Cojímar
Updated: 32 minutes ago
Heming-way off
let writing stay writing
It’s hard to follow someone like Hemingway into their world. He lived it and wrote it with so much ethos. Cojímar is said to have inspired the Old Man and the Sea, and the writer’s heavy bronze head rests on a pillar by the oceanfront, but to interpret the cluster of juxtaposing structures and buildings as a fishing village, one needed an avalanche of imagination or a time machine.
An old fort sat hunched over by the sea, a few houses looked like they weren’t sure whether anyone still lived in them or not, and the outskirts felt soviet-suburban with their post-war block-architecture and shattered concrete. A hurricane or two had passed through. I don't know what I'd expected—just that that wasn't it. Probably I'd hoped for Hemingway himself to be there and take me out fishing. Ah well, it is best to let writing be writing, and reality reality.
After a quick dip that was more bath than swim, the four of us stretched out on a little meadow. I'd met Armando and Sinat in Havana the day before, but traveling my synapses to trace and place that other girl is a dead end. If I believe my recollection, she had no name, no face, no affiliation, and popped into existence out of thin ocean air.
Before long, Armando hopped back on his feet, sized up the nearest palm tree, and climbed it with his bare hands and feet—nimble as a monkey, and casual as though he was getting coconuts from the corner store. They are always best with a bit of sweat and personal effort.
At some point we went back to Havana, and that was that. Cojímar was cute and all, but it was neither love on first sight, nor on last sight, and so I never turned back. I found other places and countries that I loved as much as Hemingway loved Cojímar and Cuba, though, and came to share his love for Paris.
Armando reached out to me after I’d left Cuba to get started with our collaboration on his finca ecológica. He’d dreamt that up out of thin air when our acquaintance was less than a day old, and while I’d tried to reign him in a little, his expectations were as tall as the palm trees he climbed. And I would have loved to help him as much as one who can't help much can, but all I got back from the various replies I tried to send were a bunch of MAILER-DAEMONS. Classic Cuba.
