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The boat was and Hemingway navigated the archipelago. tip of Cayo Cruz to Coco and Guillermo, the water probing Graceland for signs of Elvis. constructed with an oak frame and equipped with a “[Hudson] looked up at the white-painted between the keys deepens from aquamarine to green- In any building that stands the slight- custom fighting chair, a 75-horsepower Chrysler en- house and the tall old-fashioned light and then past blue to navy. On the horizon towering thunderheads est chance of hosting a tourist, his gine for cruising, and a 40-horsepower Lycoming for the high rock to the green mangrove keys and ink the ocean them while breakers billow in front of T image is mor e ubiquitous than Fidel trolling. For Whom the Bell Tolls, published in 1940, beyond them the low, rocky, barren tip of Cayo a lone tanker cruising the Old Bahama Channel. Castro’s. We spent our first three nights at one of had made Hemingway into America’s most cele- Romano,” Hemingway writes. The lighthouse signaled the beginning of Hud- Havana’s most prominent Hemingway shrines, the brated writer; it was to Cayo Romano, Cayo We can see Romano from the lighthouse’s para- son’s final pursuit of the Germans. It marks the end of flamingo-pink Ambos Mundos Hotel, in which he Guillermo, Cayo Coco, and the islands around Nue- pet, as well as 5,000 square miles of ocean and beach our bonefishing expedition, when it turns out that penned For Whom the Bell Tolls during the 1930s. vitas that he went to escape his newfound fame. that Cuba’s tourism boom hasn’t touched. From the we’ll have to traipse across sharp [ continued on page 94] Papa paid $2 for room 511 on his first night in Cuba (“Book selling like frozen daiquiris in hell,” he wrote in 1928, and kept the room for more than a decade, to his first wife, Hadley Mowrer, in January 1941.) until he bought Finca Vigía (Lookout Farm), out- Papa researched many of the Islands passages with Papa, Cuba & the Pilar side Havana, in 1939. his lover Jane Mason, a notoriously wild millionairess. I took in the hotel’s photographic ode to Papa our Fishermen say he’d hole up with her in a shack for uring the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s Hemingway entertained high-society guests like Spencer Tracy (seated center) at the D Floridita Bar (top), where a bronze statue now occupies his corner stool (middle left). Hemingway liked to escape first night as Antonin gleefully pulled on a Cohiba days, leaving only in the afternoon to hunt birds with Havana and his newfound fame in the Pilar, reeling in marlin off Cuba’s north coast (lower left). Captain Gregorio Fuentes Robusto in the open-air lobby. The collage docu- a shotgun while Mason collected seashells. Fishing (lower right), who died in 2002 at age 103, was the model for the protagonist in The Old Man and the Sea. The Pilar mented Hemingway’s time in Havana in reverent and boating were also a salve for his gnawing depres- (middle right) is now beached at Finca Vigía, a national museum that was once Hemingway’s Havana estate. detail: Papa in front of his boat, the Pilar, with one of sion, and he took to them passionately, losing himself the 52 marlin he caught in the summer of 1933; at in the Jardines for months at a time, getting to know the gold-friezed Floridita restaurant, where he local fishermen and collecting material for what would entertained Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper, and Spencer become his most famous and most puzzling novels. Tracy; with the captain of the Pilar, Gregorio Fuentes, From Havana we follow roughly the same course on whom he based the protagonist in The Old Man Hemingway did on his voyages to the Jardines, albeit and the Sea. (Fuentes died in 2002 at age 103.) Once the site of Hemingway's mistress wooing, Playa Pilar now hosts one of Castro’s mega-resorts. on land in a Czech Skoda station wagon. Instead of All Hemingway trails eventually lead to a bar, so navigating reefs and squalls, we dodge livestock, sus- on our second afternoon we sidled up to one of Papa’s U-boat alongside with the promise of fresh food and “Sinsky” (to throw the grenades), and a marine picious police, and wizened farmers peddling blocks favorites, the seedy Dos Hermanos on Avenida del water. When the crew emerged the sub hunters communications expert named Don Saxon. When of salty cheese in the middle of the