Find in Library

For Ernest Hemingway’s readers, a trip to Cuba is a kind of pilgrimage. The American author is indeed an emblematic figure of the country, and the memory of his stays on the island is celebrated in many places. In Havana alone, five places are the stages of a thematic tour: his room on the fifth floor of the Ambos Mundos Hotel, the Floridita and the Bodeguita del Medio, his two favorite bars, the port of Cojímar, in the suburbs and, last but not least, his inland residence, the Finca Vigía. The manifestations of his presence are more or less staged, from the author's house transformed into a museum to a simple bust or photographs, and the emotions each place generates are necessarily different. The multiplicity of these places, that are mostly touristic, leads to the hypothesis that literary emotion is perhaps at its strongest when it is not staged, but on the contrary born from the imagination and the memory of a reading from a simple evocation.