A foot in door -- literarily speaking

Hemingway fans hope someday to visit his Cuba home

This 2004 photo shows the dining room of Ernest Hemingway’s home from 1939-1960 outside Havana. Former Arkansas Sen. Kevin Smith, a board member of the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum in Piggott, described the estate known as Finca Vigia, or “Lookout Farm,” as “stuck in amber.”
This 2004 photo shows the dining room of Ernest Hemingway’s home from 1939-1960 outside Havana. Former Arkansas Sen. Kevin Smith, a board member of the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum in Piggott, described the estate known as Finca Vigia, or “Lookout Farm,” as “stuck in amber.”

WASHINGTON -- Some fans of Ernest Hemingway said they hope the new policy on Cuba announced Wednesday will mean a chance for more people to visit the Nobel Prize-winning author's most well-known home.

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President Barack Obama announced that the United States will ease restrictions on remittances, travel and banking relations, and will restore full diplomatic relations with the communist country, opening an embassy in Havana for the first time in more than 50 years.

Under the new policy, it will be easier to travel to Cuba for certain reasons including family visits, government business and professional research, as well as for educational, religious or humanitarian trips.

Federal law still prohibits any other travel to the country, including tourism. It is up to Congress whether to lift the current embargo.

Finca Vigia or "Lookout Farm" outside Havana was Hemingway's home from 1939-60. During that time, he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea and the posthumously-published A Moveable Feast and Islands in the Stream. The home holds one of the largest collections of his papers, books, photos, trophies and memorabilia.

That means a lot of scholars and tourists want to visit, said Adam Long, director of the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center in Piggott, Ark.

"Hemingway tourism is pretty, pretty big. People like to go to Hemingway sites and to his homes, and the site in Cuba is really the biggest Hemingway site in the world. It's really, more than anywhere, his home, but it's been cut off to American travelers for the last 60 years or so," Long said. "A lot of people will want to go."

The Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center includes a barn studio where Hemingway wrote while staying with the family of his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer.

Long said travel restrictions have been loosened over the years to allow cultural trips to Cuba, but it's not easy to get approved to go.

"It's still difficult, a lot of paperwork. The average traveler can't do it, so I think this will be big for Hemingway tourism," Long said. "Certainly any loosening of travel restrictions would make it easier for Hemingway fans to get down there and see his home."

Long said he and others with the museum traveled to Cuba last year, and he went for a Hemingway scholars conference the year before.

Former state Sen. Kevin Smith recently returned from a trip to Cuba with a group of "Hemingway aficionados." He said he's visited almost every place the writer went, and Cuba had always been on his list.

"It's been off-limits my entire life," Smith said. "I just couldn't pass it up."

The group visited several Hemingway sites, as well as art and history museums. Smith is on the board of the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum.

He described the home as "stuck in amber." When Hemingway left in 1960, he didn't realize he wouldn't return. The writer committed suicide in Idaho in 1961, and much of the island home he shared with his wife and children sat undisturbed for decades.

"The Hemingway connection with the United States really has led the way in relaxing relationships," he said. "There's been a lot of diplomatic back and forth over that issue, over preserving the items of Ernest Hemingway that are so important to so many Americans and so many other people."

The writer's grandson, John Hemingway of Montreal, said he hopes the policy change will make travel to Cuba easier. He has publicly urged the United States and Cuba to normalize relations.

"As a Hemingway this is very important," he said. "For me this is an extremely positive thing. I want more Americans to understand the heritage that we have with this country."

The Miami native, who also is a writer, said he grew up with the island so close, but out of reach.

"My family has a long history with the island. My grandfather lived there, first time in the 1930s, he eventually moved there in 1940 and stayed there for the last 20 years of his life," John Hemingway said. "Cuba has always been something that everyone in my family has talked about, but many of us were never able to go. I had to wait until I was 54 to actually visit the island, and I was born only 90 miles away from Cuba."

Now that Obama has re-established diplomatic relations, Congress should lift the embargo and allow full trade and travel, he said.

"This is a continuing process, and I believe that it will happen in time," he said.

In the past 15 years, several major U.S. organizations have worked to maintain the home in Cuba and preserve the thousands of relics.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation added the Cuba house to its list of 11 Most Endangered Historic Places in 2005 because of roof leaks and foundation problems. It is also on the World Monuments Fund List of 100 Most Endangered Sites.

A Boston-based organization, the Finca Vigia Foundation, has spent years preserving thousands of documents, the home and the 12-acre site, which includes the author's fishing boat, the Pilar.

Foundation Executive Director Mary-Jo Adams said the American and Cuban governments have been very supportive of the foundation's restoration efforts, and it's too soon to know how the new policy might affect them.

"We have been doing our job without difficulty," Adams said. "I suspect it might be a little bit easier, maybe faster. It's way too soon. I'm dying to find out."

The site is already a tourist destination for people visiting Cuba from around the world, she said, and the mutual support from two countries without diplomatic ties is unique.

"Our project, remarkably is not political, and because of that we have been very successful. The people we work with in Cuba are brilliant, are very talented conservators," she said. "Hemingway kept thousands of books, thousands of photographs, letters ... he kept everything so the project moves slowly, but it's not the fault of either government, it's the nature of document conservation."

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