six-lane A-1 high- Puerto. The Spanish poet García Lorca and Al would open fire and throw explosives-packed fire Papa’s children visited they joined in as well. way. Between comments on my erratic, hungover Capone also favored the mahogany-trellised joint. As extringuishers down the U-boat’s hatch. The Pilar Hemingway carefully maintained the Pilar’s driving, Antonin tells stories of being taken hostage the sun dropped behind the colonial mansions of Old would then radio Guantanamo Bay and a navy cover as a research vessel (which he used in Islands in Afghanistan and covering the U.S. invasion of Iraq Havana in a heavy yellow mist and musicians walked frigate would fish the survivors from the sea, elicit as well), writing to his son Patrick, “All the scientific in a Kuwaiti rental car. He refused to be embedded, in off the street to join the band, an aging barkeep communication codes from them, and wipe out the projects are in fine shape and everything will be okay and on several occasions came close to getting killed. served us cool mojitos with fresh mint and bitters. German undersea fleet. Simple. with them.” The scientific research made it imper- As we approach the Jardines we can see that The Dos Hermanos and the Floridita — the bar The weathered teak decks of the 38-foot Pilar ative to keep fishing lines in the water at all times. So much has changed since the Pilar sailed here. The Hemingway made famous by downing 12 daiquiris, didn’t appear up to the task when I inspected them on November 20, 1942, as a slightly batty Heming- most dramatic transformation came when Soviet its flagship creation, in one sitting — served as the the following day at the Finca. The boat now sits on way motored the Pilar past the embattlements guard- subsidies dwindled and Castro turned to tourism to unofficial headquarters for the sub-hunting mission. the tennis court of the Hemingway estate, which has ing Havana Harbor, the world’s greatest and most fill the void. In 1988 the first of a network of pedra- During just the first half of 1942, German U-boats been preserved as a national museum. Through a heavily-armed fishing trip was about to begin. FUENTES: plenes (“roads on the sea”) was completed to Coco, and over the next 10 years 3,000 rooms went up on n a cool spring day with the trade Coco and neighboring Cayo Guillermo. PAPA’S CREW COMPRISED “SOME BAR TENDERS; A FEW winds whipping whitecaps across the To visualize our base at the Tryp Cayo Coco, one TKTKTKT/ALAMY; TKTKTKT/ALAMY; WHARF RATS; SOME DOWN-AT-HEEL Bahía de Perros, it’s obvious what KRATOCHVIL of 11 “all-inclusive” resorts on the two keys, imagine PELOTA PLAYERS AND FORMER BULLF S.” drew Hemingway to the palm- PILAR: Captain Merrill Stubing T-boning the Love Boat into

Ocrowned islets of the Jardines. They ANTONIN Gilligan’s Island, building wooden staircases to the appeared, he writes of the archipelago, as a “line of beach, and hiring a crew of hyperactive dance BOSTON; BOSTON;

sank 397 Allied freighters in the Atlantic and the stand of palms I watched Antonin snoop around the green keys that showed like black hedges sticking STATUE: instructors to yell at guests 14 hours a day through IGHTERCaribbean, causing George C. Marshall to proclaim pool in which Ava Gardner reportedly swam naked. up from the water and then acquired shape and remote headsets. With 502 rooms, six restaurants and MUSEUM, the entire war effort to be in jeopardy. Beginning in On top of the hill sat Papa’s colonial home, the greenness and finally sandy beaches.” The keys SYGMA; bars, a discotheque, gymnasium, amphitheater, ten- June 1942, the U.S. Navy mustered some 2,000 pri- southwest corner holding the room in which he range from the size of a traffic circle to 4,000-acre AND nis courts, free drinks 24 hours a day, and the best vate yachts to “passively” patrol the East Coast and typed Islands and scripted articles for Colliers for Cayo Romano, and many are interconnected by Tom Jones impersonator in Latin America, the Tryp Gulf of Mexico, from Maine down to Texas. $1.25 a word. As I inspected the rickety wet bar shifting shoals and sandbars. LIBRARY stands as a testament to Castro’s Vegas envy. Hemingway had already been heading an anti- Hemingway had rigged on the Pilar’s flying bridge, The chain officially begins in the province of FIRAUD/CORBIS After one dispiriting night there we escape with a fascist spy ring at the behest of American ambassa- the idea of broadsiding what was then the world’s Matanzas and stretches 289 miles southeast to fly rod. Our fishing guide, Orlando Gonzales, meets PRESIDENTAL PRESIDENTAL dor Spruille Braden. Now Papa volunteered the Pilar most advanced fighting machine with a wooden fish- Camagüey. The area is a waterman’s Eden, with PHILIPPE us outside a neighboring hotel with a neatly packed for sub-chasing duty and took the civilian patrols a ing boat seemed absurd, if not insane. more than 1,000 marked dive sites and enough backpack and a shirt advertising Coco’s “Parque Nat-

