Ernesto by Andrew Feldman

Author:Andrew Feldman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2019-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

During the three weeks following the release of The Old Man and the Sea, eighty to ninety letters a day arrived at the Finca Vigía from high school kids, soldiers, sailors, columnists, professors, old pals from Italy, Montana, and Bimini, and many strangers praising him and wishing him well.59 While the letters continued, the Finca Vigía and the Floridita had become a zoo with an endless stream of visitors, house-guests, fans, friends, solicitors, and hangers-on.

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When Senator Estes Kefauver sought to eradicate organized crime and tightened gambling regulations in Las Vegas, the Mob looked to Cuba for friendlier business territory. As Variety magazine reported in 1953: “It was the chill of the Kefauver hearings which to a large measure induced the Americans to seek warmer and more hospitable grounds to the south.”60 Thus in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather II, character Hyman Roth (played by Lee Strasberg and representing Meyer Lansky) would declare with glee, “These are wonderful things that we’ve achieved in Havana, and there’s no limit to where we can go from here…We have now what we have always needed: real partnership with a government. Here we are, protected, free to make our profits, without Kefauver, the God-damned Justice Department and the FBI—90 miles away, partnership with a government.”61 Cultivating long-established business relationships with American investors and organized crime, President Batista provided incentives and protection in exchange for a percentage of the profits.62 Supported by Batista’s government, Santo Trafficante, Jr., expanded operations in casinos, hotels, cabarets like the Sevilla-Biltmore, Havana-Hilton, the Capri (the largest and most extravagant hotel casino outside of Las Vegas, with actor George Raft as its famed greeter, until it was outdone by the Riviera, and until the Havana Hilton outdid the Riviera), the Sans-Souci, El Comodoro, and the Deaville, with Mrs. Batista’s “bagman” depositing nightly 10 percent of their cut.63 Concurrently, brothels, burlesques, drag shows, and peepshows under Mafia purview, such as Casa Marina, Aunt Nena Club, the 212 Club, the Mambo Club, the Palette Club, the Bohemian Club, and the Shanghai Theater (a world depicted by Graham Greene) multiplied and made millions.64

With the inheritance from his mother, Ernest’s middle son, Patrick, had acquired a 2,300-acre homestead in Tanganyika and a house with several servants and twenty-two rooms. Benefiting from letters of introduction from his father to Philip Percival, the young man became a professional hunter and would live in Africa shooting wild animals during the next twenty-five years. By the middle of October, Ernest and Mary Hemingway were preparing a return trip to Africa so that he could write a series of articles (at ten thousand dollars per article with fifteen thousand dollars in expenses) for Look magazine that would take his readers on a photo safari through the camera of Earl Theisen, with stops in Paris, Spain, and Italy en route. In November, former general Dwight D. Eisenhower beat a progressive candidate, Adlai Stevenson, during a landslide election.

In December, Ernest attended the burial of Floridita bartender Constantino Ribalaigua and hosted Slim

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