From the first North American scholar permitted to study in residence at Hemingway's beloved Cuban home comes a radically new understanding of “Papa’s” life in Cuba Ernest Hemingway first landed in Cuba in 1928. In some ways he never left. After a decade of visiting regularly, he settled near Cojímar —a tiny fishing village east of Havana—and came to think of himself as Cuban. His daily life among the common people there taught him surprising lessons, and inspired the novel that would rescue his declining career. That book, The Old Man and the Sea , won him a Pulitzer and, one year later, a Nobel Prize. In a rare gesture of humility, Hemingway announced to the press that he accepted the coveted Nobel “as a citizen of Cojímar .” In Ernesto , Andrew Feldman uses his unprecedented access to newly available archives to tell the full story of Hemingway’s self-professed Cuban-ness: his respect for Cojímar fishermen, his long-running affair with a Cuban lover, the warmth of his adoptive Cuban family, the strong influences on his work by Cuban writers, his connections to Cuban political figures and celebrities, his denunciation of American imperial ambitions, and his enthusiastic role in the revolution. With a focus on the island’s violent political upheavals and tensions that pulled Hemingway between his birthplace and his adopted country, Feldman offers a new angle on our most influential literary figure. Far from being a post-success, pre-suicide exile, Hemingway’s decades in Cuba were the richest and most dramatic of his life, and a surprising instance in which the famous American bully sought redemption through his loyalty to the underdog. "For a long time in Hemingway studies, the final and declining two decades of an over-chronicled life were largely misunderstood. Andrew Feldman's readable Ernesto helps to extend our knowledge of Hemingway's complex relationship with his adopted second homeland of Cuba." ----Paul Hendrickson, author of Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost Andrew Feldman  spent two years conducting research in residence at the Hemingway Museum and Library in Havana, Cuba. He has taught at Tulane University, Dillard University, and the University of Maryland. He lives with his wife in New Orleans, Louisiana. Along the windswept banks of a fishing village a few miles from Havana there is a bust dedicated to the memory of a writer, set there by its inhabitants, the fishermen of Cojímar. When they first heard the news that Hemingway was dead, it felt as if they had received a blow from the long beam of their sail as wind changed and the boat came suddenly about. Still, some of them doubted the validity of the news; after all, the papers had declared his death on more than one occasion and were obliged to retract their stories when Mr. Way (as many of the fishermen, finding his full name difficult to pronounce, called him) returned from the dead, indestructible and immortal, like some hero of ancient lore. Others, sneering at the headlines, rejected the suggestion, repeating itself like a vulgar joke in the newspapers and on the radio, that his death had been a suicide. In this way, they were able for a time to maintain the fiction that their friend, Ernest Hemingway, was alive and that he had never faltered in the face of death. For thirty years, the villagers had shared the sea and fished with Hemingway, so they believed that they knew him well. They came to love him naturally and simply, like a brother, as was their custom, and he came to love them back. Whenever he, in his motored craft, encountered them after a long day of fishing, rowing back beneath the sun, el americano would throw out a line and tow their boats back to port. Often, he would invite them for a drink in La Terraza, the village restaurant-bar beside the docks where they could talk, exchange tips about sea conditions, and enjoy some rum and one another’s company. Asking many questions, Ernest Hemingway, the writer, listened intently to their responses, to their sentiments, and to their manner of speaking—slowly gathering details for his work and strengthening ties of friendship with these men. In Cojímar where his first mate Gregorio Fuentes also lived, Hemingway kept his boat, the Pilar. It was safe there. Everyone in the village knew who owned it, and they looked after it as if it were their own. As the years passed, he had become part of their community; when Gregorio Fuentes’s daughters married, Hemingway, along with the other fishermen, attended their weddings. Hemingway’s experiences in Cojímar provided the material that allowed him to write the novel that rescued his career and restored his readers’ faith in his astonishing talent. His previous novel, Across the River and into the Trees , had been considered a failure. This awkward work of “fiction” indulgently explored two of his infatuations: his World War I wounds and nineteen-year-old Venetian beauty Adriana Ivancich, w