Cojimar

Cojimar

A few miles east of Havana lies the coastal fishing town of Cojimar, sitting on a lovely bay opening to the Florida Straits. It's a short drive from Ernest Hemingway's estate, Finca Vegia, which sits generally south of Havana. Connecting the finca and Cojimar are good roads and about 20 minutes are required to drive between the finca and the town.

For Hemingway, fishing seemed more important than living, and thus he bought his fishing boat, Pilar, a few years before he bought his Cuba home, the finca. Originally he rented dock space for the new boat at the Havana waterfront near his hotel, the Hotel Ambos Mundos, where he stayed and where he wrote some of his best known books. But soon he found a home for the boat in Cojimar. Thereafter, this little town was the base of his maritime operations.

He sometimes made the trip to Cojimar several times a week, and he soon found a favorite restaurant and bar in the little town. That restaurant, La Terraza is there today as is the rest of the town, seemingly unchanged from Hemingway's era. Like most tourist spots it is owned by the Cuban government, and it is kept in perfect condition.

The first thing you notice on entering La Terraza is the immaculate polished wooden floors. You enter directly into the bar room, and you see the back bar with nearly a hundred bottles of liquor, lined up precisely. A bar man awaits the requests of any tourists. Few locals drink or dine here as the prices (about what they would be here at home) are well beyond what fishermen can afford. But if the food and drink now are what they were like in Hemingway's time, it's no wonder this was one of his favorite haunts.

The Pilar had two first mates at different times. The first was Carlos Gutierrez, and the last was Gregorio Fuentes. Gutierrez might have been the inspiration for The Old Man and the Sea (although some academics think that Papa saw himself as the model for the old man). But Fuentes way outlasted Gutierrez, living right there until he was 104 years old in 2002 and picking up money from tourists by posing for photos.

Cojimar is a sleepy little place today, as it was way back when. If there is any action at all it's out beyond sight--beyond the reef--where the epic fights for huge fish are engaged. The locals bring in their catch, and some of it ends up in the hands of the head chef at La Terraza. Nora and I have had lunch there a couple of times, but, being vegetarians, we bypassed the fish on the menu. The chef is happy to fix anything you want, and for us the last time he made us a fine vegan dish of rice, vegetables and spices, which he declined to enumerate.

We sat at the table we'd used once before--in the corner, partly surrounded by windows on two sides looking out and down to the bay and off to the deep blue water of the Gulf Stream. Far below us a lone fisherman fired up his outboard and chugged out to sea. I watched him and thought how what I was watching could have been the same scene played out in the late 1930's when I was a toddler, when Papa was in his prime, and since when the town and its people remain unchanged.

Les Inglis