Yahoo! January 29, 2002.
U.S. sees no thaw in Cuba relations
By George Gedda, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON, 28 - The State Department, dismissing Cuban suggestions that
friendlier relations may be within reach, said Monday that Cuba has not taken
any of the steps necessary.
In recent days, Defense Minister Raul Castro, brother of President Fidel
Castro, and National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon have both spoken
optimistically about future relations with the United States.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said relations won't improve
until Cuba has free elections, releases political prisoners and repeals laws
that permit the imprisonment of Cubans who criticize the government.
"It's not a question of our relationship, it's a question of the Cuban
government's continued denial of basic human rights," Boucher said.
President Bush has maintained the U.S. embargo against Cuba. That stand was
reinforced by his recent recess appointment of Otto Reich, a longtime embargo
supporter, to head the State Department's Latin America bureau.
Raul Castro, speaking to reporters in Havana on Saturday, said recent visits
by U.S. lawmakers and business people "have demonstrated there can be
mutually beneficial rapprochement, done respectfully and without interfering in
anyone's internal affairs."
Recent visitors include Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., who supports U.S.-Cuba
cooperation for drug interdiction and the fight against terrorism; and Rep.
William Delahunt, D-Mass., who favors trade with Cuba.
Alarcon, a trusted aide to Fidel Castro on U.S. issues, said U.S.-Cuban
cooperation on the transfer of Afghan detainees to the U.S. Naval Base on the
island demonstrates that productive relations can be possible.
U.S. agribusiness companies have been taking advantage of a law approved in
2000 that permits food sales to Cuba for the first time.
Castro initially rejected any purchases under the law because of
restrictions on American financing of the sales. Last fall, following a
devastating hurricane that caused extensive crop damage on the island, Castro
relented.
Since then, large quantities of U.S. wheat, rice, soy and corn have been
exported to Cuba for cash.
Honduras extends ties to Cuba
By Diego Mendez, Associated Press Writer
COPAN, Honduras 29 (AP) - Defying the United States, Cuba once stood nearly
alone in the Americas, recognized by only handful of countries as it veered
toward socialism.
Forty years later, with Fidel Castro (news - web sites) still in power, only
two countries in the hemisphere are still allied with the U.S. diplomatic
boycott of Cuba: El Salvador (news - web sites) and Costa Rica.
Outgoing Honduran President Carlos Flores Facusse restored his nation's
relations with Havana on Saturday night, ending a break that started in 1961.
The move irritated Salvadoran President Francisco Flores.
"That leaves us cold,'' Flores told reporters here Sunday night during
a meeting of leaders here to mark the inauguration of Honduran president Ricardo
Maduro.
"I believe it was an inconvenient thing,'' he added. "Never before
have we seen an outgoing president, 10 hours before leaving his post, signing
the opening of relations with a country like Cuba.''
Flores openly argued with Castro during a regional summit in 2000, accusing
Cuba of partial responsibility for his country's civil war of the 1990s.
As Cuba's government moved sharply toward a communist system in the early
1960s, the country was suspended from the Organization of American States and
all but two countries in the hemisphere - Canada and Mexico - broke ties with
Castro's government.
Today, Cuba claims relations with 170 countries around the world.
The collapse of the Soviet Bloc between 1989 and 1991, and the end of Cuban
support for Latin American rebel movements, removed the sense of threat that
many governments in the region once felt from Havana.
Democratic governments that replaced military dictatorships in many Latin
American countries also were more inclined to restore ties with Cuba.
Even those in bitter disputes with Cuba in recent years - Argentina and
Nicaragua - have refrained from breaking relations.
What remains of the blockade on diplomatic ties itself can often be leaky.
Costa Rica and Cuba had exchanged consuls until a dispute last year. A
Salvador-based airline flies regularly between Havana and the capitals of Costa
Rica and El Salvador.
The United States itself may have the largest diplomatic contingent in
Havana - though it works under the Swiss flag.
Still lacking is readmission to the OAS - efforts by influential Latin
American politicians to get Cuba back into the group have been stymied by stern
U.S. opposition - and an end to the U.S. trade boycott, which has battered
Cuba's economy.
Honduran Foreign Minister Guillermo Perez Cadalso said the new
administration welcomed the outgoing president's decision. "Diplomatic
relations with Cuba was a decision of state,'' he said, "and the process
should only be continued.''
Salvadoran Congressman Manuel Melgar of the opposition Farabundo Marti
National Liberation Front called his government's stand against Cuba "contradictory
and totally absurd.''
"Our country has a lot of business with Cuba,'' he said. "There
are hundreds of (Salvadoran) students of medicine who are being prepared and
many people travel for reasons of tourism or health.''
The Old Man Who Loved the Sea, and Papa
By Stephen Kinzer The New York Times
When Gregorio Fuentes, Ernest Hemingway's fishing companion and confidant,
died earlier this month in Cuba, the sadness spread back to the Chicago suburb
where Hemingway was born and raised.
