The Importance of Not Being Ernest by Mark Kurlansky

Author:Mark Kurlansky [Kurlansky, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781642504644
Publisher: Mango Media
Published: 2022-04-20T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Cuba and the Unspeakable Feast

A collective tobacco farm in the Viñales,

Pinar del Rio, a province west of Havana, Cuba

“La Mar violeta añora el nacimiento de los dioses,

ya que nacer es aqui una fiesta innombrable,

un redouble de cortejos y tritons reinando.”

—José Lezama Lima, Noche insular: Jardines invisibles

(“The violet sea longs for the birth of Gods,

for to be born here is an unspeakable feast,

a drum roll of commanding retinues and tritons.”)

—José Lezama Lima, Insular Night: Invisible Gardens

Even if you were not born in Cuba, its tropical embrace, its furious story, its rough-hewn grace, made it a place that, once you spent time there, would never leave you.

All that was true when Hemingway was there and when I was there too. But if the Paris I knew was not the one Hemingway knew, the differences in our Cubas were even greater. Hemingway knew Cuba for three decades, lived there for two, with more of his life spent in Cuba than anywhere else, half his adult life. While for me Cuba was an isolated forbidden fruit, Hemingway knew it almost as an extension of the US. It was easy to get to in his time; many Americans went, the stores were filled with American products, and the US government had a lot to say about what went on there. Americans that he knew and even ones that he didn’t were continually dropping by. Cuba invented Caribbean tourism and dominated it until the revolution. Aside from Jamaica, a Caribbean vacation almost always meant a trip to Cuba. The truth is that Cuba never in its history had been a sovereign nation until Fidel Castro’s revolution, shortly before Hemingway left. This was one of the reasons for the revolution.

He went there because it was part of a life he had created for himself on his cabin cruiser fishing the Gulf Stream. He fished Key West to the Bahamas and then down to Cuba. It is often called the Straits of Bahama or the Florida Straits. In time, he realized that Key West and Bimini, a small Bahamian island, were the backwater, and the real capital of his fishing grounds was the great city of Havana—coarse and elegant, tough and crumbling—implausible grandeur parked right on the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream, which has a deeper-colored water, is clearly visible from downtown Havana, just beyond the harbor entrance. The stream, like a wide river in the sea, is a deep blue, clearly demarcated from more muted water around it. Sometimes it seemed purple, according to Hemingway, because of a rich presence of red plankton swimming in the blue. Giant fish lived in this deep purple stream.

Technically Hemingway didn’t fish the Gulf Stream but something known as the Florida Current, but this was part of a more extensive system known as the Gulf Stream because it took the warm tropical water from the Gulf of Mexico, rushing it between Cuba and the Bahamas on one side and Florida on the other, up North America and across the Atlantic to Europe, which is why Europe is far warmer than North America.

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