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Sandra Spanier, a Hemingway researcher and English professor at Penn State, has reviewed the latest release of documents and said they will help biographers and historians create a fuller portrait of Hemingway. "While there's no one single bombshell document, no long-lost novel to be discovered here, these new details add texture and nuance to our understanding of the man," she said. "Hemingway was an eyewitness to 20th century history. His work both reflected his times and, in a way, shaped his times." Documents found in Cuba reveal more about Hemingway's role in World War II. He had details of daily troop movements, labeled secret, from his days as a war correspondent during the Battle of the Bulge. Also, while in Cuba in 1942 and 1943, he was authorized by the U.S. embassy in Havana to patrol the north coast of Cuba in his fishing boat, in search of German submarines. Phillips said scholars had been trying for years to see what was left behind in Cuba, where Hemingway lived from 1939 to 1960. He lived longer in Cuba than in Key West, Fla., or a home he kept in Idaho. Phillips spent time negotiating on both the Cuban and American sides to gain access to the collection. "Because of the political situation between the two countries, the Cubans held on very fast to what they had there," she said. "I think this is an extraordinary, one-of-a-kind collaboration between the two countries." The Kennedy Library holds a large Hemingway collection of more than 100,000 pages of writings and 10,000 photographs because Jacqueline Kennedy helped arrange a place for the items. Hemingway's wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway, returned to Cuba in 1961, after the writer's death, hoping to retrieve his belongings. Because of Fidel Castro's rise to power, President John F. Kennedy helped arrange for her visit to take Hemingway's possessions back to the United States. Mary Hemingway took a boatload of materials back to the U.S., burned some records deemed sensitive and left thousands of other volumes and documents at the home near Havana. McGovern, an advocate of normalizing relations between the U.S. and Cuba, said the collaboration over a shared interest in Hemingway could help ease tensions between the two countries. "Art, literature and culture can bring people together," McGovern said. "This has gone on for over a decade. This is a success story. This shows we can actually engage in successful collaborations with the Cubans." ___ Online: Finca Vigia Foundation: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum: http://www.jfklibrary.org/
http://fincafoundation.org/
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