Cuba, fishing and Hemingway

(Dottie and I went to Cuba in December of 2012 as part of Californians Building Bridges, a people-to-people nonprofit organization founded by Sonoman Darius Anderson, who has been a Cubanophile ever since he first visited the island nation when he was a student at George Washington.)

We didn't go Cuba to fish, although I would like to, but I did have an opportunity to meet and talk with Cuban fishing guide, Samuel Yeta, who works for a couple of state-run outfitters who run fishing trips off Cayo Santa Maria.

Darius Anderson and I met Samuel at the Las Brujas marina. He happened to working on his boat. We didn't bring our fly rods, but Samuel was eager to talk about fly-fishing in the area and even offered to take us out to test the local waters.

He had a couple of funky spinning rods, which we used with no success, but we did enjoy seeing the many shallow bays and narrow, mangrove-lined channels where, during the high season (April to September), anglers find world-record-sized tarpon lurking.

Samuel was eager to hear about the interest that American anglers would have in fishing in Cuba.  He guides a lot of anglers from Canada and Europe, but it is harder for Yanks to get in than the rest of the civilized world.

It is not that Cubans don't want us to come. In fact, they seem to like Americans. Our government is the roadblock.  For reasons dating back more than 50 years (and seem to me no longer relevant), the United States has imposed an embargo on trade with Cuba and most travel there.

We saw first hand the damage and hardships our embargo has imposed on the Cuban people. While Samuel and others who cater to visitors from other countries in the world are managing to stay afloat, many other parts of the Cuban economy are in ruins. Some would say Castro brought this ruination on his people, but all the U.S. has accomplished with its embargo is make it harder on the people, and given him the U.S. to blame instead of himself.

Samuel, like virtually every Cuban we met, was warm and friendly, and eager to talk about what Cuba has to offer Americans.  

Although the fishing isn't good this time of year the rum is good any time.  We enjoyed mojitos, daiquiris and piña coladas, and fine aged rum straight.  We even tried the finest Cuban cigars, none of which can be imported into the U.S. 

Old Havana is a fascinating city to visit.  Colorful and filled with artists and musicians, it appears to be the antithesis of what one would expect in a Communist country.  Fidel and Raul Castro may have rejected the capitalists and gangsters that dominated the country when Batista was the president, but they embraced those who would preserve the Cuban culture in art and in music.  Everywhere you go in Old Havana you find street musicians, and art is everywhere.

Beautifully restored old cars are prized

Private enterprise on a small scale is allowed.  You see this in street markets, and in the restaurants that are set up in private homes.  But outside the city it appears that the major sugar processing factories of previous decades are all closed and shuttered.

State-run cigar and rum production continues, with those products going everywhere in the world except the USA.

Dottie and I would love to return to Cuba some day and spend more time in Havana, and of course I would like to do some serious fishing.

“Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.”

                                          ― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway's former home, Finca Vigia, is near Havana. It was restored and reopened in 1995 after years of decay following the author's departure from the island he loved in the 1960s. It was said that Ava Gardner swam nude in his pool there.  Unfortunately the pool was drained and Ava wasn't around, nor was Hemingway, but if you believe in ghosts, Finca Vigia has those kinds of vibes.

Hemingway left Cuba because our government threatened sanctions against his publishing in the U.S. if he stayed in Cuba under Castro.  It doesn't appear that Hemingway was close to Castro, but he did side with him against Batista during the revolution and they went fishing together afterward.  Castro caught the biggest fish.

Papa, as Cubans call him, left lots of his stuff behind at his home, which sits on a hill with a view of Havana. A joint effort by Cuban and U.S. preservationists brought it back. His boat, Pilar, was brought up from the docks and is on display near the pool.

He was a passionate angler who grew up fishing the lakes and streams of Michigan, and eventually devoted most of his angling to big billfish in the deep blue waters surrounding the island.

He wasn't into catch-and-release. He fished to battle, conquer, kill and eat the things he caught.   His later books including The Old Man and the Sea and Islands in the Stream reflect his fascination with fighting (to the death) the ocean's biggest and strongest denizens.

Except for Pilar, you don't see or hear much about his love of fishing by walking around Finca Vigia or talking with the curators and guides.  Visitors are not allowed inside the home, but all the windows are open and you can see into his rooms, where lots of trophy animal heads are mounted and cabinets are overflowing with books.

For a while I just sat on a bench near Pilar and tried to imagine him fighting huge blue marlin from that single chair in the stern.  I wondered what he would say about the kind of fishing I prefer – trout fishing in mountain streams. Then I remembered that he had a lot to say about trout fishing, particularly in his early writings, including Big Two-Hearted River.

There is great collection of his writings on angling entitled Hemingway on Fishing, which I read several years ago and picked up again just to reread some of the chapters.

Even then, he was a meat fisherman, and if I had been able to ask him about today's catch-and-release practices, he would have dismissed it with a sneer as a waste of time.  Yet, in a letter to his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, his description of heaven had a least one part on which we would agree:

"To me a heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on 9 different floors and one house would be fitted up with special copies of the Dial printed on soft tissue and kept in the toilets on every floor and in the other house we would use the American Mercury and the New Republic."

--Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1 July 1925)

•                                                                                                           HEMINGWAY'S FISHING BOAT, Pilar, is on display at his former home near Havana.  He had the boat modified to his specifications.  You can imagine him strapped into the single fighting chair, a cigar in gritted teeth, battling a monster marlin for hours.