Deconstructing Hemingway's America: the Hemingway-Gattorno relationship in the U.S.-Cuban imagination

During the mid-1930s in Cuba, Ernest Hemingway befriended Cuban artist Antonio Gattorno (1904-1980) during Hemingway's most active period of Gulf Stream fishing trips. Their relationship soon transcended ocean sojourns, and the two exchanged letters, eight of which reside in the Hemingway Collection at the J.F.K. Library in Boston. Written between 1935 and 1937, the Hemingway-Gattorno correspondence showcases the relationship that came to fruition between the American writer and Cuban artist in the 1930s. It also presents a lens through which to examine the cultural contact that occurred between Americans and Cubans during a decade of great political, social, and economic exchange between the two nations. In addition, the Hemingway-Gattorno correspondence elucidates each country's tendency to romanticize the other before the Cuban Revolution and provides a template with which to examine current U.S.-Cuban relationships today. This thesis endeavors to first discuss the Hemingway-Gattorno relationship via a close examination of the correspondence that occurred between them. It then attests that the Hemingway-Gattorno correspondence exemplifies the transatlantic glamorization that characterized pre-revolutionary U.S.-Cuban relations. The thesis explores the replay of this act of romanticizing in real time, arguing that despite governmental injunctions since 1961, Americans and Cubans alike have continued to ingeniously find ways to communicate with one another in much the same way Hemingway and Gattorno did in the 1930s. One mechanism for doing so is remembering Ernest Hemingway's life in Cuba and the home he owned there, Finca Vigía, a performance of memory that often occurs through the conduits of either the Hemingway Archives in Boston or the Finca Vigía Museum in Cuba. American and Cuban longing for the cultural contact enjoyed by Hemingway and Gattorno is expressed and performed through a glorification of Hemingway and the Finca Vigía, despite the severance of diplomatic relations between the two countries in 1961. In addition, for Cubans in particular, Hemingway and the Finca Vigía present an opportunity to imagine the much more unified pre-revolutionary Cuba. Although certainly Hemingway and his home represent different realities for Cubans and Americans, in all, the thesis will show that citizens from both countries continue to find ways to create and imagine themselves in pre-revolutionary contexts like those embodied by Hemingway and Gattorno in the 1930s.