Ernest Hemingway

A former home of US author Ernest Hemingway, located on the island of Cuba, was opened to the public on Saturday after three years of intense restoration work. The famed writer lived at the "Finca Vigía", Spanish for "Lookout Farm", on the outskirts of Havana from 1939 to 1960. It was at here that Hemingway wrote much of his popular books "The Old Man and the Sea" and "For Whom the Bell Tolls". In recent years, the house, which was built in 1886, was in danger of collapse which prompted scholars from both Cuba and the US to embark on a massive restoration project. Along with the conservation of the home came the preservation of many documents, letters and manuscripts left behind by the author when he departed Cuba in 1960. A rejected epilogue for Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls," a 1941 letter from Ingrid Bergman and more than 20 letters from the 19-year-old Italian contessa he was in love with are among thousands of the author's documents Cuba has made available to outside scholars to help preserve them. American and Cuban experts were also collaborating on the restoration and preservation of two-thousand letters, three-thousand personal photographs and some draft fragments of novels and stories that were kept in the humid basement of the house. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the joint effort by the New York-based Social Science Research Council and the Cuban National Council of Patrimony will produce microfilm copies of the material, restore some documents damaged by the Caribbean climate, and help conserve the house, including a 9,000-volume library and Hemingway's fishing boat, El Pilar. The microfilm copies will be stored at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, but originals will stay at the Hemingway Museum at Finca Vigia, long a source of pride for Cuba. Hemingway's fourth and last wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway, donated the estate to the Cuban government in 1961, just after the author committed suicide in his Ketchum, Idaho, home. Cuban curators preserved the home exactly how the Hemingways left it. "It's a legacy for the world; for present and future generations," says Hemingway Museum Director Ada Rosa Alfonso. Elisa Serrano, one of the restorers says: " I believe this restoration project, where many good specialists have participated, has rescued the image of the home as it was when he left." Visitors are prohibited from entering the house, a decision US scholars and researchers say has protected the collection from deterioration and pilfering. However looking through the windows, visitors can see the writer's collection of moccasins lined against a wall, reading material, and bottles of liquor on the table next to Hemingway's favourite reading chair. On a bathroom wall, Hemingway routinely recorded his weight, blood pressure and pulse. The estate includes the graves of four of Hemingway's dogs. Handwritten and typewritten drafts offer a glimpse into the writing process of an author known to have rewritten the ending of "A Farewell to Arms" 39 times. "Islands in the Stream" and "A Moveable Feast" were among material Mary Welsh Hemingway retrieved during a hurried trip to Havana in 1961. The two works were published posthumously. Hemingway's life in Cuba inspired the Nobel-prize winning "The Old Man and the Sea."