February 08, 2007	Thursday	Muharram 19, 1428

HAVANA, Feb 7: Talk in Ernest Hemingway’s former Havana watering hole often turns to the old man and the daiquiri and, at times, to the 45-year-old embargo that officially prevents US fans from tippling to his memory in the Cuba he loved.

“We’re not even supposed to be here,” says New Yorker Neil Kok, 47, raising his glass to a life-size bronze likeness of “Papa” Hemingway in the Floridita bar that was the literary giant’s second home during his years in Cuba.

Like many Americans visiting Cuba in defiance of the US sanctions, Kok flew in through Mexico, where he bought a loose-leaf Cuban visa he planned to tear up before returning to the United States.

“I feel sadness about US politics toward Cuba and the embargo,” says Kok, who calls Hemingway his favourite author and “an all-time American great”.

Proclaimed by then president John F. Kennedy on Feb 3, 1961, and tightened on several occasions since, the embargo’s stated aim is to bring democracy to the communist-run island.

Under the terms of the embargo, US nationals may not spend any money in Cuba, which effectively bars them from travelling to the Caribbean island located just 150 kilometres from the south-eastern tip of the US.“It seems absurd,” says Kok, pointing out that Hemingway loved Cuba, where he lived on and off for two decades before his 1961 suicide.

At the hole-in-the-wall Bodeguita del Medio bar just down the road from the Floridita, a photograph shows the late US novelist shaking hands with the now ailing President Fidel Castro.

The beverage of choice at the Bodeguita, another Hemingway favourite, is the mojito, a Cuban concoction of rum, sugar, soda water, mint and ice.

A handwritten entry on a yellowed page of the bar’s guest book bears witness to Hemingway’s famed drinking habits: “My mojito in the Bodeguita, my daiquiri in the Floridita.” The busy barmen at the two establishments say they see plenty of American tourists who defy the embargo to spend time in Cuba.

The Hemingway image helps Cuba attract tourists and their desperately needed cash.

But, banned from receiving US funds, Cuba is also having to dish out $1.2 million to renovate Finca Vigia, the house just outside Havana that Hemingway bought in 1939.

It is there that he wrote some of his best-known novels, including “The Old Man and the Sea,” a story set in Cuba that won him the 1954 Nobel prize for literature.

Set amid lush vegetation, the colonial house still contains Hemingway’s belongings and many of his books, rifles and fishing rods, and the garden showcases his old fishing boat, the Pilar.

Cuban experts recently finished renovating a facade of Finca Vigia, the first stage in their ambitious project to restore the house that for decades suffered the damages of time, termites and tempests.

A few years ago, Finca Vigia, which is now a museum, was in such a state that the prestigious US National Trust of Historic Preservation included it in its 2005 list of the 11 most endangered sites.

The trust was given an exemption from the embargo that allowed it to send experts to provide advice for the restoration.

But, however devoted to Hemingway’s memory it may be, the trust, or any other American for that matter, cannot contribute any money to the project.

“This is just one of many absurd facets of the embargo,” says Finca Vigia museum director Ada Rosa Alfonso.—AFP