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Finca Vigía (, ''Lookout Farm'') is a house in San Francisco de Paula Ward in
Havana Havana (; ) is the capital and largest city of Cuba. The heart of La Habana Province, Havana is the country's main port and commercial center.Cuba Cuba, officially the Republic of Cuba, is an island country, comprising the island of Cuba (largest island), Isla de la Juventud, and List of islands of Cuba, 4,195 islands, islets and cays surrounding the main island. It is located where the ...
which was once the residence of
Ernest Hemingway Ernest Miller Hemingway ( ; July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. Known for an economical, understated style that influenced later 20th-century writers, he has been romanticized fo ...
. Like Hemingway's Key West home, it is now a museum. The building was constructed in 1886.


History of the property

The house was built in 1886 by Catalan
architect An architect is a person who plans, designs, and oversees the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to provide services in connection with the design of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the buildings that h ...
Miguel Pascual y Baguer on a hill about southeast of
Havana Havana (; ) is the capital and largest city of Cuba. The heart of La Habana Province, Havana is the country's main port and commercial center.Martha Gellhorn Martha Ellis Gellhorn (8 November 1908 – 15 February 1998) was an American novelist, travel writer and journalist who is considered one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century. She reported on virtually every major world confli ...
, his third wife. Gellhorn, who had come to Cuba to be with Hemingway, decided that she did not want to live in the small room he rented at the Hotel Ambos Mundos. She found the property for which Hemingway paid $12,500. The ''finca'' at the time consisted of with a farmhouse. While at ''Finca Vigía,'' Hemingway wrote much of ''
For Whom the Bell Tolls ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' is a novel by Ernest Hemingway published in 1940. It tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer attached to a Republican guerrilla unit during the Spanish Civil War. As a dynamiter, he is assigned ...
'', a novel of the
Spanish Civil War The Spanish Civil War () was a military conflict fought from 1936 to 1939 between the Republican faction (Spanish Civil War), Republicans and the Nationalist faction (Spanish Civil War), Nationalists. Republicans were loyal to the Left-wing p ...
which he had covered as a journalist with Gellhorn in the late 1930s. (He had started the novel while living at the Hotel Ambos Mundos, and some of it was written in Idaho.) Hemingway bought the property with some of the first royalties from the book, which was published in 1940. After Hemingway and Gellhorn divorced in 1945, Hemingway kept ''Finca Vigia'' and lived there during the winters with Mary Welsh Hemingway, his last wife. At the ''finca'', Hemingway also wrote ''
The Old Man and the Sea ''The Old Man and the Sea'' is a 1952 novella by the American author Ernest Hemingway. Written between December 1950 and February 1951, it was the last major fictional work Hemingway published during his lifetime. It tells the story of Santiag ...
'' (1951) about a fisherman who lived in the nearby town of Cojimar and worked the waters off Havana. In the early 1940s, during the
Second World War World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
, Hemingway's three sons often visited him at the ''finca'', sometimes staying in a small house that Martha ("Marty") Hemingway had fixed up for them. The guest house, a converted one-story wooden garage, is now used as offices for the museum director and staff and for meetings. They reported that the property then was overgrown with ''manigua'' and ''flamboyan'' trees, but that most of the rural land has since been taken over by housing. In those early days there was also a tennis court, a pool and water wells. At the ''finca'' Hemingway began to keep and breed cats (in Key West, he had kept only peacocks). Hemingway started with a gray Angora cat named Princessa (middle cat in photo) obtained in
Key West Key West is an island in the Straits of Florida, at the southern end of the U.S. state of Florida. Together with all or parts of the separate islands of Dredgers Key, Fleming Key, Sunset Key, and the northern part of Stock Island, it con ...
from a breeder, and in 1942 picked up two male Cuban kittens named Good Will and Boise (left and right cats in photo). Hemingway wrote extensively about the habits of Boise. By 1943, the cat population at the ''finca'' numbered 11. When Mary Hemingway moved into the ''finca'' in 1946, she had a workshop tower constructed on the property for Hemingway to write in, but he preferred to work in his bedroom, and the workshop was eventually assigned to the cats. Today, there are no cats on the Cuban property, but there are several at the home in Key West, some with “thumbs,” (ie, polydactyl cats). There is no evidence that any of Hemingway's Cuban cats were
polydactyl Polydactyly is a birth defect that results in supernumerary body part, extra fingers or toes. The hands are more commonly involved than the feet. Extra fingers may be painful, affect self-esteem, or result in clumsiness. It is associated with ...
. After the
Cuban revolution The Cuban Revolution () was the military and political movement that overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, who had ruled Cuba from 1952 to 1959. The revolution began after the 1952 Cuban coup d'état, in which Batista overthrew ...
ousted the US-backed government in January 1959, Hemingway was on good terms with the new Cuban government. In Havana in the summer of 1960, he presented a trophy to Fidel Castro for winning a sport fishing contest named for Hemingway. Nevertheless, as depression and illness overtook him, Hemingway left Cuba for good on July 25, 1960, leaving behind the home that he had used there for more than 20 years. In the fall of 1960, the Cuban government expropriated a great deal of foreign property, including the ''Finca Vigía''. The U.S. government broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba in October 1960 and imposed a partial financial embargo. After the
Bay of Pigs invasion The Bay of Pigs Invasion (, sometimes called or after the Playa Girón) was a failed military landing operation on the southwestern coast of Cuba in April 1961 by the United States of America and the Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Front ...
in April 1961 and Cuba's announcement that it was a Communist state in May, relations between Cuba and the U.S. deteriorated further. Hemingway was being treated for severe depression in the U.S. through the first half of 1961, and the Hemingways could not return to Cuba due to the hostile political climate between the two countries. Hemingway committed suicide at his home in Idaho on July 2, 1961. The official Cuban government account is that after Hemingway's death, Mary Hemingway deeded the home, complete with furnishings and library, to the Cuban government, which made it into a museum devoted to the author. Mary Hemingway, however, stated that after Hemingway's death, the Cuban government contacted her in Idaho to report that it intended to expropriate the house, along with all
real property In English common law, real property, real estate, immovable property or, solely in the US and Canada, realty, refers to parcels of land and any associated structures which are the property of a person. For a structure (also called an Land i ...
in Cuba. Mary Hemingway negotiated with the Castro government for certain easily movable personal property (some paintings and a few books), plus manuscripts deposited in a vault in Havana. Most of the Hemingways' personal property, with no way to move it out of the country at the time, had to be abandoned.


