Welcome to Havana, Senor Hemingway - Alfredo Jose Estrada

Welcome to Havana, Senor Hemingway is largely a book about Cuba in the time before Batista rose to power. It's framed as a young man trying to uncover whether the story about his grandfather, Javier, knocking down Hemingway is true or not. Hemingway is not present throughout the book, as the story carries over at least a year or more of unrest prior to Machado stepping down, and "Papa" wasn't in Havana the entire time.

Estrada's method is a little unusual, because he doesn't go the well-worn route of presenting it like some investigative drama. There are no chapters of the author trying to track down leads, then chapters set in the past describing what he learned. Estrada opts to shift into the past merely by having the author picture how his grandfather would have looked, and goes from there. Which is fine, it probably helps the reader stay more engaged in the story if it's presented as though we're there, rather than as though we're hearing about it second hand decades later. Still, it leaves me a little confused, since the chapters in the present are written from the author's perspective, but those set in the 1930s are an omniscient, third-person perspective, as the focus shifts amongst several characters, what they're thinking and feeling. It leaves me wondering if this should be regarded as a "true" retelling (allowing for the fact the book itself is a novel, in the context of the world it inhabits, is it true), or just the author's conjecture and best reconstruction?

However, the book is sufficiently engrossing that these questions only came to the forefront once I stopped reading for the evening.

I was particularly interested in the glimpses of Cuba we get, since it's not a country whose history I'm terribly familiar with. This will seem foolish, but I was surprised by the frequent mentions of a Chinese population. Laundrys, restaurants, general "chinamen" in the markets or pulling wagons of goods. I never pictured Cuba as a popular destination for Chinese immigrants, and perhaps it was limited to Havana, but it was still intriguing. I thought Estrada, by having characters receive focus who were in a variety of professions, was able to nicely chart the rising tension in the country as unrest grew louder. How banks struggle when shops start closing down, or newspapers can't find people to buy ad space and have to worry about being shut down by the government if they don't tread carefully. That air of unease, where anyone in uniform is given a wide berth, not merely out of fear of them, but also fear for them and anyone nearby.

I should have read this before Hemingway's Boat, since having read a dedicated biography of the man makes the version here seem a bit caricatured. It's true Hemingway was prone to fishing, drinking, committing adultery, was likely to be gripped by sudden dark moods that might vanish equally suddenly. Still, I feel Estrada sort of files him down to just those things. It's a bit like how people use Tesla in fiction when they want death rays. It'd be worse if Hemingway was the subject here, but he's more a means to an end, a way to draw ignorant chaps such as myself into the subjects Estrada is more interested in, and in that regard, it worked very well.