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Chapter 9 -
A Visit to the Ambos Mundos Hotel
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Friday Afternoon, February 26, 1999
On the way back into Havana, Victor suggests we visit the Hotel Ambos Mundos. It was where Hemingway lived in the 1930s before acquiring his country estate. We parked a block away and walked into a rabbit warren of streets that is Old Havana. Built in 1924 on the corner of Mercaderes and Obispo, the hotel is a five-story, salmon-colored building. It’s one of the stops on the Hemingway Tourist Trail. Earnest’s room on the top floor is now a museum.
The entire hotel could be a movie set from one of John Huston's black-and-white films. The large lobby has a long bar (famous for their mojitos) with a comfortable lounge, a baby grand piano, and a small dining area tucked off to one side with tables and chairs. Tucked away in the back, the reception counter faces a small gallery of Cuban art and a concierge's desk. A slight breeze blows through the tall, open windows. There’s an art-deco elevator with fancy ironwork—operated by a Cuban—that clanks and clatters its way to the upper floors and the rooftop, where there is another bar and a restaurant—and one of the best views of Old Havana. From there, you can see the fort at the entrance to the harbor, and in the evening, rain clouds are releasing lightning out over the Gulf Stream.
Hemingway had a corner suite on the fifth floor. It was here he worked from 1932 to 1939, before acquiring and moving to Finca Vigia, or Lookout Farm, in San Francisco de Paula. Even while living at the Finca, he maintained this suite at the Ambos Mundos. It cost him $1.50 a night. You can look into his room, now a small museum, where you’ll find his desk, a typewriter, a small bed, a few photos, and a gazelle's stuffed head on the wall. The shuttered windows open to a view of the street below and the Plaza de Armas beyond. It’s not an inspiring setting, I thought, but a writer does not need an inspiring setting in which to work. A writer can write in a closet with a light bulb overhead. It's in this work that one finds themselves lost. Each time I sit down to work on a piece of writing, I am no longer where I am; I’m inside the story. I can see and feel the place in which the story resides. I’m sure Hemingway must have felt he was on a pine-covered hillside in Spain when Franco’s fascist troops were searching for the wounded Robert Johnson, Hemingway’s character, in his novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. He also wrote Death in the Afternoon (1932), a novel about the Spanish bullfights, during this period. He began writing New Green Hills of Africa during this period, which was published in 1935. He also worked on To Have and Have Not, which was published in 1937. It is a story about a murder and a sports-fishing charter skipper named Harry Morgan, who smuggles liquor and people from Cuba to Key West following his probation.
In the 1944 Howard Hawks film, the story was rewritten by Faulkner (and a few others), using a Casablanca-like plot revolving around the smuggling of a French Resistance couple out of Martinique, a French island in the Caribbean, then Nazi-occupied. Humphrey Bogart plays the rogue charter boat skipper, with Lauren Bacall in the leading female role.
In the film, Bacall asks Bogart, "You can whistle, can't you?" He is twice Bacall’s age, but the chemistry between the two not only plays out on the screen, but the pair begins a secret love affair while shooting. After the film’s release, Bacall and Bogart marry and remain so until his death at 61.
I did meet with the hotel manager, who showed me the function rooms on the second floor: a banquet hall and a small meeting room next to the elevator shaft. Ideal! Room rates were less than $100 a day; some were $50, which was affordable for those on a budget. Yes, they could accommodate a group in the fall, their slow season.
The Hotel Ambos Mundos is magic. Our photojournalists will truly feel at home here, as I noted in my journal that night. I am falling in love with Havana—the tropical heat, the slowness of life, the simple food, and the rum. At the hotel bar, Victor introduced us to the mojitos. This simple cocktail is the perfect afternoon libation, consisting of crushed mint (the Cubans simply call it grass), Havana Club white rum, a squeeze of lime, simple sugar, and soda water. Somehow, they taste better in Cuba. The first one goes down really easy—by the second one, you are feeling right in the mood for those Cuban rhythms that come out at dusk all over Havana.
There is live music everywhere, pouring out of the clubs, bars, and restaurants, wafting down from apartments on the second and third floors of the tenements. People gather on the sidewalks outside their buildings or in parks, chatting; men are playing dominoes, and kids are running around. The people we meet are warm and inviting. Over the next few days, Victor introduces us to his art and filmmaking community, along with his wife and daughter.
We are welcomed on the forbidden island.
Late that afternoon, following our tour of Hemingway’s haunts, Victor dropped us off at our hotel with a promise to return on Monday. I tell Anna that I need some alone time to jot down the day's events, send her off on her own, and then head out with my camera.