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JIRIBILLA Hemingway worked intensely on this project and by the middle of 1947 had written nearly a thousand pages. But he put aside this manuscript until Fall, 1950, only to abandon it again -this time definitively- in the middle of 1951. During this year Hemingway made the fateful decision to split one of the stories from The Sea Book off on its own: a legend about a Cuban fisherman's struggle with an extraordinary fish in the Gulf Stream north of Cuba. Hemingway delighted in the work of transforming the story into a prose piece of rigorous simplicity and mythic dimension capable of promoting all his previous work, permitting him to win first the Pulitzer Prize and subsequently the coveted Nobel, in 1954. The rest of The Sea Book remained in a bank vault in the Cuban capital, Havana for many years, awaiting an editing by Hemingway that never came. Anticipated with a certain amount of dread, The Sea Book was a novel Hemingway was known to have worked intensely on (his project on the land, sea, and air), to have interrupted and lain aside, and in a seemingly deliberate manner never to have given to his publishers. In this novel Hemingway left developed reflections about a wharf on the island of Bikini, and a nearly perfect communion with a storied Havana that leads us finally to the pursuit of German submarines in the paradisiacal littorals in the north of Camagüey. Hemingway suspended his work in the middle of 1947 when his son Patrick had a sort of nervous attack following a car accident, possibly exacerbated by an imminent university examination and a crisis of religious faith. Hemingway brought Patrick to the Finca Vigía and surrounded himself with his closest friends: a doctor, a priest, a jai alai player, so that he would forget the shadows that were troubling him. Hemingway left the novel further and further behind him, turning the Finca Vigía into a place for meetings and discussions between drinks and jokes, always with a good shot of the whiskey which always eased him from the preoccupation with family worries and quilt. But something even worse would happen. A few months later in August, 1947, Hemingway found himself connected by rumours to an antii-Trujillo uprising that was being organized in one of the smaller Romano keys. Because of these rumours Hemingway was persecuted and slandered, and the Finca was even occupied by a detachment of troops who killed one of his dogs. Hemingway continues in some dark corners of Havana to be the object of persecution. But let us return to The Sea Book, the most biographical, revealing work of Hemingway's. In its pages a reader encounters Hemingway's greatest hopes and enthusiasms, the happiest years of his life and many of his greatest frustrations and intellectual adventures. A reader meets with many of the most important people in Hemingway's life: his sons, his friends, women he loved--and above all, the one unforgettable woman. The woman who was the first among his great loves, linked forever in him memory with his great love for Paris. When a reader traces the mythical dimension of the formidable iceberg Hemingway crafted in Islands in the Stream, the magisterial complexity of Hemingway's technique becomes evident. No one can deny the novel contains some of Hemingway's most formative experiences. Structured as a trilogy of complementary stories that enrich and modify each other, the novel is one of his most passionate. Hemingway places his characters on a small island of the Bimini group cast of Florida in the novel's first part. Even so, the setting also recalls his farm in Cuba (country houses, docks, beaches, travellers, and immigrants). We recognize the author and his sons in Thomas Hudson, the novel's protagonist, and his three sons, and his friend Red, the woman, the painter's nostalgia for Paris, the sharks and world of the Antilles during this period with its bars, adventurers, yachts, and tourists, not to mention to ever present Hemingwayan tragedy. The second part of Islands in the Stream takes place in fabulous Havana. Thomas Hudson has returned from one of his customary trips around Romano Key when we find him stretched out over a palm carpet with his cat and his memories, frustration, and sadness before he leaves the farm in his old car, heading off to the city in the same route Hemingway took almost every day. A reader encounters in Islands in the Stream the beautiful house Hemingway owned in the hills around San Francisco de Paula, with its paintings and books, efficient servant and Chinese cook, the eastern breezes coming in between the palms and mangos, its walks along the coastline with Hemingway's friends the fishermen, and sometimes a memory of Paris amid the writer's existential thoughts and passions. With its old loves circling around the writer's head, Havana was transmuted by his genius into pages of splendid writing. The legendary Floridita bar represents another dimension of the fabulous