Hemingway’s Havana

We wanted to visit Hemingway’s house outside Havana so got up early. The main house is being renovated and was closed but we were able to see the guest bungalow, gardens, pool and tower. A curious feature of the estate was the cat cemetery near the pool and Pilar, Hemingway’s fishing boat.

Back in Havana we enjoyed a drink at the Saratoga Hotel and finally got to do a tour around the cigar factory. The process was quite specialised as there are thousands of cigars rolled, cut, labelled and graded according to type and colour. Although it was informative we wished we hadn’t done the tour as the factory was a sweat box. 750 workers were cramped inside this hot, stuffy factory and they had to make 80-120 cigars a day.

For lunch we sat outside the Hotel Inglaterra and had cheese and ham toasties. On our final walk back to our hotel we nipped into Hotel Ambos Mundos to see the room where Hemingway had stayed, on and off, for 7 years in Room 511. It was here that he wrote ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’. After afternoon tea in Café Mercury around the corner of the hotel we picked up our bags and got a taxi to the Viazul Bus Station. There was a horrific thunderstorm on the way and we saw several old cars stranded in the rushing water.