Hemingway's Cuba papers available electronically

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January 5th, 2009

HAVANA (AP) - Cuba on Monday began accepting requests for electronic access to more than 3,000 documents from Ernest Hemingway's home on the island, including the unpublished epilogue of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and coded messages the author sent when using his yacht to hunt for German submarines during World War II.

Unedited manuscripts, a screenplay for the "The Old Man and the Sea," letters to the Nobel Laureate and insurance policies are among other papers at Finca Vigia, the hillside hideaway on the eastern outskirts of Havana where Hemingway lived from 1939 until 1960.

The 3,197 documents were scanned and organized electronically as part of a 2002 agreement between Cuban national heritage authorities and the New York-based Social Science Research Council, which also provided acid-free boxes and other storage materials to better protect the originals, said Ada Rosa Alfonso, director of the museum at Finca Vigia.

. . . the collection includes coded messages Hemingway compiled when he used his fishing boat, El Pilar, to ply the waters north of Cuba during World War II, believing German U-boats were using the area to refuel.

There are keys to decode some of those messages, but museum officials have yet to decipher them.

The collection also has maps, newspaper articles Hemingway clipped, receipts and carefully worded, diffident letters to Hemingway from his editors . . .

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