Travels with Bob
Postcard from Cuba
Ernest Hemingway might as well have been Cuban. He loved the island so much he made it his home for over twenty years! His dream house was on a small farm near Havana that he and his wife Mary bought in 1939 after selling the film rights to "For Whom the Bell Tolls".
My last visit there was in January, but the work of restoration on the house has been going on for ten years and the house and its collections are once again open to the public. Visitors come from all over the world.
My role in all of this has been as a consultant to the restoration but it has offered me the opportunity to get acquainted with my parents' homeland. They left there in the 1940's and I visited there as a kid before the revolution.
It is a really gorgeous place and the people are friendly and eager to reconnect with Americans. The next phase of our project has already begun and it involves the restoration of over 9,000 books and documents that Hemingway left behind. The material is also being digitized and will become available to Hemingway scholars all over the world.
I'm hoping to go again in 2011.
