Grand Tours: Hemingway in Havana

Ernest Hemingway spent most of the latter part of his life in Cuba, where his former home is now a museum. To Have And Have Not is set both in Havana and the Florida Keys. The movie version starred Humphrey Bogart as Harry Morgan, an archetypal Hemingway hero, and featured Lauren Bacall in her first film role. The story begins with Morgan, a smuggler, being asked to take illegal immigrants to the United States. The second extract is a brilliant evocation of street life in Havana as it was in the Thirties, when Hemingway wrote the book.

Click here to see how to follow in Hemingway's footsteps

Ernest Hemingway spent most of the latter part of his life in Cuba, where his former home is now a museum. To Have And Have Not is set both in Havana and the Florida Keys. The movie version starred Humphrey Bogart as Harry Morgan, an archetypal Hemingway hero, and featured Lauren Bacall in her first film role. The story begins with Morgan, a smuggler, being asked to take illegal immigrants to the United States. The second extract is a brilliant evocation of street life in Havana as it was in the Thirties, when Hemingway wrote the book.

* * *

You know how it is there early in the morning in Havana with the bums still asleep against the walls of the buildings; before even the ice wagons come by with ice for the bars? Well, we came across the square from the dock to the Pearl of San Francisco Café to get coffee and there was only one beggar awake in the square and he was getting a drink out of the fountain. But when we got inside the café and sat down, there were the three of them waiting for us.

We sat down and one of them came over.

"Well?" he said.

"I can't do it." I told him. "I'd like to do it as a favour. But I told you last night I couldn't."

"You can name your own price."

"It isn't that. I can't do it. That's all."

The two others had come over and they stood there looking sad. They were nice-looking fellows all right and I would have liked to have done them the favour.

"A thousand apiece," said the one who spoke good English.

"Don't make me feel bad," I told him. "I tell you true I can't do it."

"Afterwards, when things are changed, it would mean a good deal to you."

"I know it. I'm all for you. But I can't do it."

"Why not?"

"I make my living with the boat. If I lose her I lose my living."

"With the money you buy another boat."

"Not in jail."

They must have thought I just needed to be argued into it because the one kept on.

"You would have three thousand dollars and it could mean a great deal to you later. All this will not last, you know."

"Listen," I said. "I don't care who is President here. But I don't carry anything to the States that can talk."

"You mean we would talk?" one of them who hadn't spoke said. He was angry

"I said anything that can talk."

"Do you think we are lenguas largas?"

"No."

"Do you know what a lengua larga is?"

"Yes. One with a long tongue."

"Do you know what we do with them?"

"Don't be tough with me," I said. "You propositioned me. I didn't offer you anything."

"Shut up, Pancho," the one who had done the talking before said to the angry one.

"He said we would talk," Pancho said.

The one thing that he hadn't understood right had made him nasty. I guess it was disappointment, too. I didn't even answer him.

"You're not a lengua larga, are you?" he asked, still nasty.

"Listen," I told him. 'Don't be so tough so early in the morning. I'm sure you've cut plenty of people's throats. I haven't even had my coffee yet."

"So you're sure I've cut people's throats?"

"No," I said. "And I don't give a damn. Can't you do business without getting angry?"

"I am angry now," he said. "I would like to kill you."

"Oh hell," I told him. "Don't talk so much."

* * *

The moon was up now and the trees were dark against it, and he passed the frame houses with their narrow yards, light coming from the shuttered windows; the unpaved alleys, with their double rows of houses; Conch town, where all was starched, well-shuttered, virtue, failure, grits and boiled grunts, under-nourishment, prejudice, righteousness, interbreeding and the comforts of religion; the open-doored, lighted Cuban bolito houses, shacks whose only romance was their names; The Red House, Chicha's; the pressed stone church; its steeples sharp ugly triangles against the moonlight; the big grounds and the long, black-domed bulk of the convent, handsome in the moonlight; a filling station and a sandwich place, bright-lighted beside a vacant lot where a miniature golf course had been taken out; past the brightly lit main street with the three drug stores, the music store, the five Jew stores, three pool rooms, two barbershops, five beer joints, three ice cream parlours, the five poor and the one good restaurant, two magazine and paper places, four second-hand joints (one of which made keys), a photographer's, an office building with four dentists' offices upstairs, the big dime store, a hotel on the corner with taxis opposite; and across, behind the hotel, to the street that led to jungle town, the big unpainted frame house with lights and the girls in the doorway, the mechanical piano going, and a sailor sitting in the street; and then on back, past the back of the brick courthouse with its clock luminous at half-past ten, past the whitewashed jail building shining in the moonlight, to the embowered entrance of the Lilac Time where motor cars filled the alley.

Ernest Hemingway's novel 'To Have And Have Not' is published by Arrow at £5.99

Follow in the footsteps of Hemingway

Where to stay

You can book room 511 at the Hotel Ambos Mundos, Obispo 153, Old Havana (00 537 60 95 29). Ernest Hemingway's old
room, where he lived intermittently for five years, was lost forever when the hotel was gutted in the 1990s but an approximation has been built.

Staying here costs $70 (£50) a night or you can visit it for $2, although you may like to consider whether the money might be better spent in the hotel's open-sided fifth-floor bar, planning your own great novel as you look out over the city.

Hemingway's house

Finca La Vigia, overlooking the village of San Francisco de Paula (about 10 miles southeast of Havana) is the airy white villa Hemingway first rented, then bought in 1940 for $18,000.

Finca La Vigia became the property of the Cuban government a month after Hemingway committed suicide in the US in 1961 and is now the Museo Hemingway. The interior is pretty much as Hemingway left it in 1959. His personal possessions, including his Nobel Prize medallion, hunting trophies, rifles and ammunition and empty bottles of the Gordon's gin with which he made his morning cocktails, are clearly visible through the windows, although visitors are not actually allowed inside the house.

The museum is open from 9am to 4pm Monday to Saturday and until 12.30pm on Sundays. Admission costs $3, and photography another $1. After heavy rain it tends to be closed to avoid visitors churning up the grounds.

Where to drink

Hemingway frequented La Bodeguita del Medio in a side street off the cathedral square, where he sank mojitos, and
El Floridita, where, 70 years ago, barman Constante Ribailagua invented the frozen daiquiri. Both bars are very much on the tourist circuit, with daiquiris now costing $6 in El Floridita.

Go fishing

The world's best marlin fishermen gather every May at the Hemingway Marina for the Hemingway International Billfish Tournament. He kept his own boat, "El Pilar", at Cojimar and told the story of a fisherman from Cojimar in the Nobel prize-winning "The Old Man and the Sea". Gregorio Fuentes is the local character who claims to be the subject of the story; an audience with this self-professed centenarian will cost $10.

Getting there

Package: Resort-based package holidays in Cuba are available from your local travel agent. Independent operators, such as South American Experience (020-7976 5511) and Journey Latin America (020-8747 3108), can tailormake holidays in Cuba.

Flight only: return fares to Havana cost about £420 through Trailfinders (020-7937 5400).

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