OAK PARK, Ill., Jan. 28 When the leathery old body of Gregorio Fuentes,
Ernest Hemingway's fishing companion and confidant, finally gave out earlier
this month in Cuba, the sadness spread back here to the Chicago suburb where
Hemingway was born and raised.
There was the sense of an era ending, a door closing. Hemingway's youngest
sister survives, as does one of his sons, but few others now alive can claim to
have known him well.
"The necrology is kind of ominous, with two of his sons passing away in
the last year or so and now Gregorio," said Scott Donaldson, president of
the Hemingway Society. "It reminds you of how far back in time he was. He's
been dead for more than 40 years now."
Hemingway always admired and often wrote about men like Gregorio Fuentes,
whom he found wise, courageous, close to nature and blessed with innate
nobility. During the years that Hemingway spent in Cuba, when he evolved from a
gifted writer into a myth-shrouded giant who dominated and defined a generation,
he spent many afternoons on his boat in the company of Fuentes.
But even in recent years, when he was much sought after by tourists, Fuentes
kept his employer's secrets.
"He liked to tell stories, but he was also pretty circumspect,"
said Scott Schwar, executive director of the Hemingway Foundation here, who met
Fuentes several times during the last years of his life. "He never really
got into gossiping, although he certainly would have been able to."
Hemingway and Fuentes were bound together by a passion for fishing. The open
sea formed the backdrop for a great literary career and for the enduring
Hemingway legend, a legend that some scholars now say is nonsense.
Fuentes was a born seaman who rode out four hurricanes, swam through
shark-infested waters to rescue a drowning man and could feel in his bones
precisely where the biggest marlin, sailfish and tarpon would be running, or so
Hemingway asserted. In a 1949 article, Hemingway said that his own role on their
boat was to hook the prey and then "gradually work him closer and closer
and then in to where Gregorio can gaff him, club him and take him onboard."
Fuentes was born in the Canary Islands sometime between 1897 and 1899. There
are different accounts of how he met Hemingway, one having to do with a storm in
the Gulf of Mexico from which the two men found shelter together. In any case
they struck up an acquaintance, and around the time Hemingway settled in Cuba in
1939, he hired Fuentes as his boatman.
"I know that he would rather keep a ship clean and paint and varnish
than he would fish," Hemingway once wrote. "But I know too that he
would rather fish than eat or sleep."
The boat on which the two spent countless hours, the Pilar, was 34 feet
long, made of American black oak and had a cruising range of 500 miles.
Hemingway paid the Wheeler Shipyard in Brooklyn $7,500 for her in 1934, $3,000
of which was advanced by Arnold Gingrich, editor of Esquire, as payment for
future articles.
The writer and actor George Plimpton had less than happy memories of one
fishing expedition on the Pilar. "We were out all day and didn't catch
anything except a barracuda," he recalled. "It cut somebody's hand I
forget who and it was a real mess, blood all over the hold."
Much serious fishing was done aboard the Pilar, and much else as well.
Jeffrey Meyers, a Hemingway biographer, recently described it as "kind of a
floating whorehouse and rum factory as well as a fishing boat."
Fuentes never said anything like that, but he did offer a few glimpses of
Hemingway's drinking habits. He had inclusive tastes but favored Gordon's gin
above all. Whenever possible he drank only from freshly opened bottles.
On many of their trips, Fuentes told stories that he had heard in seaside
towns around the Caribbean, and some of them may have worked their way into
Hemingway's fiction. He claimed to have been a model for the weather-beaten
fisherman in "The Old Man and the Sea," a claim that some biographers
say is at least partly true.
"The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his
neck," Hemingway wrote of his fisherman, words that could easily have
described Fuentes. "The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and
his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But
none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless
desert."
During most of the 20 years when Cuba was his home longer than he lived
anywhere else Hemingway presided over a hilltop estate called Finca Vigía,
where hummingbirds flitted among the mango trees. He rose early and spent
mornings at work, standing at his typewriter wearing a favorite pair of
oversized moccasins. For lunch he would sometimes visit La Terraza in nearby Cojímar,
where his boat was moored, or drive to Havana, a few miles away, to visit one of
his two favorite bars, the Floridita or the Bodeguita del Medio. Nights were for
reading or entertaining.
As often as possible Hemingway broke away from his work to answer the call
of the sea, which meant the call of Fuentes and the Pilar.
"His life on that boat was certainly one of the things he enjoyed most,
aside from his work," said his son, Patrick Hemingway, who lives in
Montana. "I do think that in Cuba they've made too much about Gregorio
being the one who taught Ernest Hemingway all he knew about fishing. That's not
so. But my dad had a lot of respect for people who find simple but honorable
lives, and he saw that in Gregorio."
When Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in 1954, he told Fuentes, "We will
have very much money now." That turned out to be true, but there was
another consequence. Visitors began turning up uninvited at Finca Vigía,
sometimes by the dozen. Fuentes took on a new job, ferrying Hemingway and his
fourth wife, Mary Welsh, to an abandoned cay where they could bathe and
Hemingway could work uninterrupted.
In July 1960 Hemingway left Finca Vigía and, after stops in New York
and Madrid, landed in Idaho, where he had bought a house on 17 acres of land.
The following spring, an American-backed force of exiles landed at the Bay of
Pigs. It was a shattering event for Hemingway writer, because it marked the
final break between the United States and Cuba, and therefore the impossibility
of his return to the home he loved.
Some scholars say this realization may have helped propel him toward
suicide, which he attempted for the first time on the very day news of the Bay
of Pigs invasion was reported. He took his life on July 2, 1961.
Soon after, fishermen in Cojímar decided to erect a bust of the
American who had lived among them. There was no metal available, so they
contributed old propellers, deck ornaments and whatever else they could spare.
It was melted down, and the resulting monument was unveiled on the first
anniversary of his death in Cojímar's dusty main square, where it still
stands.
Finca Vigía, now owned by the Cuban government, remains almost
exactly as Hemingway left it. Bottles of Cinzano, their wrappers dry and
bleached, are still in the wine rack. Books spill from shelves, even in the
bathroom. Researchers have discovered that he annotated about one- third of
them, and are now compiling his notes in search of new insights. Walls and
floors are covered with animal head and skins that Hemingway brought home from
safaris in Africa.
The house has a distinctly masculine feel, and fits the traditional image of
Hemingway as a man's man for whom hunting, fishing, boxing and bullfighting were
the purest of pursuits. That image is now under withering attack.
"There's been a total change in the field, a huge reaction against the
old conventional wisdom," said Susan Beegel, editor of The Hemingway
Review. "It's not a reaction against Hemingway, but against the male
critics and scholars of an earlier era who created this one-dimensional macho
image of him."
"These days, people are writing about how real and complex his female
characters are, how sensitively he portrayed romantic relationships, and how
ambivalent he really was about manhood and gender," Ms. Beegel said. "Feminist
and gay-oriented scholars have discovered him with a vengeance. It's really
amazing to see how positively a lot of them view him."
After Hemingway's death Fuentes continued to work when he could, both as a
fisherman and charter captain. Hemingway left the Pilar to him, but soon the
Cuban government placed it on dry-land display at Finca Vigía. Whether
Fuentes donated the vessel freely or under duress remains unclear.
Like the rest of Cuba, Cojímar drifted into isolation after Fidel
Castro's revolution and the American trade sanctions that followed. More than a
few boats have left its harbor under cover of night for desperate runs to
Florida. But unlike other local fishermen, Fuentes had something to fall back
on: his memories of Hemingway. They gave him celebrity status and allowed him to
live differently from his neighbors.
"Gregorio is possibly the only fisherman in the world who owns
authentic Robert Capa and Karsh photos," the Cuban author Norberto Fuentes
(no relation) once observed. "Karsh's famous portrait of Hemingway hangs in
his living room."
When tourism to Cuba picked up in the 1990's, Finca Vigía became an
attraction once more. Visitors could look through open doors and windows but not
actually enter the house. Those wishing to take photographs were sometimes
charged $5 a shot.
Tour buses that made the trip to Finca Vigía often stopped at La
Terraza, where Hemingway favored the shrimp and crab dishes. There Fuentes was
the top attraction. He began charging $50 to spin 15 minutes worth of yarns
about his days with Papa, speaking in Spanish with a cigar between his teeth.
Sometimes his stories were about fishing trips, like one on which the writer
supposedly landed a 1,542- pound marlin. Other times they would have a literary
aspect, as when he told a journalist about the night Hemingway was considering
titles for his famous novella. "I said to him, 'Look, its about an old man.
And it's about the sea.' And Papa said, 'Yes, that's it!' "
Here in Oak Park, where Hemingway did his first writing and where the name
E. Hemingway is inscribed among others at the base of a memorial to local men
who served in World War I, a museum to his memory draws more than 10,000
visitors each year.
Its prize exhibit is the famous breakup letter he received from Agnes von
Kurowsky, the 26-year-old American nurse he fell in love with while he was a
teenager recovering from his war wound at a Milan hospital. She became the model
for Catherine Barkley, the beautiful English nurse in "A Farewell to Arms"
who treats and loves an American soldier hospitalized in Italy.
"I know that I am still very fond of you, but, it is more as a mother
than as a sweetheart," she wrote. "I can't get away from the fact that
you're just a boy a kid. I somehow feel that some day I'll have reason to be
proud of you, but, dear boy, I can't wait for that day." | 
