Assignment: Find Ernest
Author: Bill Roberts
The sun also rises in Havana,
and when it did, we went in search
of Hemingway at his local haunts.
We started early, after exploring
one another’s body one more time,
with a drop-in at Harry’s Bar.
The only waiter awake at that hour
said, after pouring Coke on top of our
rum eye-openers, that Hem had disappeared.
The early lunch at Zargonana, a full bottle
of fino sherry blended with snapper turtle
soup, left us groggy and still clueless.
We took a nap in the afternoon, as Cubanos
do, and decided our next inquiry would be
at the Partagas Cigar Factory nearby.
The sweating, shirtless guys rolling those
splendid, perfect cigars told us, yeah,
Ernesto was in last month – or was it last year?
The fragrant rum distillery was peopled with
several shady characters from his novels, none
willing to talk about the Old Man or the sea.
We finally caught a glimpse of him one evening
at the Tropicana, where Nat King Cole was
playing, but the suspicious host shrugged,
opened up only after I slipped him a fin, seated us
next to Nat’s piano, and whispered that the pug
we saw was just a Hemingway impersonator.
Re-reading Hem killed the rest of our honeymoon.
(Published online in the December 2007 issue of Long Story Short)
Note: Our diversionary search for Ernest Hemingway took place in February 1958 on our honeymoon to Havana, seeking him out at all of his known bars and hideaways. Havana in 1958 – exotic, erotic, scary, with soon-to-be-deposed Ferdinand Batista guarding most street corners with high-piled sandbags, behind which were khaki-uniformed men carrying sub-machine guns ready to fire. In the nearby hills, Fidel Castro and his small but loyal and growing band fired off occasional shots to remind Batista he’d soon be coming. And he did, taking over the city less than a year after we returned to our lives in D.C. – me finishing my senior year at A.U. (plus working part-time at the National Bureau of Standards), Irene in her new security-related job at the Library of Congress. So much to write about Havana. ‘Twould be nice to return someday, see it again. Friends who’ve been there recently say the decay is palpable. In ’58 it was evident the underclass of poor residents weren’t going to tolerate mighty Batista’s thieving shenanigans much longer. They welcomed Fidel with open arms. And so history is written.