step further by convincing the Office of Naval Intel- Hemingway knew this on some level, so he anchorages and beaches to explore for months in a FISHING: ural,” a scruffy brush patch on the island’s old airport. ligence to outfit the fishing boat with Thompson assembled a nervy crew to man the Pilar’s first three- yacht or sea kayak. The nearby coral reef is second in Thanks to Castro’s intense paranoia, maps in Cuba machine guns, hand grenades, a radio, a bazooka, month patrol. The core came from his “Crook size only to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and shel- COLLECTION/JFK are almost nonexistent, and asking directions, even and all the government gasoline she could take. Factory” of spies — “a bizarre combination of ters some 900 species of fish. The waters bordering from locals, often leads to more questions than ANTONIN The general scheme of “Operation Friendless,” Spaniards: some bar tenders; a few wharf rats; some the Old Bahama Channel are known to offer some of answers. (A car rental agent in aptly named Morón named for one of Hemingway’s cats, was to lure a - down-at-heel pelota players and former bullfighters,” the best deep-sea fishing in Cuba, while the flats HEMINGWAY told us a two-hour drive would take two days.) Lucky ROQUE/AFP/NEWSCOM; ROQUE/AFP/NEWSCOM; by Braden’s account. In addition the roster included closer to shore harbor mythically large bonefish. KRATOCHVIL for us Gonzales navigates by watching the ocean, and Porter Fox, an MJ contributor, has written for the businessman Winston “Wolfie” Guest, Fuentes, two Hemingway had been exploring the Jardines for ERNEST he leads us directly to the yellow-and-black-check- New York Times Magazine, Outside, and others. Basque jai alai players nicknamed “Paxtchi” and years, since buying the Pilar in 1934 for $7,455 from ered Diego Velázquez lighthouse by which Hudson PARTY: PARTY: ADALBERTO

74 MEN’S JOUR NAL FEBRUARY 2007 FEBRUARY 2007 MEN’S JOUR NAL 75 HEMINGWAY continued from pag 5 Toro due north. We tool past the crowded beaches of Coco, the Parque Natural, and Guillermo and coral and hot sand, on foot, under the broiling sun, all swing west into the deep blue waters off Isla Media in order to catch an inedible fish. Our enthusiasm Luna, finally taking in the seascape that beguiled both wilts, and we bid Gonzalez (and our $75) farewell. Hemingway and his fictional Hudson. Fifty miles to We follow Hudson’s/Hemingway’s trail farther the southeast is Cayo Confites, where Fuentes babysat the next day, to the cut between Coco and Guillermo Hemingway’s children when he wasn’t captaining the where the Germans supposedly passed. A bridge Pilar; 20 to the northwest is Cayo Frances, where now spans the gap and we continue along Guillermo, Hudson communicated with a U.S. Navy outpost. searching for one of the beaches Hemingway and Off the port bow Jesus points to a boiler from a tanker Jane Mason frequented on their trysts. Instead we sunk during WWII. Directly astern I see “the bight find a Disneyesque gas-powered locomotive, dis- where [Hudson and his first mate, named Willie] had patched from one of the resorts, marking the entrance anchored and the beach and the scrub trees of Cayo to Playa Pilar. While Antonin browses the last chap- Cruz that they both knew so well.