city. There, in the bar presided over by Constante, the most famous prostitutes in the city would meet (as they do in the novel), along with the only slightly less notorious mayor, senators, businessmen, landowners, sugar barons, and Hollywood stars (including the one who used to swim nude in the Finca Vigia´s swimming pool?). As it has been accurately noted many times before, Hemingway explored the Cuban archipelago along its northern coast on Joe Russell's yacht, the Anita, starting in 1929, at first for big game fishing and rum running, but later venturing into the capital city. Hemingway's enthusiasm for Havana grew with each demented trip he took to meet one of the most mysterious and beautiful women of the entire period. It is well known that in 1931, on the deck of the Ile de France en route to New York, Hemingway met the enchanting Jane Mason. She was at that time married to Grant Mason, the chief executive for Pan American's Caribbean operations, who in those days was almost always away on business trips. The Masons owned a lovely house on the bank of the Jaimanitas river, twenty-five minutes west of the Cuban capital. Located on a high slope between sandy areas, the house had large porches from which the whole cove could be seen, with its bars, hotels, and little wharf on the river. The house was encircled by a wild garden with grapes, coconut trees, and flowers, and a swimming pool that reached almost to the edge of the sea. Surrounding everything was a low wall. Hemingway began to cross the Gulf Stream over and over in one of his friends boats or another, and not only to fish or contemplate Havana at night from the sea. His destination, as he wrote in one of his famous pieces of journalism without ever providing any further explanation, was other than the nights passed in the cabaret Sans Souci and the beautiful dawns on the Jaimanitas. Those who met Jane Mason on her walks around Havana report that she had a classical bearing, a wild and delicate figure. She had large blue eyes, a face and mannerisms that suggested refined distinction. Tall, startling, elegant, with abundant and reddish hair parted down the middle, her strawberry locks sometimes fell carelessly over her forehead, especial when she seemed calm (something she was not, in reality). Nothing could stop them. Until 1936 there wan an intense and scandalous affair between Ernest Hemingway and Jane Mason. They were often seen together in Havana at the most surprising places, such as horseraces, taverns near the port, in one boat or another, or hopping between bars and cabarets. In the afternoons they often met in one restaurant or another, when not in the National Hotel of Cuba built on the hill that rises over Havana's Malecón, from which the Gulf Stream’s vivid blue can be seen. Ten years of voyages, meetings, and tours of Havana began before Hemingway would definitively settle in Cuba. It was in the visits to Cuba during these early years, with the splendid Jane Mason, that the myth of Hemingway started to circulate among the Cubans, as if little by little Hemingway were becoming the proprietor of plazas, wharves, streets, bars, restaurants, and hotels--among the other coastal locations around the Cuban capital. During these years also, Hemingway entered into contact with adventurers, sailors, fishermen, millionaires, boxers, photographers, baseball and jai alai players, jockeys, merchants, and hired drivers in Havana, along with clerks and prostitutes, police and mafiosos, while he was creating one of the most extraordinary personal myths of any writer of the twentieth century. In Havana Hemingway also began a friendship with the young Mayito Menocal, son of an ex-president of Cuba known as El Mayoral, "The Boss.“ Mayito had access to an impressive boat, the private yacht of the Menocal family, which was registered as Las Delicias, "The Delights,” almost thirty feet long and excellent for sailing even in rough seas. The news that Hemingway could often be found sailing around the Romano Key during the first years of the thirties, sometimes on the Anita with Carlos Gutiérrez or Joe Russel, other times on Las Delicias accompanied by Jane Mason, reached even to the heights of Punta Lucrecia. During this period Hemingway first arrived with Mayito Menocal in the inlet of El Guincho, port of San Fernando de Nuevitas, but in the whole Camagüeyan archipelago, he always felt a special fondness for Romano Key, the largest of the keys islands. More than a hundred miles long, from east to west, Romano, with its deep water coral, coves and channels, hills and forests, had considerable importance from the turn of the century on. Among those who had contact with Hemingway in the Romano Key during the early thirties was a man known as Caciano, who frequently attested that Hemingway travelled through Romano Key on several occasions. During these trips, Hemingway would ride on horseback with a twelve gauge shotgun, Caciano accompanying him on foot with the dogs, searching