Thaindian News

Havana, Aug 4 (EFE) American writer Ernest Hemingway did not leave Cuba over his frustration with the government of Fidel Castro but was instead forced by the US government to abandon the island, a newspaper has reported.
Ada Rosa Alfonso, the director of the Hemingway Museum in Havana, told official Cuban newspaper Juventud Rebelde that then-US Ambassador to Cuba Philip Wilson Bonsal made the 1954 Nobel Literature laureate to leave the island.

The author of “The Old Man and the Sea” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls” abandoned Cuba suddenly on July 25, 1960, leaving many personal belongings at Finca Vigia, located some 20 km from Havana and at his home on the island from 1939 to 1961.

Unfinished manuscripts were among the items left behind by the writer, the newspaper said.

The majority of Hemingway’s biographers concluded that the writer left the island because he was uncomfortable with the way the government installed by Castro in January 1959 was heading.

On July 2, 1961, nearly a year after leaving Cuba, Hemingway killed himself in Idaho.

“It is a fact that they forced him to leave,” Alonso told the daily.

In January 1959, Hemingway made some statements in the US that were supportive of the revolution, expressing optimism about what was happening on the island, she said.

Hemingway “supported the executions of the henchmen of the tyranny of (Fulgencio) Batista,” the museum director said.

On his return to Cuba in March 1959, Hemingway “said he was Cuban and that the Cubans were going to win”, Alonso said, adding that the writer later stated that the revolution was “indestructible and fabulous”.

On May 15, 1960, Castro and Hemingway “spoke quite a bit” and were photographed together at a fishing tournament in Havana, she said.

“A short time later, they (US officials) went to his house and told him that if he remained in Cuba, he would be considered a traitor,” Alonso said, adding that “Hemingway never had problems with the Cuban government”.

Hemingway “suffered from depression”, the newspaper, noting that “the pressure to leave the island may have played a role in worsening his mental state”.