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 John and Patrick Hemingway arrived in Cojimar, on the eastern
outskirts of Havana, to begin a weeklong visit to try to enlist
Cuban marine scientists to join an effort to conserve billfish in
the Straits of Florida.
Billfish include species of marlin, sailfish and spearfish that
Hemingway was instrumental in cataloging 80 years ago, when he first
took his fishing boat Pilar from Key West to Cuba.
"This we feel very strongly about because it ties in with my
grandfather and his love for fishing and his love for Cuba," said
John Hemingway. "We think it's vitally important that both countries
work on this together. Both of them use this water."
More than 100 townspeople, including cheering schoolchildren,
greeted the Hemingways' yacht as it sailed into Cojimar from the
Hemingway Marina on Havana's western edge.
They laid flowers at a bust of "Papa," who spent years in Cuba,
including long stretches in Cojimar, the unnamed hometown of the
protagonist in "The Old Man and the Sea." The work won Hemingway the
Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1953 and he was awarded the Nobel
Prize in Literature a year later.
The delegation is commemorating the 60th anniversary of Hemingway's
Nobel and the 80th anniversary of the Pilar's journey to Cuba.
Billfish have yet to recover from the reckless overfishing of the
1970s and remain under assault from the commercial fishing industry,
said David Die, a scientist with the International Commission for
the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas.
Cuba no longer employs a large deepwater fleet, but shallow water
fishermen still hook billfish on their long lines, said Die, who is
part of the delegation.
He and other fishery experts will meet Cuban counterparts from
academia and government to encourage Cuba to join the international
commission. Joining would provide Cuba better access to the latest
science and conservation techniques.
The Hemingway name provides a valuable boost, Die said.
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"You just have to see behind me how many people have shown up," Die
said as the town still buzzed from the ceremony. "If I just arrived
with my biologist colleagues, nobody would be here."
The United States and Cuba have been rivals since Fidel Castro took
power in a 1959 revolution and Washington imposed a comprehensive
trade embargo on Cuba in 1961, the same year Hemingway died.
Although bilateral relations on immigration and drug interdiction
have become more pragmatic, there are no formal
government-to-government talks on the environment.
"We're hoping with this delegation we can begin to share more
information between Cuban scientists and American scientists, just
as we did before the embargo," said Robert Peck, a senior fellow for
the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. "We need to get the
two governments talking together. Conservation is an issue that
knows no political bounds."
(Reporting by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Kieran Murray and Gunna
Dickson)
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