Torres: Cuba cruise trip and plans to visit Hemingway’s farm come crashing down
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Cruises from Florida ports to Cuba rerouted in wake of Trump administration travel ban
I read the sports and news columnists like Jimmy Breslin and Mike McAalary. I’ve loved newspapers since I was a kid.
But it wasn’t until I read Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea,” that I realized I wanted to write for a living. His words, like these below from his classic, were absolutely beautiful and simple and true:
“The fish is my friend too … I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars. Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We were born lucky; he thought.”
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And so in January, while my wife and I were shopping for a cruise to take this summer, we discovered that Cuba was now a destination. I was ecstatic.
To be honest, I had no interest in seeing the classic cars, an island and a people seemingly frozen in time, listening to Afro-Cuban jazz in some Havana café, sipping a Cuba Libre or eating ropa vieja with black beans.
No, my cruise was going to be a pilgrimage to sacred ground. I was finally going to make it to Finca Vigia, Hemingway’s Cuban farm where he wrote much of “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and of course, “The Old Man and the Sea.”
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I would even be able to go to the fishing village of Cojimar, which served as the inspiration for his novella that has in turn inspired me for decades. My band is even called the Hemingways, and I have a man-cave at home dubbed “The Hemingway Room.” So, it’s safe to say I was pretty stoked.
Nearly as excited as I was to visit Hemingway’s farm was my dad, now 82, who along with my mom, booked a cabin aboard the same ship. The thought of standing on such hallowed soil as Finca Vigia with my dad, literally gave me chills and a lump in my throat.
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And then the bottom dropped out when Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin read a statement that detailed new restrictions on travel to Cuba because of Cuba’s “destabilizing role in the Western Hemisphere, providing a communist foothold in the region and propping up US adversaries in places like Venezuela and Nicaragua by fomenting instability, undermining the rule of law, and suppressing democratic processes.”
I have and always will respect the Office of the President and if it’s truly in our best interests that Americans stop traveling to Cuba then so be it. I only wish it could have been delayed a few months. Sigh, but if wishes were felines, they’d be six-toed cats.
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Carnival is re-routing the ship to Jamaica and offering a $100 on-board credit for everyone in my party. That’s nice, I guess. I’ve been to Jamaica. It’s a great place but there is no Hemingway.
Now my summer plans are uncertain. I’m not sure whether to take the deal or ask for a refund. I’m not sure whether to take the cruise or fly somewhere else.
But I’m certain of one thing I’ll be doing. I’ll be reading “The Old Man and the Sea” for the umpteenth time and dreaming of what might have been.
Contact Torres at 321-242-3684
or jtorres@floridatoday.com.
Twitter: @johnalbertorres
Facebook: /FTjohntorres
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