15

THE HURTS, THE AIR CRASHES, AND CASTRO

Hemingway’s other great art form was personal injury.

Accident-prone and hypochondriacal, afflicted by a Job’s list of illnesses and hurts, he and Mary, now flush with money from his books, flew to Africa, site of his previous safaris, for a look at the scenic delights and to recapture his happier moments (as recorded in his rambling, opinionated Green Hills of Africa, about a previous big game trip he made with his then-wife Pauline.)

Aboard a small airplane over East Africa, the setting of for some of Hemingway’s best work, like “Kilimanjaro” and “Macomber,” the pilot crash-landed to avoid a flock of birds. Mary broke some ribs. The flaming crash of a second, rescue plane almost killed them both. Mary made it out of the burning wreckage. Hemingway, trapped inside the plane, used his head as a battering ram to escape through a jammed door. More concussions. Miraculously alive, he was pretty sick afterwards. The biographer Jeffrey Meyers lists injuries that would have killed a normal man: skull fracture; cracked spine; dislocated arm and shoulder; ruptured liver, kidney, and spleen; paralyzed sphincter muscle obstructing sex and urination; crushed vertebrae; and burns to arms, face, and head; and damaged hearing and vision. He was too damaged to go to the Swedish ceremony awarding him the Nobel Prize for Literature.

After the double plane crashes in Africa in 1954 the newspapers began running his obituaries. He read them with pleasure from the comfort of his farm in Cuba. A lifelong avid newspaper reader, he couldn’t entirely ignore what was happening elsewhere. So he was aware of the Korean War and the Hollywood blacklist (hurting so many of the friends who gave him money for Loyalist Spain). And, of course, he’d see how Cuban affairs were reported in the world press.

Soaking up the latest gossip in his favorite Havana bar, the Floridita, he caught on to rumors circulating about the political volcano simmering in the Sierra Maestra Mountains at the other end of the Cuban island. A youth rebellion against the U.S.-backed dictator Batista, led by two former university students, the semi-mythical Fidel Castro (law) and Che Guevara (medicine), originally with only 19 men, was marked by ambushes, bombings, sniping, assassinations, and open attacks on military outposts that were hard to conceal from the public. Batista’s 30,000-man army began leaking defectors to the rebels, and the peasants believed what Castro promised about land reform. From only a few hippie-looking bandidos, Castro now had a popular following.

Fidel and his “barbudos” (bearded ones) were front-page news in the New York Times, which gave them sympathetic coverage. But President Eisenhower and the CIA grew nervous when Castro and his guerrillas marched victoriously into Havana in 1959 and proceeded to nationalize, take over, and run U.S. businesses. The Mafia, which controlled Cuba’s notorious sex-and-gambling enterprises, was kicked off the island (see The Godfather, Part 2). Fidel’s surprise revolution sent alarm bells ringing all through the White House, the Pentagon, and spook headquarters. For decades Cuba had been an American fiefdom. But Castro’s propaganda preaching land reform and women’s rights—some guerrillas were armed females—was decidedly, well, un-American. Washington’s official thinking went, Castro must be a communist (which he may have been, secretly), so let’s get rid of him and put our own people back in the Presidential Palace.

Where was Hemingway in all this? It’s been suspected that he slipped money to the Castro rebels early in the uprising, when the fledging M-26 Movement was still holed up in the Sierra Maestra. (I can just picture J. Edgar Hoover frothing at Hemingway helping those troublemakers who so resemble Pilar and Pablo in For Whom the Bell Tolls—incidentally, a book Fidel read for its guerrilla tactics when he was holed up in the mountains.) It would have been consistent with Hemingway’s love of romantic rebels and his hatred of dictators. When the Batista regime fell, Hemingway wished Fidel “all luck,” and later donated his Nobel Prize to Castro. Henceforth the new revolutionary government honored “Ernesto” as an adopted son of Cuba. My guess also is that Hemingway’s machismo, his aggressive manliness, appealed to Fidel, the Bearded One with his submachine gun slung over his shoulder and his many mistresses.