansion on the banks of the Jaimanitas River. It was a beach house atop a sloping, sandy bank, cared for by a dozen servants, a house with big doors from which one could see the whole cove, including bars and lodgings and a small pier right at the mouth of the Jaimanitas River. The Masons house was surrounded by a garden that resembled a small jungle, with grapevines. Coconut trees and flowers. It had a swimming pool that extended almost to the seashore, surrounded by a tow fence.

>From then on Hemingway began to cross the Gulf Stream repeatedly and it was not exactly to go fishing, or to contemplate the splendours of Havana. His destination was something else, as he himself wrote in one of his famous chronicles without ever giving any fuller explanation about his nights spent in the Sans Souci Cabaret and the dawns in Jaimanitas.

The writer used to anchor his boat in the cove of the Jaimanitas River, the source of various rumours and legends related to the smuggling of rum and of other sea stories that are lost in time.

In the company of Jane Mason, Hemingway developed an almost excessive liking for the splendours of Havana. Jane loved strong drink, and she drove her car wildly She piloted her boat masterfully, and she fished and hunted like the most experienced adventurer and she even made a trip to Africa to practise hunting, to say nothing of the fame she achieved among hunters in Havana.Those familiar with her life in the Cuban capital assure that Jane had a classic, wild somewhat delicate air, with beautiful big blue eyes, a lovely complexion, and an admirable figure. She was surprising, elegant, with abundant strawberry-red hair that she parted in the middle. On occasion it fell carelessly over her forehead, especially when she relaxed, which seldom happened, because according to everybody, Jane was the most unpredictable woman of her age.Jeffrey Meyers affirms that Jane Mason was as beautiful as Grace Kelly, more sensual than Duff Twysden, and as turbulent, extravagant, and as outrageous as Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife of the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, a couple whom Hemingway had known in Paris during the 1920s. Jane's husband, Grant Mason, known as a successful man, was head of several businesses and had become very rich in Cuba. In Havana Mason's businesses were so profitable that he rapidly became a multimillionaire before he left Cuba definitively in 1939 but early in the 1930s. Grant began to extend his businesses throughout the area, for which reason he was often absent from the Cuban capital. He travelled frequently to Venezuela Panama, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Mexico, Central America, and the United States. He was constantly travelling while Jane remained on the banks of the Jaimanitas.

Nothing stopped them. Until 1936 there was an intense and scandalous love affair between the writer Ernest Hemingway and the voluptuous Jane Mason.

The citizens of Havana used to see them everywhere, in the most unusual places. It was common to see them in the taverns near the port, going from one spot to another, or on to a boat, or making the rounds of the casinos and cabarets; and in the evening they would meet in an exquisite restaurant, when they were not staying in the aristocratic Hotel Nacional of Cuba, overlooking Havana's seaside drive, from which they could contemplate the intense blue of the sea. For Hemmgway, this was the beginning of ten years of trips and stays in Havana before he would establish himself definitively in Havana, surrounded by a charming landscape, which would include a view of the nearby low hills on the other side of the bay, where the old fishermen's quarters were.

It was in these places, in those early years with lovely Jane Mason, that the myth began to take root among Cubans, as though little by little Hemingway was taking possession of plazas, piers, streets and bars, canteens and restaurants, hotels and other spots along the coast near the Cuban capital.

The Land of Miracles

Everything served to make Hemingway have an even greater liking for Havana.

The city he glimpsed during a brief lay over, the city to which he would return from Key West, exploring its streets and taverns, observing, listening, inebriated at times, on nights of drinking, womanizing in the most splendid places, and acquiring habits that would lead him hopelessly to seek refuge on the fifth floor of a peaceful and protective little hotel on Obispo Street, in a Havana dominated by uncertainty and abandon. A Havana scourged by a cruel tyranny, ruled by General Machado, whose delusions of grandeur immersed the country in enormous projects that allowed greedy groups of lawbreakers to establish themselves in Cuba.

In Havana Hemingway comes into contact with adventurers, sailors, fishermen, millionaires, famous people from Hollywood, politicians, boxers, photographers, baseball players, jai alai players, jockeys, street vendors, taxi drivers, clerks, prostitutes, policemen and Mafiosos while he cultivated his persona at the centre of one of the most fascinating myths that any writer has ever created.It is as though Hemingway still roamed the streets of Havana, with his corpulence, his broad shoulders, going to places by the sea, his big feet always bare. Today it is as though he still wandered through the city with his old moccasins, without socks, with his rebellious, almost defiant, attitude; and the tight grey canvas pants and the old blue gingham shirt, and the sun visor, and the shorts, and the worn out multi-coloured shirt, and his reputation among hunters as a great marksman.

The first thing that Hemingway did in Cuba was take over the streets of Old Havana, the area around the Plaza of San Francisco, with its fountain, and the cafes and piers near the port, cluttered with cote of Catatonian rope; and the little hotel known as the Ambos Mundos.

He stayed there time and again, and he would return so often to the room on the fifth floor, with its three windows open to the Northeast breeze, that the room soon became his.

The novelist also succumbed to the charm of Obispo Street Those nine blocks always full of people; a narrow noisy street with shops, canteens, offices, florists and pharmacies, and celebrated cafes and bars.

Besides Obispo Street, Hemingway enjoyed the informal elegance of the Florida. His presence in that restaurant, among friends and people from all corners of the world, characterized an age. It was common to see him there with Jane Mason.

Hemingway also frequented the town of Casablanca on the other side of the bay, the International Club, the beaches of Tarana, the little port of Cojimar, and the succulent meals that were served at La Terraza; and he wound up involving himself in the mysteries of Chinatown, along Zanja Street, and enjoying the delicacies served by the waiters at the El Pacifico restaurant.

The myth

Nevertheless, the most impressive thing is that the myth of Hemingway in Havana in its early stages, was not created in the realm of literature, but rather through Hemingway's involvement in everyday things, in his relations with human beings, in the most universal city of the Antilles; and this myth has achieved such magnitude, such force that anybody who roams through the streets of Havana today, if he is white, tall, strong broad shouldered, if he has a beard and wears a sun visor, may be surprised by being mistaken for Hemingway, although he had died many years ago.

The myth was created also among the most experienced fishermen in the coastal villages and among adventurers who frequented the cafes and taverns.

The myth was also strong among heavy drinkers, old and young, who still go to the bars by the port.The myth is present in all quarters of the city. Hemingway is recalled during reflective moments about fishing, tides, and drinking. His legend pervades the urban landscape with the abbreviated towers of the cathedral, and the entrance to the port, and the colonial fortresses, and above the rooftops, across the bay, the white buildings on the low hills, with their white buildings, the schooners, fishing boats, ocean liners and torpedo boats in the bay, the bars and canteens butt on piles, bars where he used to go to contemplate the landscape, to have a drink, or simply to talk to some anonymous sailor.It was Joe Russell who introduced Hemingway to the most enigmatic sailor of those places, to Carlos Gutierrez, who would serve as skipper for his friend Ernest Hemingway in those repeated expeditions that he made to the Cuban coast in the yacht Anita.

Around that time the Ambos Mundos Hotel had become Hemingway's base for trips along the Northeastern coast of Cuba. By 1933 Hemingway was familiar with the world of Havana and closely followed Cuban politics. That same year, he wrote his chronicle "Martin Fishing off the Morro' based on his deep sea fishing experiences.

To be continued