UK Cigar Scene Magazine March Issue 3 | Page 8

Finca Vigia The recent launch of the Trinidad Vigia sent us on a search for the meaning of the Spanish Vigia. Mark Whitty writes about Ernest Hemmingway’s Havana home. Ernest Hemingway’s home in Key West was listed on the visitors’ map. The pathologically shy writer was not best pleased. Declaring that he would: “Rather eat monkey manure than die in Key West.”, he accepted an invitation from Martha Gellhorn, a gal he’d met in Sloppy Joe’s, to report on the Spanish Civil War. Finca Vigia (‘Look-out Farm’) lies nine miles south of Havana, in the village of San Francisco de Paula. His new warcorrespondent [third] bride found the house in the small ads. Tin-roofed wooden shacks and hard basic drinking sheds lined the short rowdy path to the gates. Having fixed the roof, re-plastered mouldstained walls, Hemingway bought the 15 acre estate for 18,500 pesos with a royalty cheque from his sweeping tale of the Spanish Civil War: For Whom the Bell Tolls was a big hit. By a strange twist of fate, Fidel Castro, would soon be using it as a primer for waging guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra. Hemingway found time to do things most men only dream about. Between the battlefields; hunting; bullfighting; fishing and boxing, he allowed time to write. Indeed, he gave equal dedication to everything he did. When Hemingway 7 was author, the change in his life-style was dramatic, the discipline of work absolute. In his bedroom his large desk supported stacks of letters; good-luck charms and an assemblage of memorabilia including international newspaper articles about his presumed death in two different plane crashes in Africa; Michelin maps of Spain annotated with names of people he met, restaurants and hotels he visited. All details he wished to remember for his writing. He never worked at the desk. From five or six in the morning, his portable typewriter on top of a bookcase near his bed, he stood, in a pair of oversized loafers, on the worn skin of a kudu. The door to his bedroom remained inviolate until one o’clock, when he would emerge, mix a drink and read the newspapers before lunch.