Cuba makes Hemingway trove available to US

HAVANA - Agence France-Presse

This photo released Feb 11 by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, shows a photograph from Ernest Hemingway?s passport, one of many new items from Hemingway's former estate in Cuba being made available at the museum. AP photo

Cuba has released to U.S. researchers copies of more than 2,000 documents related to Ernest Hemingway, media reported Feb. 18 in Havana, the American literary giant's home during the 1940s and 1950s.

"More than 2,000 documents held at the Finca Vigia Museum in Havana are now available for the first time for researchers in the United States after having been digitized and sent to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum," the Cuba Contemporanea magazine wrote on its website.

Now a museum, Finca Vigia, which means "lookout house" is located in the town of San Francisco de Paula just outside Havana. It was Hemingway's home during much of his more than two-decade-long residence in Cuba.

Among the treasures now accessible to U.S. scholars at the Kennedy Library in Boston is the 1954 telegram from the Nobel Prize Committee in Sweden informing Hemingway that he had just been awarded its prestigious literature prize.

A statement from the Kennedy Library in Boston, Massachusetts said that the trove of documents, which had never seen outside of Cuba, includes letters, passports, telegrams, household accounts, bar bills and recipes.

"We are pleased to make available to researchers copies of these materials that provide a unique glimpse into the everyday life of Ernest Hemingway," said Tom Putnam, Director of the Kennedy Library.

"For a literary figure who is often portrayed as larger than life, this trove of personal ephemera serves to humanize the man and to understand the writer." 

Officials said it is the second large document release from the Finca Vigia. A first huge tranche of 3,000 digitized images was donated to the Kennedy Library in 2008.

Hemingway, who took his own life in 1961 at the age of 61 after returning to the United States, wrote some of his most famous works in Cuba, including "For Whom the Bell Tolls," and "The Old Man and the Sea."  

He was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his mastery of the art of narrative... and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style."