CubaPLUS Magazine

Many years ago, the famous Finca Vigía opened to the world as the Ernest Hemingway Museum, a mansion nestled in an Edenic setting in the town of San Francisco de Paula, about 15 km from Havana, where the American writer, author of A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.

Little is known about the most intimate reasons that made that brilliant man, with a hectic life as a war correspondent and prolific literary creator, end up in that place.

On the other hand, it is known that it was his third wife, Martha Gelhorn, who convinced him in 1939 to move to Finca Vigía, discovered by her, to leave the Ambos Mundos hotel. They moved there on December 28, 1940.

But it was his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, who fitted out the mansion and suggested the construction of new facilities, turning it into into a practical, modern house, a real and comfortable home, at the same time splendid, made according to the peculiar taste and habits of the couple, of course.

A close home-writer synergy arose there, the most stable place of residence Heminway had in his life. On the spot he finished For Whom the Bell Tolls and wrote The Old Man and the Sea, Paris Was a Party and Islands in the Gulf, as well as journalistic works.

Some four hectares of land occupy the area where Finca Vigía is located, surrounded by an evergreen tropical vegetation, shelter for different species of Cuban fauna, such as its showy songbirds.

The cozy mansion keeps everything just as the creator left it, something that suggests he would appear at any moment in any corner. There is also the bungalow, the observation tower, the swimming pool and the Pilar yacht from his adventures. The place where he woke up writing, standing in front of his typewriter, his paintings with bullfighting motifs, his hunting trophies, his records and well-stocked library, packed with books, documents and papers...

Everything remembers him. It is well worth visiting Finca Vigía and recreating that enriching cosmos of the writer, where he lived until he was on the verge of making the most dramatic decision of his existence, suicide,  when he felt very ill, hospitalized and in the United States, on July 2, 1961. Perhaps Finca Vigia is where his soul rests.