THE STRAITS OF FLORIDA — The waters off the coast of Havana were remarkably deserted for hugging a city of 2.2 million. A lone fisherman was bobbing on a piece of foam. Two more waved from a battered skiff.
This is where Ernest Hemingway — followed now by his grandsons — came to hunt his “monsters.”
“I can’t wait to get out of here,” said Kurt Winters, pointing his boat at Key West, 97 miles north. During nine days in Cuba, his crew caught only one marlin.
His gleaming 50-foot Hatteras sport fishing model, Therapy 2, had come to Cuba for the 65th annual Ernest Hemingway International Billfishing Tournament, a six-day event held late last month. It was one of eight U.S.-flagged boats to make the trip, navigating an ocean of bureaucracy to get there.
Their visit seemed like one more sign of a new era in U.S.-Cuba relations, or maybe a return to an older one, at least for the deep channel of water between the two countries, the Straits of Florida. Hemingway likened its powerful Gulf Stream current to a river in the ocean. It is still a restless, wild place.
The straits were a symbol of U.S.-Cuba intimacy back then, easily crisscrossed by weekend boaters and car ferries. After Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, the busy river became a separation barrier, a 90-mile moat, then a watery graveyard for Cubans desperate to cross it.
Now the Obama administration is moving to restore relations with Cuba after 54 years. It has authorized passenger ferries to run again whenever the Castro government is ready to receive them. American pleasure boats such as Therapy 2 may soon be making this trip more and more. This is the view of Havana they will see.
Aboard Winters’ boat were five crew members and seven passengers, among them two Hemingways, John and Patrick, grandsons of Ernest.
The Therapy 2 and other U.S. boats had moored at the communist government’s Hemingway Marina, in a city whose state-run tourism industry offers Hemingway mojitos, Hemingway daiquiris and visits to the Hemingway estate, Finca Vigía, where the legendary American lived most of his last 20 years.
Cuba’s Hemingway industrial complex “is sort of overkill,” said Patrick Hemingway, but he has always felt like an honored guest during the eight visits he has made to the island since 2005. He said he detected a palpable excitement this time, his first trip since the announcement in December that the two countries would restore relations.
It was the first crossing to Key West for Patrick and John, too, the trip their grandfather made many times in Pilar, his beloved, black-hulled “fishing machine.”
The straits, and the fishing, lured Hemingway and he moved to Cuba. For the next two decades, he wrote, drank, entertained — and seduced — aboard the boat. During World War II, he outfitted Pilar with grenades and a machine gun to hunt German U-boats when he wasn’t hunting marlin.
Neither of the grandsons is a dedicated deep-sea fisherman, but they were happy to lend the family name to the cause of greater U.S.-Cuba cooperation, especially for the sake of marine conservation and research in the straits, a highway for global commerce and aquatic life alike.
