Hemingway
Hemingway's Home in Cuba, the Finca Vigía
In the spring of 1939, Ernest Hemingway returned to Havana, Cuba where Martha Gellhorn would later join him. Martha rented the Finca Vigía, a 10-acre property outside the city where they could live together, which Hemingway would eventually buy and would become his home for the next two decades.
TRANSCRIPT
(birds chirping)
- [Woman] I woke to look out my window at a Ceiba tree,
so beautiful that you can't believe it.
And hear the palms rattling in the morning wind,
and the sun streaking over the tiled floors
and the house itself wide and bare,
and clean and empty.
Lying quiet all around me
and I am delighted.
- [Narrator] Hemingway was delighted too
and would eventually buy the place outright.
The Finca would be his home for the next two decades.
(slow drum beats)
- (speaking in foreign language)
- [Narrator] People ask you why you live in Cuba
and you say, it is because you like it.
It is too complicated to explain about the early morning
in the Hills above Havana, where every morning is cool
and fresh on the hottest day in summer.
You could tell them that you live in Cuba
because you only have to put shoes on
when you come into town and that you work as well
there in those cool early mornings
as you ever have worked anywhere in the world
but those are professional secrets.