1928: On April 1st at 10: 50 pm with a cloudy and foggy sky the steamship ‘Orita’ made a stop in the port of Havana before continuing its journey towards Florida. Hemingway travelled there accompanied by his second wife Pauline Pffeifer who was pregnant.
The ship had weighed anchor from La Rochelle, France.
1930: He started carrying out regular sailings till the ‘cayería del Romano’ in the north of Camagϋey. Those trips included the coastlines where the biggest and largest keys of the country can be found.
1934: The first presentation of his mythical yacht‘El Pilar’ was carried out through a four- months sailing in the ‘cayería del Romano’, pier of the Guincho, Nuevitas; from where he travelled by train towards Camagϋey and visited the ‘central’(the modern sugar mill) Santa Amalia together with James Mason and Carlos Gutiérrez.
1937- 38: As he went to Spain or the United States towards other European countries, in four occasions, he made brief stays in ‘La Habana’ and he lodged at the Hotel Ambos Mundos and he even made a trip to Camagϋey, specifically to La Gloria City, a community founded by the north Americans in that region of the island.
1939: On his return from Spain he stayed again at Hotel Ambos Mundos where he began to write: “For Whom the Bells Tolls?”.
1940: He made up his mind to settle definitely in Cuba, in the farm ‘La Vigía’. There are no evidences of any other place where the writer had established. He had written in occasional places till that moment, from taverns to hotels rooms. Here, he had his library, his favourite animals, and his most varied objects.
1942-43: He devoted his time to pursue German submarines in the ‘cayería del Romano’, where military operations and activities from the most powerful fascist groups had taken place by those years.
!945: He began to write here his vast novel about the Second World War, book that he would never published in life – The sea book- relegated by him in 1947.
1949: On his return to Cuba, after several months in Italy, he made out of his novel about the Second World War three of his well known books: “Through the river and among the trees”, “The Old Man and the Sea”, and “ Paris is a Party”.
1954: He is honoured with the Nobel Prize which he dedicated to the Cuban people. He placed the medal in the sanctuary erected to the ‘Virgen de la Caridad de Cobre’, situated in a small town near Santiago de Cuba.
1960: When Hemingway is surrounded by journalists in the United States who told him slanders against Cuba, he put an end to the conversation: “Have you finished, gentlemen?
I believe that everything is quiet right over there. People of honor believe in the Cuban Revolution”
1961: Knowing the deep political changing that were taking place in Cuba as well as the hostility of the United States government, Ernest Hemingway decided little before committing suicide to bequeath his house, his library, and the objects that he kept there to the Cuban people. Besides, he bequeathed the yacht ‘El Pilar’ to his friend Gregorio Fuentes in his testament including his expressed will that the craft of his best adventures would continue sailing through the waters of the island.
