The Sun Also Rises Over Cuba

That was fun. The whole The Sun Also Rises Over Cuba thing. See, a young friend of mine from NYC was part of a boy’s trip to Cuba with me and four other guys. He went to El Floridita and drank a daiquiri next to the bronze Hemingway statue; he learned to play the 3-stringed tres guitar at La Terraza, the elegant little café in Cojímar where Papa hung with the fishermen, listening to the stories that eventually became The Old Man and the Sea; and he took a 50s-era Ford Fairlane up to Finca La Vigía where he saw the epic kudu that the author wrote about in Green Hills of Africa. In short, he was immersed in the whole Hemingway mystique. So much so that on our boat in the Jardines de La Reina, he read The Sun Also Rises. Which he didn’t like.

“I just don’t get what he’s trying to do here,” he told me when we discussed it one afternoon while fly-fishing for bonefish. “It just seems antiquated. And I don’t understand why he writes the way he does.”

I explained to him about Hem’s clean, crisp writing, free of adjectives and adverbs, and how space was important to him and why the things he left out of a story were often more important than what he put into a story. But that just confused him even more. So I made a deal with him. I told him that I would take some of the experiences we were having in Havana and on our fishing boat, Avalon I, and write them the way Hemingway would have. Perhaps if he could see how I used the language in a contemporary setting, it would make more sense to him, I thought.

That’s what I’ve been doing for the last two weeks. And truth is, I could have done it for another two or three weeks; it was great fun for me. But enough is enough. It’s time to get on with the real telling of what happened to us in Cuba, which I will begin on Monday.

So, did my young friend appreciate Hemingway’s masterpiece more after my little literary attempt? Isn’t it pretty to think so.