for some game that never appeared. The fishermen and turtle hunters knew of a North American going around the northern coast from Guillermo Key to Sabinal, but thought he was only an adventurer, not a famous writer. There were so many rumours that some people from Caibarién tried to sell Hemingway a buried treasure. Whether or not the buried treasure, presumably located in Coco Key, really existed is no longer of much importance. What is significant is that in this maritime region everyone knew about the North American who was sailing around the coastline of Romano Key. The map of the buried treasure is still preserved in an antique metal tube fourteen inches long by one and a quarter inches, in the possession of a man named Naftalí Pernas, who just turned eighty-four years old. During this period Hemingway preferred to spend most of his time (all of it, in fact) in Romano Key with the enchanting Jane Mason. He had recently returned from Africa, and had left Pauline Pfeiffer in Key West. With his yacht, the Pilar, just finished he proposed to take it on its maiden voyage. Hemingway set himself to sailing the northern coast of Camagüey, not exactly looking for sharks. Accompanied by Jane Mason (then twenty-five years old), Hemingway's voyage stretched out to four months, from July to October, 1934. They quickly explored the entire key, then weighed anchor at the cove called El Guincho, in the mythical port of San Fernando de Nuevitas. It is well known that they stayed in the hotel run by La Colombiana, afterwards boarding a train for Camagüey. From there they went to the Santa Marta sugar mill, where they stayed in the plantation house. There were innumerable sailing trips in the days Carlos Gutiérrez was captain of the Pilar. Those days the sea was rough, with stiff breezes out of the east or hurricanes in the north, Hemingway would wait out the bad weather in some inlet of the Romano Key or other. He would go ashore on those occasions to get to know the marshes, trees, and low hill lines of the key, and the wild deer that started at the sound of any human foot, the wild pigs and dogs, howling and barking furiously, and the reddish soil of the coast from which thousands of flamingos took flight when he approached. And he would have seen the dwarf horses which were a real local legend. They came to Romano at the close of the last century, left there by the shipwreck of a circus boat bound for Venezuela. In Romano Key Hemingway also witnessed the legend that always accompanies the founding of a city: in this instance, a small town founded by French immigrants on the eastern side of the island, with a wharf, two or three shops built of limestone, and some taverns whose balconies and terraces stretched toward the sea. But when Hemingway arrived for the first time at the old French town, in the early thirties, what he saw was only a few shacks inhabited by fishermen, some isolated three stumps near the shore (all that remained of the wharf), and some walls ruined by the rain and salt air. If Hemingway did not see the old French town in its heyday, he did meet some fishermen and turtle hunters possessed of an extraordinary marine culture: valorous, skillful, knowledgeable about their occupation, who with a simple observation were able to foresee any contingency. During this time Hemingway also began his expeditions into the Camagüeyan interior, at the prompting of Mayito Menocal, whose family had sugar interests in the south of Camagüey. it was after finishing For Whom the Bell Tolls that Hemingway made one of his most extensive such trips to Camagüey, and he is known to have carried among his papers the original manuscript of the novel The Great Crusade, by the German writer Gustav Regler. Regler had asked Hemingway to review the novel, and was surprised when Hemingway read it not once but several times, even making some suggestions for revision and beginning a prologue for it while at the house at the sugar plantation in Santa Marta he had visited with Jane Mason, which he completed at the Grand Hotel in Camagüey and finally at the Black Cat hotel in El Guincho. To everyone's surprise, a few months later Regler's novel appeared with Hemingway's introduction. In Camagüey, the most unexpected characters came into contact with each other, some just passing through, others living in the cities founded by North Americans and Europeans all over the valley of Cubitas in the early part of the century. Hemingway regularly met adventurers, gamblers, drunks, frustrated gunfighters, and confidence men who spent a night. at the port on the way to visit family and friends in one of the little houses on the Camagüeyan plain. The largest of the North American cities in Cuba, Gloria city, still preserved a little of its grandeur from the days of its founding, nowhere more than in the formality of Mrs. Neustel's hotel. But out of all these immigrant towns, the one witch Hemingway was most interested in was the one built by Germans, the