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fortunes from American promoters, and Cuba’s courage to stand up to the most powerful nation on earth (Fidel was actually carrying Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls looking for pointers on guerrilla warfare while he was up in the Sierra Maestra mountains during the revolution). These entry points to Cuba were like the Pyramids, but what loomed like the sphinx was the character of the people themselves.
    Why had Hemingway—one of America’s most beloved writers—spent the last third of his life on the island and declared himself a Cuban? Why, in 1976, when America offered Cuba’s greatest boxer, Te ó filo Stevenson, five million dollars to leave Cuba and fight Muhammad Ali, had Stevenson turned the tables and instead asked of the offer itself, “What is one million dollars compared to the love of eight million Cubans?” And why would anyone want to resist America, let alone wish to assume the role of David against a Goliath only ninety miles away?
    Before I ever set foot on Cuban shores, I wondered what Shakespeare might have done with Fidel Castro and his cursed treasure chest of an island Columbus had tried to plunder, along with all the other intruders ever since. And then an hour later after my first visit in 2000, when I was only twenty, it became clear that the better question was what Fidel Castro and Cuba would have done with Shakespeare. Everywhere I looked, I was confronted with the same question: Who would believe this society ever existed in the first place, let alone for this long?
    During my first week in Havana, I took a gypsy cab over to Cojimar and tracked down Gregorio Fuentes, the still living 103-year-old model for Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea . I asked him, “If Hemingway wrote about every other war he’d chased after around the world, why not the revolution going on in his backyard?” Gregorio shrugged and took a puff from his cigar. “He liked boxing. Maybe Hemingway’s knowledge of boxing taught him enough to know to punch your weight.” He smiled. As for a hero like Te ó filo Stevenson turning down all that money to leave, on my final trip to Cuba, eleven years after my first visit, Stevenson reluctantly granted me the last filmed interview of his life before his sudden death a year later, in 2012. When the Miami Herald ran a front-page feature about that interview, in which Stevenson asking me for a hundred dollars in return for our session somehow overshadowed all the millions he’d turned down during his career, it cost me my ability to ever return to an island I love and greatly admire. I’d handed ammunition to a lot of enemies of the Cuban government by exposing one of its idols. And over half a century after Fidel Castro seemed to be taking a joyride on the Titanic , dedicating his life to opposing America, with the latest banking collapse, suddenly our unsinkable ship of capitalism was taking on water with a limited supply of lifeboats to go around. Maybe with The Old Man and the Sea , a lovingly told story embracing the haunting beauty found in certain failed journeys, Hemingway spoke with equal truth to both sides of the ninety miles separating his adoptive home and his native country.
    The first thing that happens when you arrive in Havana is you feel your heart’s watch resisting your mind’s clock about what time it is. The Cuban poet Dulce Mar í a Loynaz once described the shape of her island as “like the drawn bow an invisible archer raises in the shadows, aimed at our hearts.” I was warned like all visitors that books were banned in Cuba. This had the unintended consequence, at least for me, of redoubling my desire to go to a place where books were still that powerful . No matter what was written in a book in most places in the modern world, who would think to waste their time banning it? It was hard enough getting people unplugged for long enough to read , let alone care enough to