She told us that when Hemingway held his first broadbill fishing tournament, Castro came out to fish with him and won the competition. Castro said he envied Hemingway because of the traveling he had done and the many experiences he had had. She said Fidel Castro was a great friend to Ernest Hemingway and Capt. The bartender said that this famous old village, which had always been blessed by the sea, was the place where Ernest Hemingway, Errol Flynn, Sarita Montiel, and Spencer Tracy hung out to experience first-hand the Cuban fisherman's experience. When we rapped on his front door, a pleasant woman in her seventies, Fuentes's daughter, answered. With directions from boys playing in the street, my friend John Bayfield and I went to Capt. The village was spread out along the shore, the weathered and unpainted stone cottages clapped together along narrow streets, and there was the sullen whisper of a calm sea just beyond a small, decaying fortress that guards the entrance to the bay. The temperature was in the high 80s (F.) as we entered Cojimar on a sun-filled, breezy morning. Fuentes, who was Hemingway's boat captain for 30 years. The novelist docked his boat the Pilar from the 1930s until his death in 1961. These were the words novelist Ernest Hemingway used to describe Santiago, the fisherman cursed by Salao (the worst form of bad luck), in his profound novel, The Old Man and the Sea, which won him the Nobel Prize for literature almost 50 years ago.Ĭaptain Gregorio Fuentes, the man who Hemingway admitted was his model for Santiago, as well as Antino from Islands in the Stream.

The old man on the sea