nearly mythical Palm City, eight miles West of Gloria City. German laborers built beautiful houses with gardens and flower beds there, and converted the run down ranches into prosperous farms. On the coast opposite Romano, other Germans lived in Columbia City. But the German immigrants lavished most of their creativity on Palm City, with its little schools, churches, and shops, and its streets in perfect order, everything in good taste and with exceptional beauty, A city of farmers, it even had a short clock tower, a park, almond and flamboyán trees, not to mention a very good local beer. In those days Hemingway never missed an opportunity to put his ship up at the dock in El Guincho. Nearby, on one side of the wharf of Carreras, Agustin's tavern could be found. On the other side was a sort of hotel and bar with spacious halls, terraces, and balconies run by a woman everyone knew as La Colombiana. Then came a cobblestone street and the large colonial shops built of limestone and coral rock, covered in tile roots. From there the cites cobblestone streets ascended the hill among the green verdure, until they came to the park of San Fernando de Nuevitas at the top of the hill, with its old yellow church and towers built one piece at a time by a Catalan master builder. This was (and is) my town, my port, my key: the area where I was born and from which my memories of childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood derive. I was born in a neighbourhood where predominantly fishermen lived, and got to know many of these individual who had come into contact with Ernest Hemingway: Old Fals, and the eldest of the Montenegro family, Antoñico the Islander, Old Anthony, a legendary hunter named Caciano, and the fishermen, turtle bunters, adventurers, and immigrants who thronged around the port. The Guincho pier that Hemingway began visiting was a place where experienced fishermen, turtle hunters, and sailors gathered, a port which it was common to see cargo ships, military vessels, sailboats, schooners, and brigantines in after the Second World War began. In those war years, one regularly encountered in the local hotels and taverns captains of merchant vessels, gamblers, businessmen, and executives of international companies, bank representatives, Germans from Palm City, adventurers and sailors from the far corners of the globe, the "better sort" of people from Camagüey, Europeans and North Americans from the immigrant cities established in the valley of Cubitas, hunters, landowners, and sugarmill owners on their way to or returning from Camagüey on business. Of all the testimonies about Hemingway from the port of San Fernando de Nuevitas, the most sympathetic was offered by Agustín. As previously mentioned, his tavern was on the windward side of the large wooden dock that bore witness to former greatness, on the other side of the hotel run by La Colombiana. These buildings were almost mirror images of each other with their broad wooden terraces facing toward the sea. The hotel of La Colombiana was more splendid and, for me, more colourful--even a little scandalous--due to the renowned parties La Colombiana gave during the war years, as well as the fact that it was visited at various times by the writer Hemingway. Nevertheless, I had to wait a while before I would learn anything certain. I had to wait until everything started to fall apart, and La Colombiana started showing signs of her increasing indolence, getting bigger around the waist as she spent her days on the east side of the terrace, gazing out to sea absently. It was a challenge to talk to her. Her responses (propelled by her imagination) only confirmed a past she never had in reality. It turned out to be extremely difficult to draw her out of her absorption, as if she had already forgotten everything but her home in her native country, in one of those houses on the shore of the Magdalena, in the port of Barranquilla. From the first interview, La Colombiana would only volunteer a single phrase: "In business, you know," she said, “I am not in the custom of talking about my clients." With time's passing, La Colombiana appeared to get her memories mixed up, but she did remember the landing of Hemingway's boat: "In those days each time Hemingway arrived, he would go to that Agustín fellow's tavern." And she also mentioned the fishermen Hemingway met on the wharf, that time when Hemingway tied up his boat again to the old dock of Carreras, and "he didn't seem to be carrying any guns. He gave the impression of being a solitary sailor, always with a light step, dressed like a sailor, like the first time he came to port to get drunk at Agustín's tavern. But that day, he went to the receptionist at the hotel and asked for the best room, with windows looking out on the water.” La Colombiana recalled Hemingway that night during the Second World War waiting a long time, and it wasn’t until the next day that the movie star he waited for came. She arrive very early, in a