Happy New Year
Yeah, yeah I know it has been nearly sixty days since my last post and I have no excuse other than the usual Holiday season busy-ness. So we’ll just put all that astern and hope I can post more frequently in the new year. As you may or may not know, I am a Hemingway fan, and have about as much interest in his colorful life as I do in his writing. So as we chart a new course into 2009 the following story caught my eye. Cubans and Americans working together? Could it be a sign that mean we are entering an era of greater cooperation? Let’s hope, we certainly could use it. But either way, I included something else that can’t hurt - the recipe for one of Papa Hemingway’s favorite cocktails - courtesy of our favorite RUM expert, old buddy Doug Hendrix. So mix up a batch of Papa Dobles and raise a toast to one of America’s greatest writers. Slainte’
Patrick Ó Brien
(Rueters) Cuba on Monday made the first of thousands of digitized documents, photos and books that belonged to writer Ernest Hemingway available to scholars after the items sat for years in the basement of his home outside of Havana. Decades exposed to humidity, insects and heat took a toll on many of the documents, which Cuban conservationists have painstakingly restored, then scanned into computers.
Most of the papers have never been published and will shed new light on the 21 years Hemingway spent in Cuba, where he wrote some of his greatest works, including The Old Man and The Sea, and Islands in The Stream. Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
The material includes more than 2,000 documents ranging from manuscripts of some of his works to letters to store receipts, 3,500 photographs and 9,000 books, some 2,000 of which Hemingway was known to have read because he made notes in the margins.
So far, about half of the documents have been preserved and digitized and are now available for viewing by scholars who make formal application to see them. For now, they will have to travel to Cuba to see the archive, but later this month the documents will also be available at the Hemingway collection in the John F. Kennedy presidential library in Boston, Alfonso said. The archive is not available on the Internet, but likely will be someday, she said.
The project is part of a joint effort by the Cuban National Cultural Heritage Council and the U.S. Social Science Research Council, working together under a 2002 agreement to preserve the archives that were stored in Hemingway’s basement.
Papa Dobles
Lets face it, there maybe no better connoisseur of Rum in the world than the late Ernest Hemingway. There are numerous drinks in Key West and the Islands named for the late writer but it’s best to go back into his own writings and history to find truth in larger than life characters such as Ernest.
