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Gregorio Fuentes

Tuesday 15 January 2002 01:00 GMT
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Gregorio Fuentes, fisherman: born Lanzarote, Canary Islands 11 July 1897; married 1920 Dolores Perez (died 1990; two daughters and two daughters deceased); died Cojimar, Cuba 13 January 2002.

Since the death of Ernest Hemingway in 1961, a cottage industry has grown up among the author's aficionados surrounding the true identity of the "cheerful and undefeated" old fisherman, Santiago, hero of what many claim was Hemingway's finest novel, The Old Man and the Sea, published in 1952 – the story of an old man who hooks a marlin, his first fish in 84 days, but has to fight off the sharks if he is to get the fish back to land where he can sell the meat. It is a story of struggle, of loyalty, of fortitude and of a man who goes too far out in pursuit of his prey and pays the price. Two years later it was named in Hemingway's citation for the Nobel Prize for literature.

Much of the attention on who really was the old man, unsurprisingly, revolved around Gregorio Fuentes, long-time first mate and eventually captain of Hemingway's fishing boat, the Pilar. Fuentes, who died on Sunday in the village of Cojimar, 10 miles east of Havana, at the remarkable age of 104, certainly fitted the bill but for the fact that Hemingway conceived the idea for the book in the 1930s; at that time both men were in their thirties.

Nevertheless, it took 16 years for the first phase of Hemingway's "book about the sea" to make it to print; the second phase, Islands in the Stream, was published posthumously in 1970. An earlier book, To Have and Have Not (1937), paints a unflattering portrait of a first mate named Eddy whose main preoccupation is drinking rum, definitely not based on Fuentes.

Although Hemingway was always rather cagey about who provided the basis for Santiago, the fisherman, there can be no doubt that much of Fuentes' character made it into the persona of the old man. Both were from the Canary Islands – there is, to this day, a large subculture of Canary Islanders in Cuba, dating back to the days when Cuba was the last outpost of Spain's overseas empire.

Hemingway once recalled that Fuentes had joined the Pilar in 1938, replacing another good mate named Carlos Guttierez who had been hired away while Hemingway was covering the Spanish Civil War. In fact, Hemingway and Fuentes had met a decade earlier when Hemingway then was based in Key West. Both were stormbound. Hemingway needed supplies, went aboard Fuentes' boat to buy them and found "the cleanest ship that I had ever seen", he told an interviewer. "Now, after 10 years, I know that he would rather keep a ship clean and paint and varnish, than he would fish. But I know too that he would rather fish than eat or sleep."

The circumstances that led to Hemingway's hiring Fuentes were not accidental. Fuentes once recalled he had been working as a sailor on a US research vessel when the author, remembering the encounter 10 years earlier, tracked him down and offered him the job. Their first mission was to return to the US and pick up the Pilar, which Hemingway had just had specially built. They remained close friends till Hemingway's death by suicide in 1961 and Fuentes was a stout defender of Hemingway ever after. Anyone dastardly enough to besmirch Hemingway's name – to call him a boor or a drunkard – was apt to feel the lash of his tongue. "Did they know him? They see him with a drink and say he is a drunk. They are liars."

Hemingway credited Fuentes with superb seamanship and a good nose for where the fish were running. He once recalled that Fuentes rode out a 180mph storm in 1944 and another big blow four years later.

Fuentes lived most of his life in Cojimar, much of it in pleasant anonymity until the tourism boom of the late 1980s. Cojimar is a quaint seaside village a safe distance from the hustle and bustle of Havana. Increasingly, visitors who knew something of Hemingway's writing would include a trip to the village as part of the tour that would begin at Hemingway's old but immaculately restored house at San Francisco de Paula, a few miles inland.

There they would stand a good chance of encountering Fuentes, who divided his time between busying himself at a local boatyard and stoutly guarding the memory of his late employer.

His style was to charge hard currency for his comments, $50 for 15 minutes, he told one recent interviewer. The pleasant scent of hand-rolled cigars was everywhere to be smelled, for he was an assiduous smoker of cigars (although Hemingway never touched them), despite cancer of the lip, which in recent years required surgery.

Hemingway in his will left the Pilar to Fuentes but, say officials, the Hemingway name and legend has become a state industry in a country that needs every dollar it can get, and the boat was taken ashore some years ago and left firmly landlocked at a site next to Hemingway's home. Fuentes' permission was not sought.

Clearly, he was flattered to be thought of as the basis for The Old Man and the Sea, but he explained numerous times that the character of Santiago was not he. He once told of a chance encounter between him, the author and Mary Hemingway, who were patrolling the Cuban north coast in the Pilar, and an old man and a boy battling to protect a fish from a shark attack. Their offer of help was spurned, though they stood by for several hours before departing.

In an interview with Argosy Magazine in 1958, Hemingway stressed that his novel was fiction. "The old man is nobody in particular," he said:

A lot of people have been claiming that this person is the old man and somebody else is the kid. That is a lot of bull. I wrote that story from 30 years of fishing around here and before that, too.

Most of these fishermen in Cojimar have had experiences like that; one was out two days with a fish and when they found him he was out of his mind.

He did admit that there once was an old man named Santiago Puig, nicknamed Chago, who did have some influence on the character in the book, but, with Fuentes now gone, there seems little doubt the tourism industry will firmly link his name with that of The Old Man and the Sea.

Frank Gray

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