rented car from the airport at Camagüey. The woman Hemingway met at the hotel was describe by La Colombiana (and this was confirmed by some fishermen later) as "tall, blond, splendid, with a beautiful face and large breasts.” Nobody thought Hemingway would stay in the hotel room with his visitor for two whole days, asking for ice and rum, clean sheets and pillowcases, large meals in the mornings and afternoons followed by more rum and bottles of wine, always with the window open to the sea air. At night they went out on the terrace together, and left the hotel for the restaurant El Gato Negro (The Black Cat), the nicest place in the whole area. El Gato Negro was located in a twist of the river, not far from La Colombiana's hotel. It wasn't the restaurant's beautiful bar, nor its grand salon that Hemingway loved about it, according to Agustín. What Hemingway was most attracted to was the irresistible aromas that came from the kitchen. Hemingway always ordered oysters, shellfish, crabs, seafood pasta, turtle stew, and other local dishes. Agustín always said he met "that American' who continually seemed to be looking for a drink in 1930. He remembered the year because two years later the great hurricane hit the coast. The German submarines began appearing in the Romano Key starting in 1942. In one night alone they sank the tanker Texan and the cargo ship Olga. They sank these ships in a strait between the Lobo lighthouse and Confites Key, in a place where the channel was just twelve miles wide. The submariners began their hunt March 12, 1942. A few months later Hemingway found himself preparing his yacht, the Pilar, for one of the most surprising adventures undertaken by any writer in this century: to catch a German submarine when it surfaced, tie it to his yacht, board it, and seize it with grenades, small arms and machine gun fire, in order to learn any valuable information possible from the capture. As soon as he learned the Germans had sunk two ships in Romano Key, Hemingway embarked on his yacht, with his fearless companions, armed with anti-tank guns, hand grenades, explosives, machine guns and pistols, from the west coast of Cuba to those channels he had explored in the company of Jane Mason and Carlos Gutiérrez years before. Upon arriving at Romano Key, Hemingway knew all the details about what had happened: the ships had been sailing at night, and had been surprised by the torpedo strikes. The submarines were indeed in the zone; it wasn't just the imagination of old fishermen in the area. The turtle fishermen said that on some nights they had seen submarines close to the bluffs, and sometimes during the day submarines had even been seen above water. The locals had sometimes seen the sailors leave the submarines and go ashore looking for notable water: on the island of Turiguanó, Sabinal, and Paredón Grande. Early one morning the Germans had docked at Coco Key. The reports were almost paralyzing: how could it he that German submarines were sinking boats right off the coast of Camagüey? In spite of all these reports, the voyage of the Pilar to these dangerous waters was tranquil. Hemingway sailed full of nostalgia for the beautiful and wild coast from Frances Key to the hay of San Fernando de Nuevitas. Between May, 1942 and the end of 1943, Hemingway would make several trips, staying several months at a time renewing his acquaintance with his favorite spots. According to Agustín, Hemingway's fabulous submarine hunting expedition was uneventful. True, submarines were common in the area, but for Hemingway the whole enterprise was something of a lark. Hemingway patrolled the coastline, going in and out of the channels and backwaters from Guillermo Key to Práctico, and above all, the coastline of Romano Key, so full of legends and fantasies. Old Fals (who was then a young man) had been around Hemingway's yacht before. His opinion was that the North American was wasting his time and money running around those places without anything to show for it. But he thought Hemingway was only hunting and fishing. It took almost twenty years: the fatal gunshot, the changes that occurred in Cuban culture (for the majority of Cubans the Nobel Prize was something that only mattered to the journal Bohemia), the emergence of Cuban publishers that began the systematic publication of the best universal literature (including of course the novels of Hemingway), for the North American who was accustomed to go hunting and fishing in the Romano Key to be known also as one of the greatest contemporary authors. In my interviews with Agustín in his tavern, he vouched that during the Second World War, Hemingway was most impressed with the Germans of Palm City: gracious people, friendly, quick to learn and discreet, completely dedicated to their work, now bunted down, detained, and imprisoned in concentration camps. In Palm City only women and children remained. Hemingway became familiar with their condition in one or two trips he made at the end of 