Hemingway Adventure (1999) (32 page)

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.

*

H
avana 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.

W
hen 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
.

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.

T
he 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.

A
nxious 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.