…” ter of Islands under a palapa, I explore the rocky After clandestinely trading a half-bottle of rum point at the northwestern tip of Guillermo. to some fishermen for a hunk of fresh tuna, Jesus We’ve been starving all week, thanks to several points out Contrabandos. The tiny two-acre atoll poorly thought-out laws Castro imposed to foster hovers over the Caribbean like an emerald stepping tourism. Every piece of food a tourist eats must be stone. Mangroves crowd the western tip and a long inspected by the government, and thus sits in a ware- coral point juts east toward Coco and Guillermo. I house, getting stale, for at least a week. Fishermen spot several sticks marking the sandbar on which can only keep the head and tail of any fish they catch; Hudson runs aground in Islands; Jesus avoids Hud- the meat must be turned over to the state immediately. son’s fate by maneuvering the Toro along a deep And Cubans are not allowed to eat lobster, to ensure channel leading to the island. There he rafts up with that officials have enough frozen, rubbery tails to a fishing boat, the same model used by the “lobster serve to tourists. So it is more with a sense of appetite police,” in the lee of the key. than sport that I notice a school of plump Cuban Jesus and a grizzled old fisherman paddle us in. jacks swimming off Guillermo. An hour later I’m Antonin and I break through the mangroves and find back, fly rod in hand, clambering 30 feet down a two abandoned foundations in a small clearing. Then razor-sharp coral cliff to cast for dinner. When a I follow the gray coral shore around to the opposite dachshund-size tarpon removes my fly with a flick of side of the island. I’m not sure what I’m searching its head, I opt to join a Spaniard who has arrived with for: a shell casing, an ammo box, something to shed casting gear and a bucket of Rapala lures. light on Hemingway’s last great war story and the Over the next two hours I take part in a Monty connection between him and Hudson. Python version of The Old Man and the Sea. It takes Near a small spring I find a half-buried trash pile Pedro two casts to hook his first 30-pound tarpon, with antique glass fragments in it. One appears to be but then the oafish hotel manager almost expires reel- the top of a liquor bottle, another is embossed with ing the beast in. Twenty minutes and several thrilling the word “Dietz,” a German name. I put both in my tail-walks later, he finally wrestles the fish to the edge pocket and make my way back to the dinghy. We of the cliff, at which point he explains in a frighten- cast off and Jesus fires up the engines. The trip is ingly high-pitched wheeze that it’s my job to scale over; we’ve reached the final page. Even Antonin is down to the water’s edge and gaff the fish one- subdued in reflection at the site of Papa’s last stand. handed. Soon after, he reels in a second 30-pounder, What we’ve found, we aren’t exactly sure. Which collapsing dramatically on the ground as I lug it too might be the point, because neither was Heming- up the cliff. I have a brief respite when he hooks a way. His time in the Jardines — always seeking, mere 15-pound barracuda, but am soon faced with never quite finding, successful but restless — was the most difficult endeavor of the afternoon: heft- more about conjuring a story than anything else. For ing the 75-pound catch back to Pedro’s Audi, where Hemingway the ensuing tale was both the greatest he hurriedly bids adieu and zips back to his hotel and most devastating of his life, and it was the one with all the fish in his trunk. that outlived him. As it did Thomas Hudson, felled by machine-gun fire off the shores of Contrabandos after a week in the surrealistic world that in the last paragraph of the novel. eis Castro’s Cuba, I am beginning to think that Cayo “H e felt the ship gathering her speed and7 the Contrabandos might not exist. Meanwhile, Antonin lovely throb of her engines against his shoulder blades has begun explaining to complete strangers the which rested hard against the boards. He looked up improbable factors that miraculously aligned to make and there was the sky that he had always loved and me into an asshole and a shithead simultaneously. he looked across the great lagoon that he was quite Thankfully the manager of the marina signs an inch- sure, now, he would never paint and he eased his thick ream of paperwork and nonchalantly nods his position a little to lessen the pain. The engines were head toward a boat tied to the pier. A second miracle around three thousand now, he thought, and they comes when our rakish, mustachioed skipper, Jesus came through the deck and into him. Lucio, tells us he grew up in Punta Aelgre and has “‘I think I understand, Willie,’ he said. boated around Cayo Contrabandos most of his life. “‘Oh shit,’ Willie said. ‘You never understand Jesus drops both throttles and points the 40-foot anybody who loves you.’” m

94 MEN’S JOUR NAL FEBRUARY 2007