Discovering Hemingway’s Havana
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Inside one of Havana’s most famous bars, El Floridita, several dozen people are singing along to choruses led by a dynamic salsa singer. A circle of New York couples and an Argentine with two cigars stuffed in his shirt pocket all dance before the singer’s five-piece band. Most of the patrons have ordered icy daiquiris in thin-stemmed cocktail glasses, a famous drink from El Floridita, which turns 200 this year.
Seeming to watch all this is a bronze sculpture of Ernest Hemingway, the Nobel Prize–winning American author who lived in Havana from 1940 to 1960. Now he leans against the bar in the same spot where he was known to enjoy a dozen or so daiquiris a day.
After a half-century hiatus, Americans are returning to this island nation, just under 100 miles from Florida. I’m finding that Hemingway’s footsteps provide a timeless introduction, starting with his writings. To Have and Have Not begins in Plaza de San Francisco; parts of Islands in the Stream were influenced by his nights on the island; and his articles for Esquire talk about his offshore chase for marlin. He dedicated his 1954 Nobel Prize to the Cuban people.
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