COJIMAR, Cuba — A dozen tiny, aging fishing boats bobbed in the wake of the massive, gleaming white sport-fishing yacht taking Ernest Hemingway’s grandsons to the village that inspired the Nobel laureate’s greatest work.
Fishermen waved to the Hemingways and hundreds waited on shore Monday to greet the descendants of a man who fished from Cojimar for decades, hauling in marlin, sharks and tuna from the warm waters off the Cuban coast.
“He was a fisherman,” grandson Patrick Hemingway said, looking at the men gathered to greet him. “He considered them his brothers.”
Along with a team of U.S. researchers, Hemingway and his brother John are on a five-day mission to leverage their famous name to encourage closer ties between the United States and Cuba and, hopefully, open the way for scientists to gain access to the writer’s fishing logs, a long-concealed and potentially valuable source of knowledge about the area’s massive predatory game fish.
Researchers gathered little information about the health of deep-sea fish populations in the years before industrial fishing devastated populations of tuna and other highly desired big species in the second half of the last century. That leaves sport fishermen’s records as some of the only resources for marine scientists seeking a benchmark to measure population declines.
Ernest Hemingway lived in Cuba from 1939 to 1960 in a villa on lush, orchard-filled grounds in the village of San Francisco de Paula on the southeast edge of Havana. From Cojimar, he often launched his boat, the Pilar, with first mate Gregorio Fuentes, who helped inspire the aging fisherman who battles a giant marlin in the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Old Man and the Sea.”
One of the earliest and most prolific sport fishermen in the Florida Straits, Hemingway may inadvertently have created an unparalleled scientific resource as he prowled some of the world’s richest fishing grounds.
Hemingway assembled thousands of books, photographs and journals, many of which deteriorated over decades of exposure to Cuba’s baking heat and high humidity, and the longstanding neglect of the estate known as Finca Vigia. The logs are now kept by Cuba’s National Cultural Heritage Council which, in order to protect the fragile documents, only allows conservators to handle them.
