Save Finca Vigia! - Part Two

Two good articles about the political firestorm surrounding the former Hemingway home in Cuba can be found at the web sites of PRI and the New York Times. The Times article gives some more detail about how the Bush administration put the kibosh on getting American aid down to Cuba to help with the restoration. The PRI article provides a little more color, with bits of interviews of some of the principals involved in the work.

I wonder what student gets through high school without having read The Old Man And The Sea, which students of literature get through college without experiencing The Sun Also Rises. Those two novels, along with For Whom The Bell Tolls, are the most famous of Hemingway's books. There are also a number of very fine non-fiction books to go along with the novels: read about big game hunting in Green Hills Of Africa, and bullfighting in The Dangerous Summer and Death In The Afternoon. A Moveable Feat, which chronicles the time Hemingway spent in Paris, is one of the finest memoirs you are likely ever to read.

Obviously, I am fairly biased in my appraisal of Hemingway's work. He was a favorite of my mom's, so I heard the name from time to time as I grew up. I read A Farewell To Arms in a literature class in high school, one of only two books in the whole class that I actually enjoyed at the time (the other was The Grapes Of Wrath). It was probably The Sun Also Rises that was the first Hemingway book that really got its hooks into me - the classic tale of young people meandering through life, blissfully unaware of their own mortality, going through the motions because that's what they think they're supposed to be doing. The entire literary oeuvre of Bret Easton Ellis (another of my favorite writers) is based on variations of that theme. I even sort of dug The Garden Of Eden, even though it has sort of an impenetrable feel to it - it was one of a number of books Hemingway had not finished at the time of his death, so the end for it that Hemingway might have had in mind will never be known (the ending to it that was published was slapdashed together by the folks who edited what there was to edit of the manuscript after Hemingway's death).

But apart from my own personal bias, there is the issue of saving an historic landmark, one that holds significance for two countries, not just the one where it exists. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has placed Finca Vigia on its list of the most endangered U.S. landmarks - and it is the only one that exists outside the United States. If there were money in it for America - like there is in our robust trade with China, which is both Communist and atheist - you can bet that Bush would be on this one; but the only money in is it is for Cuba, so the Bushies fall back on outmoded law and the politics of fear, at the expense of art and culture. As usual.