1942. He took the train in the morning, returning the following evening at night, after having seen some of those German women begging, pleading, supplicating in the foreign embassies. In August, 1942 the submarine war in the entrance to the Gulf broke out, in the great Stream of water that crosses between Florida and Havana. German submarines sank several ships en route to Cuba, and the foolhardy crew aboard the Pilar left the Romano Key for the western coast of Cuba. Between November, 1942 and April, 1943 Hemingway stayed in the Havana area. The Pilar could be found around the shores of Pinar del Río when not anchored in one of the little ports around the East of the Cuban capital. But on March 13, 1943 the German submarines again carried out an attack in the zone of Nuevitas. They intercepted a convoy of two merchant ships accompanied by some patrol boats for protection, the North American tanker Nikeline, and the Cuban cargo ship El Mambí as they left the bay. The convoy was ambushed a few miles from the lighthouse at Maternillos. Two days later, in the middle of the afternoon, one of the Kingfisher planes spotted a submarine sailing with its mast completely above water, not far from the zone of Cárdenas, just as if it were on a vacation trip. At that moment, a group of merchant vessels was coming out of the Saint Nicholas channel, escorted by three Cuban submarine chasers. Of the three submarine chasers, the one in the lead was the CS-11, which headed full throttle for where the Kingfisher had located the German submarine, where it began discharging its tanks of dynamite, until one of the depth charges hit the submarine. The German U-Boat 176, commanded by Reiner Diener, heavily damaged, ditched on a sandbar, where it can still be found at fewer than one hundred feet of depth a few miles off the Cuban coast, at 23'21 degrees Worth by 80'18 degrees North by 80´18 degrees East, at the reefs of Key Mégano Chico, far east of Romano Key. Ernest Hemingway did not witness any of these incidents. He was always someplace else on his boat, but without doubt he knew everything that happened although he made no mention of it anywhere in his wonderful chronicles. Hemingway returned to the Romano Key In the last days of May or the beginning of June, 1943, navigating with extreme care this time. He sailed all day, and at dusk went into one anchorage or another at the top of Cayo Key or Paredón Grande, or sheltered behind Maternillos lighthouse. All that was left was the bad memory of the night the last two cargo ships were sunk in the channel. It was in 1977, seven years after the novel’s publication, that Paramount finished filming Islands in the Stream. But the novel lost its authenticity when it was adapted to film. It became just a confused portrait of a painter, in a beach house on a Pacific island, with some Bengal lights on a dock, a woman, a plane flying over the coast, some children, a pillow fight between a child and his father (perhaps the film's most dramatic passage, not present in the author's work). The film suppresses everything that has anything to do with Havana, including the subtleties of characters who appear in the novel. It also castrates the splendor of the Floridita, with its adventurers and women of the period. But above all, missing in the film is the Romano Key. The third part of the novel, subtitled by Hemingway "At Sea," received similar treatment in the film. The pursuit of German submarines through the unexplored areas in Camagüey's north is absent from the movie. Thomas Hudson's antifascism (the antifascism of Hemingway) is turned into the vicissitudes of a smuggler of illegal Jewish immigrants, who flees from a Cuban PT boat through a vaguely tropical channel surrounded by mangroves. Fortunately, readers can go back to the novel. Islands in the Stream awaits a second chance to be adapted to the cinema, Hemingway's most autobiographical novel became an exasperating movie. Hemingway's representation of locations in Islands in the Stream is so faithful that one can precisely identify his preferred spots in the novel. Moreover, it's possible to navigate the Romano Key from Faro lighthouse in the east to the bluffs of Romano, arriving at Media Luna Key, by following Hemingway's description, as if the novel were a real nautical map. The novel guides us into a maze of channels, sand banks, mangroves, marshes and islets before presenting the combat with the German submarines. The fidelity of Hemingway's novel to the facts also makes it possible to identify individuals who sailed with Hemingway on the Pilar during the Second World War from the attributes of characters. In this big novel there is also one place in which an informed reader senses an unsettling question: Where did Hemingway get the episode of the crippled German submarine stranded at the Bank of the Bahamas, at the top of San Fernando de Nuevitas, whose crew Thomas Hudson pursues after the Germans carry out a massacre of turtle fishermen? The