HEMINGWAY’S HAVANA: A REFLECTION OF THE WRITERS LIFE IN CUBA
On Big Blend Radio, author Robert Wheeler has a lively conversation about his new book, “Hemingway’s Havana: A Reflection of the Writer’s Life in Cuba,” that portrays the intimate connection Hemingway had with the land, the sea, the people, the culture, and the politic of Cuba.
Ernest Hemingway lived in Cuba for more than two decades, longer than anywhere else. He bought a home—naming it the Finca Vigia—with his third wife, Martha Gellhorn and wrote his masterpiece The Old Man and the Sea there. In Cuba, Papa Hemingway found a sense of serenity and enrichment that he couldn’t find anywhere else. Now, through more than a hundred color photographs and accompanying text, Robert Wheeler takes us through the streets and near the water’s edge of Havana, and closer to the relationship Hemingway shared with the Cuban people, their landscape, their politics, and their culture.
Wheeler has followed Hemingway’s path across continents—from La Closerie des Lilas Café in Paris to Sloppy Joe’s Bar in Key West to El Floridita in Havana—seeking to capture through photography and the written word the essence of one of the greatest writers in the English language. In Hemingway’s Havana, he reveals the beauty and the allure of Cuba, an island nation whose deep connection with the sea came to fascinate and inspire the writer.
The book includes a foreword by América Fuentes , a native of the village of Cojimar, Cuba, where Ernest Hemingway docked his boat, the Pilar. She is the granddaughter of the boat’s captain and Hemingway’s close friend, Gregorio Fuentes. She lives in Havana.
Author of “Hemingway’s Paris: A Writer’s City in Words & Images”, Robert Wheeler has been a Hemingway enthusiast since reading his first Hemingway novel in 1986. For the past ten years, he has been a professor at Southern New Hampshire University where he teaches courses in writing and on Hemingway. He was the recipient of the coveted Excellence in Teaching Award for 2006. He lives in New Castle, New Hampshire, with his wife, Meme, and daughters, Emma and Helen. www.Hemingways-Paris.com
