Welcome to Havana, Senor Hemingway (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Welcome to Havana, Señor Hemingway Steve Paul Welcome to Havana, Señor Hemingway. By Alfredo José Estrada. Miami, FL: Vista Publishing, 2003. 295 pp. Paperback $17.95. The Ernest Hemingway of Alfredo José Estrada's first novel is the rum-swilling, skirt-chasing, fist-throwing, fish-battling americano of legend. Oh, he's a writer, too. Sometimes he is incapable of writing. But sometimes the fire burns: "When the going was good, the words flowed out of him effortlessly. Only later would he go back and revise what he had written in his rounded, almost girlish handwriting." Hemingway lived a boisterous life, a life so large that he proves capable of taking over Estrada's novel, even when presented as a fictional character presumably within the author's control. Perhaps this was unintentional. It certainly [End Page 110] was unexpected in a novel that seemed to promise a view of Havana at a time and place rarely seen in American literature—and certainly not much seen in the work of Hemingway himself. Estrada serves to paint in some of the backdrop which Hemingway left out of his Cuba and Key West novel of the period, To Have and Have Not. Estrada frames his fiction with a familiar device. A contemporary Cuban American, assigned to write a magazine article about Hemingway's Cuba, uses the opportunity to explore a family story that puts his grandfather in the path of the "famously belligerent writer." It was not merely a brush with fame, but a momentous encounter, as the narrator suggests in the opening line: "My grandfather once knocked down Ernest Hemingway, or so I was told." The narrator sets the stage by talking with his grandmother, who had no fond feelings for this Hemingway character. Of her late husband—he had the "soul of a poet" and wanted to be a writer—she says, "Cada uno de su chivo hace un tambor." The phrase, we are told, suggests that he lived the cards he was dealt, and that is meant to hang in the air to guide the narrator's search. After the setup, Estrada deposits the reader into the Cuba of the early 1930 s. It was a time of political unrest, of an internal struggle between dictatorship and freedom, of a desire for self-determination that was complicated by the hovering presence and economic influence of the United States. Bombs punctuated the political landscape. Young radicals were gunned down in the Havana streets. And the famous American writer, the author of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, plied Cuba's waters for marlin and Havana's watering holes for pain relief. Enter Javier López Angulo, a Harvard-educated Cuban who yearned to be a writer like Hemingway but settled for the world of advertising. Javier is not much interested in the underground movement that hopes to topple President Gerardo Machado. He also resists the committed intellectuals' arrogant dismissal of Wall Street and yanqui warships in the vicinity. "He had been away for so long," Estrada writes of Javier, "that it made little difference to him who was president of Cuba. But were these would-be revolutionaries any better, with their endless arguments?" Javier instead prefers the hedonistic life, and while sitting with a friend one day at the Floridita, "he noticed a burly, square-jawed American with a mustache and a walnut-shaped scar over one eye." This man "wore a blue and white striped jersey, like a Basque fisherman, and cotton pants stained [End Page 111] with fish blood." Javier watches as the man performs a bullfighter's veronica with a towel and knocks over a glass of Hatuey beer in a gale of laughter. Soon enough Javier has been swept into Hemingway's swirl and he marvels at the American's appetite for life: "How could he bring such enthusiasm to everything he did? Was that the secret of his writing?" Hemingway and his ever-changing entourage—including Pauline and sons, Jane and Grant Mason, the boat captain Joe Russell, and the fishing guide Carlos Gutierrez—carry much of the weight of Estrada's novel. A few of the story lines...