sinking of two German submarine is the only legacy of the Second World War directly touching the Americas. One is found in the reefs of Mégano Chico Key, just over the channel of Saint Nicholas, west of the Camagüeyan archipelago. This submarine's sinking is well known; it was reported widely in the press during the period. Knowing Hemingway's technique of using historical details in his novels, it is impossible these contemporary news stories were sources for the episode of the German submarine in Islands in the Stream: this incident was already too well known. It would have been pointless to include in his novel an event already known ail over the world, in which it would have been impossible for the crew to escape and reach the Bank of the Bahamas as they do in the novel. The second sinking of German submarine in America during the Second World War occurred off the coast of Brazil. Is it possible that Hemingway merely invented the submarine in the novel? But in his novel, Hemingway leaves us a key to the truth when, not far from the beach where the Germans seize the boats of the turtle fishermen, Thomas Hudson tell us: “Where do you suppose they lost their own boat, Tom?' Ara asked. “They got these boats here and they did away with these people a week ago, say. So they must be the one that Camagüey claimed. But they got somewhere close to here before they lost her. They didn't sail any rubber boats into that wind.” (341) Hemingway confirms the existence of a third submarine, sunken or damaged by the naval base at Camagüey: "the one that Camagüey claimed." And in fact, despite the passing of years, among the rumor, myths and realities that get mixed up together around the port of El Guincho, to this day the account of a third submarine that got into a battle three miles off the Faro Maternillos (lighthouse) persists. It was a battle between a submarine and a merchant vessel, the cargo ship Dominous. The turtle fishermen and sailors in the region swear that the submarine went down to a depth of around five hundred meters. But the whole incident was covered up officially, perhaps to avoid a panic over the knowledge that German U-Boats were so close to the Cuban coast. Whatever the reason for the official silence, news of this incident did not circulate in the papers. Naval officials never confirmed it, and it become a war rumor. But sailor and fishermen witnessed the docking of the Dominous at El Guincho after the incident, and report that there was evidence of machine gun strafing on the ship. They were uneasy days, but also times of the celebration of an incident that quickly passed into collective memory. The parties held to commemorate the sinking of the U-Boat were planned at the house of my parents, the Cruzes. The news spread like dust in the wind as soon as the crew of the vessel disembarked from the dock at Carreras. The first victory toasts were offered at Agustin's tavern. Later, the captain, chief pilot, superintendent, and engineer made their way over to the hotel of La Colombiana, where bottles of wine, champagne, and the best Spanish cognac were broken out. From there, they were carried on the shoulders of the crowd to the hotel Filgueras, and later to other hotels, ending tip at the Cruz house, while the sailors told stories about the battle with the submarine, how its turret had become visible above the waterline, and how it had opened fire with its fifty caliber machine gun. The captain of the ship was well known to locals: it used to dock almost every month in the port of Tarafa, and its captain was known to be expert in the currents and tides, which it what made him decide to enter the port. The rest of the convoy was anchored in deep water, and the captain, knowing his ship would arrive at Práctico Bridge at midnight, let his boat drift with the current, confident he could enter the port this way without incident. It was fairly well known that German submarines were in the area, so that, as soon as the ship reached the top of the Maternillos lighthouse, the captain ordered that the engines he switched off to avoid detection by sonar. The Germans started tailing the ship, but when everything became silent, it introduced a wrinkle in the chase they pursued. This, together with a new circumstance, complicated everything: neither the submarine nor the merchant ship were expecting that on this night there would be a heavy fog, that crossed up the plans of both of them. Although the Dominous sighted the lighthouse at Maternillos, the submarine had no recourse but to follow it. The Germans were watching the whole time; they had detailed intelligence that the merchant vessel was appearing in the mouth of the channel just before dawn, but with the fog and the prevailing current, together with the difficulty of pinning down the exact location of the silent ship, in a burst of impatience they decided to surface. The U-Boat surfaced, in the middle of a thick fog, only to find themselves directly before the prow