Tourists continue to flock to Cuba

HAVANA — Many tourists in Havana pay tribute to Ernest Hemingway by drinking a frozen daiquiri alongside the life-size bronze statue of the late author at El Floridita restaurant, his one-time watering hole.

But few of them used to drink with the man himself at the restaurant’s bar, as did Lee Minor, a 90-year-old resident of Fort Myers, Fla.

“We had drinks together at the bar,” said Mr. Minor, who spent much of the 1940s and 1950s traveling to Cuba as president of an American electrical company operating here. “He enjoyed friends, enjoyed knowing people.”

Decades later, Mr. Minor returned to the island with his 60-year-old son for a tour of “Hemingway’s Cuba” with a group of American Hemingway fans.

The travelers are among just a sprinkling of American groups still coming to Cuba after tough new U.S. restrictions against travel to the island took effect on June 30.

Organizers of the group said the travelers came to Cuba, via Mexico, on a humanitarian license. They brought bags of clothing, medicine and school supplies to give to Cubans they meet on their weeklong trip, which ends Sunday.

Other groups come in direct defiance of the U.S. measures. Brigada Venceremos, a group of American activists, arrived via Canada earlier this week in the eastern city of Santiago, telling reporters that they came in solidarity with Cubans and in protest of U.S. policy against the communist-run island.

The new U.S. rules are meant to squeeze the island’s economy and push out President Fidel Castro by cutting the amount of cash coming from the United States and limiting visits to Cuba by cultural and academic groups, as well as by Cuban Americans.

On Tuesday, the Hemingway group visited the rambling hacienda of Finca Vigia just east of Havana, where the American icon lived from 1939 to 1960, a year before he committed suicide in Ketchum, Idaho.

They toured the inside of the writer’s home, preserved much as he left it and filled with books by him and other authors such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky and J.D. Salinger. Spanish bullfight posters and stuffed animal heads cover the walls, and a leopard skin stretches across a wide couch in front of Mr. Hemingway’s massive mahogany desk.

Dandruff rinse still sits next to the sink in the bathroom, where Mr. Hemingway penciled in his weight — which dropped from about 240 pounds to 190 over five years — on the wall next to the scale.

The group stopped to listen to a group of Cuban men in their 70s recount tales of playing baseball as children at Mr. Hemingway’s hacienda.

The neighborhood boys played alongside Mr. Hemingway’s children and eventually were given uniforms by the author, who served as the team’s pitcher.

“We were just poor kids, but he never discriminated against us,” said 74-year-old Oscar Blas Fernandez, who was 10 when he first met Mr. Hemingway. “We never asked for anything, he just gave to us spontaneously. He treated us like his own children.”

The group also met Mr. Hemingway’s former cook, Alberto “Fico” Ramos and planned to visit the seaside fishing village of Cojimar, where Mr. Hemingway docked the Pilar, his 40-foot fishing boat.