A Week in Cuba - We Visit the Towns of Cojimar and Alamar

After we finished the tour of the Hemingway home/museum, we set out for the village of Cojimar, just a short distance East of Old Havana.  Cojimar was the home port for Hemingway's boat, the Pilar, and was also the inspiration for his prize winning book, The Old Man and the Sea.

 We climbed back into Billy's '49 Chevrolet DeLuxe for the ten-mile ride into Cojimar.

  

 

Cojimar is a small town - with a tiny harbor.  It offered Hemingway a nearby getaway for fishing expeditions in the afternoons after spending his mornings standing at the typewriter.

As we approached the waterfront, the road along the bay descended a steep hill and led to a Hemingway monument that was erected by the local citizens in 1962, a year after his death.  

 

 

  

The monument stands opposite a small old Spanish Fort (Torreón de Cojímar) which housed about 50 soldiers and had 10 cannons when the British arrived with 22 ships and landed a 2,000 man invasion force on the nearby beach in 1762.

Hemingway was much loved in this community.  He was regarded as a true Cuban and the brass used to cast this bust was reportedly contributed by the local fishermen in the form of propellers and fittings collected from their boats.

 

Besides being home to the Pilar, the town was also home to Gregorio Fuentes, Hemingway's boatman.  The two met shortly after Hemingway took up residence in Cuba and they quickly became friends after discovering their common interest in fishing.  Fuentes died in 2002 at the age of 104.  His death was widely reported since he had built a reputation as the model for the fisherman in The Old Man and The Sea.   Hemingway had left the Pilar to Fuentes upon his death.  Its transfer to the Government of Cuba for the museum,  like the transfer of the Finca, seems to lack documentation or journalistic and historical curiosity.

If a visitor has the time, a visit to the Cojimar restaurant, La Tarazza, might be in order.  Hemingway used to stop in after fishing and engage with the locals.  He favored a corner table that looked out on the water.  He met Anselmo Hernández here, (photo taken at the Terazzo at this link) who some say is the real model for The Old Man.  The reality, of course, is that Hemingway's characters, as with other authors, are composites.

Following our visit in Cojimar, we took a short trip to the other side of the narrow bay and drove through Alamar.  

  

 

We didn't recognize the name of this town but later discovered that it know as the "home of Cuban rap."  Alamar is a Hip-Hop hot spot known especially for its frequent peñas, or multiple performer venues, according to Wikipedia. 

A planned community, constructed under two vastly different economic systems, Alamar is a wonder to behold.  Occupying a space comparable to Cojimar across the bay, Alamar is home to 90,000 residents versus 20,000 in Cojimar.  There is some fascinating material in three   different   websites describing the town.  I'll quote a few lines:

...Built in the 1970s, Alamar was part of the embodiment of the Revolution itself: a large-scale housing complex for Castro’s workers. Several decades later, this revolutionary dream has shown not to be resistant against the ravages of time: Alamar’s apartment blocks are in decay, the neighborhood is isolated from Havana’s city center itself and suffers from a lack of identity and a monotonous cityscape.

...Alamar is known for its poor building design and the lack of functional urbanistic distribution and civic centers that would encourage the integration of the complex’s youth—the children and grandchildren of the workers who decades ago built their own apartments.

...Summing up its history, another Alamar resident, one of Cuba’s finest poets, Juan Carlos Flores, called this singular place “the last province of the USSR.”

That last line was fascinating to us for the following reason.  When we visited the Minneapolis sister city of Novosibirsk in Russia, we were struck by the bleak appearance of most high-rise apartment buildings.  Our local Russian friend mentioned that they were known as Khrushchevs, owing to the period in which they were built.  The Russians must have brought their blueprints to Alamar because they look so similar to the buildings in Novosibirsk.

  

 

 

 

After that brief tour of Alamar, we returned to Old Havana, just three miles away along the coastline. navigating the narrow streets to our B&B.

  

 

And those two Mangoes that the gardener had handed to Abel back at the Finca?  He passed them on to us and we had them for a tasty snack.

 

  

 

Now, if you have read both this post and the previous and now have some familiarity with the haunts of Ernest Hemingway during his twenty-year life in Cuba, it might be time to watch this five-minute video that comes from Chicago's Public Television station, WTTW.  It is well put together showing scenes from Cojimar as well as Finca Vegia.