Hemingway's Havana

In Cuba, Ernest Hemingway, author of The Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Rises, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, found a sense of serenity and enrichment he couldn’t find anywhere else. Here through more than a hundred color photographs and accompanying text, is a look at the Cuba he loved.

Photographer Robert Wheeler takes us through the streets and near the water’s edge of Havana, and closer to the relationship Hemingway shared with the Cuban people, their landscape, their politics, and their culture.

Papa Hemingway lived in Cuba for more than two decades, longer than anywhere else. He bought a home—naming it the Finca Vigia—with his third wife, Martha Gellhorn and wrote his masterpiece The Old Man and the Sea there.

Wheeler has followed Hemingway’s path across continents—from La Closerie des Lilas Café in Paris to Sloppy Joe’s Bar in Key West to El Floridita in Havana—seeking to capture through photography and the written word the essence of one of the greatest writers in the English language. In Hemingway’s Havana, he reveals the beauty and the allure of Cuba, an island nation whose deep connection with the sea came to fascinate and inspire the writer.

The book includes a foreword by América Fuentes who is the granddaughter of the late Gregorio Fuentes, the captain of Hemingway’s boat Pilar and his loyal and close friend.

Robert Wheeler is a teacher, writer, photographer, husband, and father. He has been a Hemingway enthusiast ever since reading his first Hemingway novel in 1986. For the past ten years, he has been a professor at Southern New Hampshire University where he teaches courses in writing and on Hemingway. He lives by the sea in New Castle, New Hampshire with his wife, Meme, and his daughters, Emma and Helen.