Hemingway’s Cuban Son, Reflections on the Writer by His Longtime Majordomo (review)

Ernest Hemingway has been dead nearly fifty years. After all of this time, one would think that all of the memoirs by family and friends had been written and there would be little new to be said. But then comes the memoir from the person, excluding his wives, who perhaps knew him best during the last twenty years of his life. In 1939, René Villarreal was a ten-year-old boy living in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba, playing baseball outside of a walled estate when Ernest Hemingway drove up to visit the estate with the intention of possibly buying it. Villarreal began running errands and feeding the dogs and cats at the Finca in 1940 and, in 1947, at age seventeen, he was promoted by Hemingway to the position of estate manager. After Hemingway’s death, when his widow Mary Hemingway gave the estate to the Cuban people, Fidel Castro insisted that Villareal remain to manage the estate as the Museo Hemingway.

In the mid-1960s, while still in Cuba and serving as administrator of the Museo Hemingway, René Villarreal wrote a memoir. When he left Cuba in 1972, he entrusted his manuscript and numerous photographs, letters, and other Hemingway memorabilia to others who either stole the items or lost them. For the next 25 years he declined all requests for interviews and, in fact, there were conflicting rumors about where he was actually living. Then, in 1996, his son Raul began a series of interviews with him about his life working for Ernest Hemingway. Those interviews occurred over the course of two years and are the basis for this book.

René Villarreal’s first person account of life at the Finca is an important addition to Hemingway scholarship. There have been a number of other books, both fiction and non-fiction, written about Hemingway’s years in Cuba. Hemingway in Cuba by Norberto Fuentes and Ernest Hemingway in the Romano Archipelago by Enrique Cirules both provide valuable insights into Hemingway’s Cuban years, but neither is in the first person. Mary Hemingway’s How It Was is a fine chronicle of life in Cuba with Hemingway, but she didn’t arrive in Cuba until 1946. Villarreal provides a detailed picture of life at the Finca. With the eye of an historian interested in providing a documented record, he takes the reader on a tour that details the paintings and furnishings of the Finca. Many of the items are still there. Some are not. He also describes daily life with Hemingway, his likes and dislikes, and the comings and goings of the author, his last two wives, and their close friends. Many of the stories, such as the formation of Gigi’s All Stars, have been told before. But to have one of the All Stars who was there at the beginning tell the story is to hear it as we have not heard it before. Many of the stories and anecdotes provide new information that will eventually show up in future books about Hemingway’s Cuban experience.

As both a member of the Hemingway household and a resident of the small town in which the Finca is located, Villareal provides insights into a personal side of Hemingway that is too often overlooked. On the first day that Villarreal and boyhood friends meet Hemingway, the author opens the Finca gates to them so that they can pick fruit from the trees and play baseball on the grounds. Hemingway also promises to buy them baseball gear so that they no longer have to use sticks for bats or balls made of rags. Hemingway is soon called “Mr.Way” by the adults in the community and “Papa” by the children.

Villarreal tells about a Hemingway who is the benefactor of individuals, families and causes. He also shows us a Hemingway with a strong emotional attachment to people, cats, dogs, and trees...