of the cargo ship. At. this point, everything happened rapidly. Realizing they would have to resubmerge quickly, the crew of the submarine opened fire on the ship with machine guns. The artillery commander aboard the ship returned fire with three cannon shots as the submarine dipped below the surface once more. This is the true story, not widely known, but fixed in the memories, myths and legends of the area around the Maternillos lighthouse. An excellent story for the writer Hemingway. Similarly, guided by the novelist's hand, the crew abandon the submarine in the novel and make for a sandy key, where they assassinate some turtle fishermen in order to steal their boats, causing Thomas Hudson to follow them in the direction of Romano, where he is certain they are heading. On the other side of a channel just off the Bank of the Bahamas, the Pilar once took shelter from a violent wind, anchoring in a laguna not far from a white sandy beach with cocoanut palms. And in the novel Thomas Hudson, Henry Wood, Guillermito, Juan, Jorge, Gil and Ara, Antonion and Peters, see the dark, indecipherable coast of Romano as they continue sailing through tortuous stretches in search of the German submarine crew. The first key off the Cuban coast Thomas Hudson reaches on his boat is Confites Key. Earlier, in the depth of the channel, he had had the fantastic vision of land at dawn; and what he saw in Romano in the flash of an instant was "a low square smudge as though a man's thumb had daubed weak ink against the lightening sky" (348). Thomas Hudson's house and the crew of his boat in Confites Key permit us to learn something about the small military base that existed on the key during the World War. Later, they leave Confites realizing that the Germans had passed through tree days earlier. In Confites Key they obtain news that the turtle hunters boats are sealing for Cruz Key, and Hudson orders the pursuit into the reefs. From this point on in the novel, Hemingway leads us through the whole key, among sandy coves, searching cautiously toward the west, leaving behind Cruz and Mégano Key, feeling the closeness of Coco Key and turtle hunters of Anton Key, while sailing in the intense, blue water along the long, broken line of Romano, with its own numerous keys, lagunas encircled by coral, in that coast of great sand banks and hurracanes. Thomas Hudson perceives that the German submarine crew is on the leeward side of Puerto Coco or around Guillermo Key, and they set to sea again, sailing around this dirty, rocky coast with its reefs and sandbanks, just as in actuality Ernest Hemingway had done with Jane Mason and Carlos Gutiérrez, going ashore to look for old souvenirs of bucaneers and pirates, and scaring up flamingos as they searched for treasure. In the novel one feels the intense greenery of Guillermo Key, the claustrophobic stretches of channel seeking the great bay of Buenavista. One can still sail the head of Guillermo Key and revisit Media Luna Key with its shipwreck on its western side. It is difficult to be exact now about whether during the Second Word War the channel of Baliza Vieja was capable of accommodating a boat like the Pilar, as it does Thomas Hudson's boat in the novel, but there is no doubt Hemingway knew these waters intimately. The descriptions Hemingway gives us in the pursuit of the German submarine crew in the Islands in the Stream leads us inevitably to the channel of Baliza Vieja: tortuous narrow, covered in mangroves, with little or no visibility beyond fifty meters ahead. The ideal place for an ambush. Ernest Hemingway knew this channel perfectly. He must have been down it one time or another in the Pilar, and certainly would have done so in a smaller, auxiliary Boat every time he visited Punta Alegre or the island of Turiguanó, places Hemingway explored often. It would not be the first time the writer changed the setting of an incident to a specific geographic location according to a story's needs. After the mortal wounding of Hemingway's painter, Thomas Hudson, in the channel of Baliza Vieja, he and his crew at last emerge in the large bay of Buenavista, leaving behind the thicket of key add the famous channel. Far off, the mountains can be seen behind the island of Turiguanó, and the crew has two destinations they can set course for: Punta Alegre, or continuing their search for Frances Key where the base is located. And so it is that after the passage of so many years, we came back with the story of German submarines and the fragrance of wildflowers each time we visited the channels of Guillermo Key with Old Antonio. Later we return to port, meeting the almost mythical fishermen who keep their boats tied up at the pier of El Guincho. We returned with a mountain of stories, and Agustín received us in his tavern in the wee hours of the morning, when schools of sardines make their way toward Sabinal Key pursued by sharks baring their teeth. La Habana, 2002 |
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