Cuban ownership and stewardship after 1960

The home, claimed to be in danger of collapse by the US
National Trust for Historic Preservation The National Trust for Historic Preservation is a privately funded, nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., that works in the field of historic preservation in the United States. The member-supported organization was founded in 1949 ...
, was restored by the Cuban government and reopened to tourists in 2007. Even so, it has been listed as one of the 11 most-endangered historic sites, despite being outside the US. Also, it is on the World Monuments Fund's biennial list of "100 most endangered sites". Significant disputes and controversies have arisen over the condition of the house and its contents, although researchers who have visited the site have reported that the Cuban government, without funding from the US, has responsibly maintained the house, contents, wooden fishing boat '' Pilar'', and the grounds. In a June 2008 newspaper article, Irish thriller writer
Adrian McKinty Adrian McKinty is a Northern Irish writer of crime and mystery novels and young adult fiction, best known for his 2020 award-winning thriller, ''The Chain'', and the Sean Duffy novels set in Northern Ireland during The Troubles. He is a winner o ...
alleged that during a visit to the house, a Cuban secret policeman offered him any book in Hemingway's library for $200.


See also

* Ernest Hemingway House * Hotel Ambos Mundos


Notes


External links


11 Most Endangered, Finca Vigía: Ernest Hemingway House
National Trust for Historic Preservation, 2008 (web.archive.org)

www.PBS.org

Hemingway Society, April 2004 (web.archive.org)
Finca La Vigía HavanaAdios Hemingway - a Leonardo Padura police detective novel
{{DEFAULTSORT:Finca Vigia Ernest Hemingway Museums in Havana Historic house museums in Cuba Homes of American writers