Hemingway's Havana

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and can coast down them… Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motorcar only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.” – Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway travelled extensively and spent a large chunk of his life in Cuba (1939 – 1960).

Cuba fulfilled Hemingway’s desires for solitude and big game fishing. Basing himself in the hotel Ambos Mundos, for a decade, room 511 at this hotel has been preserved as Hemingway liked it with the original furniture and typewriter. Then he decided to buy the Finca Vigía, a villa and farm on the outskirts of Havana.

Hemingway wrote some of his best works in Cuba. A Cuba-inspired novella for which Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953, and the Nobel Prize in Literature the following year. The Old Man and the Sea was Hemingway’s last major work of fiction and is thought to be partly based on Gregorio Fuentes, a seafarer who became Hemingway’s fishing companion and who migrated to Cuba at 22 having been born in Lanzarote. In this respect Cuba was arguably more inspiring for Hemingway, especially considering that his most famous work, For Whom the Bell Tolls, was conceived there as well. Hemingway was at his Cuban villa when he received the Nobel Prize in 1954. He said; “This prize belongs to Cuba since my works were created and conceived in Cuba, with the inhabitants of Cojimar, of which I am a citizen.” Having said these words Hemingway placed the Nobel Prize at the foot of a statue of the Virgen del Cobre. The Virgin was recognised as a saviour of sailors.

There are no hills, city and county side rides, so a reasonable basic level of fitness is recommended.