Behind Islands in the Stream: Hemingway, Cuba, the FBI and the crook factory

By Thomas Fensch

Ernest Hemingway lived in Cuba for 20 years--1940-1960. After the Spanish Civil War, thousands of Spanish Falange (Spanish fascists) immigrated to Cuba. They were thought to be a threat to Cuba and to the U.S. With the blessing of, and financing by,   the American Embassy in Havava, Hemingway recuited a ragtag band to sp

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Century Books
• Release date: Jun 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9780999549674

Thomas Fensch

Thomas Fensch has published 40 books in the past 50 years--his first three were published in 1970. He has published five books about John Steinbeck; two about James Thurber; two about Dr. Seuss; the only full biography of John Howard Griffin, the author of Black Like Me, and a variety other titles.

Book preview

Chronology

Key dates in the life of Ernest Hemingway

POSTHUMOUS PUBLICATIONS

Introduction

Hemingway, Cuba, the FBI and the crook factory

Ernest Hemingway lived in Cuba, at Finca Vigia — Lookout Farm — for 20-plus years, 1939–1940- to 1960. Half his productive life as a writer was spent there. And while there, he wrote some of his very best novels. And one of his worst.

They included part of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Across the River and into the Trees, A Moveable Feast, The Old Man and the Sea and Islands in the Stream.

There are several books worth studying for Hemingway’s life during these two decades, but the one most crucial is Hemingway in Cuba, by Norberto Fuentes. First published in Cuba in 1982 under the title Hemingway — Our Own, it was translated into English and published in the United States in 1984. It is a rich trove of material about Hemingway, Cuba, and his friends and compatriots. No comprehensive understanding of Hemingway’s life there is possible without Hemingway in Cuba.

Fuentes writes that in Cuba, during the period of the end of the Spanish Civil War, there were about 3,000 Spanish Falangists (Spanish fascists) in Cuba, most pro-Nazi.

But U.S. Ambassador to Cuba Spruille Braden later wrote in his memoirs, Diplomats and Demagogues, that there were 300,000 Spaniards in wartime Cuba, of whom 15,000 to 30,000 were violent Falangists. (Braden, in Hemingway: A Biography, by Jeffrey Meyers, pp. 368.)

Hemingway rounded up a ragtag organization to spy on the Cuban Falangists and report, through him, to the American Ambassador Braden, said to be the best U.S. Cuban Ambassador ever posted to Havana. Hemingway named this amateur spy operation the crook factory.

They were, according to Jeffrey Meyers, priests, waiters, fishermen, whores, pimps and bums. (Meyers, pp. 368.)

Alternatively, in his biography of Hemingway, only a few pages later, Meyers writes: According to the Cuban newspapers, the outfit was made up of monarchists, aristocrats, priests, bartenders, criminals and whores. (pp. 384)

Ambassador Spruille Braden said that Hemingway enlisted a bizarre combination of Spaniards: some bar tenders; a few wharf rats; some down-at- the-heel pelota players and former bullfighters; two Basque priests, assorted exiled counts and dukes, several Loyalists and Francistas. He built up an excellent organization and did an A-One job. (Braden Diplomats and Demagogues, pp. 282–4, quoted in Reynolds, pp. 60.)

That operation was eventually curtailed by Braden, but it led to Hemingway’s patrols searching for Nazi submarines, on his motor yacht, the Pilar, in the waters off Cuba.

Terry Mort writes that Pilar was Hemingway’s nickname for his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway. Or it could have been the name of a shrine that Hemingway knew about, in Zaragoza, where he watched bullfights. (Mort, pp. 51) The yacht named after the shrine would have been easier to explain to wives number three and four …, Mort suggests.

And those patrols furnished him the material for the end third of what would become the novel Islands in the Stream.

His patrols in the Pilar not only had the blessing of Ambassador Braden, but were financed, gasoline and armaments, by the U.S. Embassy. And here the narrative gets darker, for the FBI deeply resented these covert Embassy-Hemingway operations. Hoover’s FBI believed Hemingway was treading on its turf and was a security threat. And was also a Communist fellow traveler, a member of so-called Communist front organizations.

And while Hemingway and his crook factory tracked the Falangists and later searched for Nazi submarines in the Caribbean, the FBI tracked Hemingway.

Fuentes tells much of this story with grace and verve; Hemingway was, during those two decades, the most beloved public figure in Havana and in all of Cuba. He was especially venerated because he was living in Cuba when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Hemingway thought the number nine lucky, so the Pilar had nine crew members. Fuentes writes:

It is easy to understand how Hemingway was able to enlist nine men in his adventure, a since it seemed to be such an attractive project, offering some possibility for real action and much for having a good time. As the captain, Hemingway was zealous in his duties, however, and he made his