What Was Hemingway Doing in Cuba During World War II?

World War II spread its appendages around all facets of human affairs. With everything at stake, war powers amped up to collect every shard and crumb in mobilization against the enemy, insisting it would take every father, mother, daughter, and son to achieve victory against the Nazis. When the United States declared war on the Axis powers, Batista’s government pledged Cuban allegiance to the cause. Yet among the thousands that had fled to Cuba from the Spanish Civil War were many fascist Falangist elements that had triumphed over the Loyalists due to Hitler’s and Mussolini’s support. So American and Cuban officials were justifiably concerned that these elements loyal to the Axis could sabotage Allied interests.

Ernest Hemingway had recently written the introduction to an anthology of short stories, Men at War. Eager to participate in the conflicts he had just been touting in the anthology, the author assured American ambassador to Cuba, Spruille Braden, that he could assemble his network of contacts from the Spanish Civil War to weed out Falangists on the island, frustrate Axis missions, and arrest any Nazis operating in their hemisphere. Enjoying the support of both American and Cuban governments, the writer “enlisted a bizarre combination of Spaniards: some bartenders; a few wharf rats; some priests; assorted exiled counts and dukes; several Loyalists and Francistas. He built up an excellent organization and did an A-One job.” Ernest expressively dubbed the spy cell the “Crook Factory,” but whether its informants were behind any of the numerous round-ups and convictions of suspected Axis agents in America and Cuba that year remains classified.

Observing his anti-fascist campaigns in Spain and speculating on his Communist sympathies, Soviet agents approached Ernest in Havana at the Floridita at least twice in September 1942, but nothing, other than inebriation, resulted from these meetings. Yet the author’s “premature fascism” with Loyalist Spain, the Soviet “friends” and spies who pursued him, his recent travels to Communist China, and his rather unconventional involvement in a renegade intelligence ring raised eyebrows among several agents of the FBI in Havana, toward whom the writer had friskily expressed his disgust. These agents opened a case on the author and reported his every move to the director of “the Bureau” at that time, J. Edgar Hoover.

Hoover read these reports with indulgent good humor. But in his own handwriting, at the bottom of the report, the director concluded that Ernest had been an impassioned author with a grand imagination, not a traitor to his country. Hoover advised his agents to stand down, for it was only natural for a courageous and inventive artist like Ernest Hemingway to loathe their dull and dutiful kind. Thus clearing his name as a loyal American, the director nonetheless advised his agents “to discuss diplomatically with Ambassador Braden the disadvantages” of allowing a civilian, outside the purview of government authority and with a wild imagination, to head up such a mission. Though Ernest had hoped to be a spy, the Soviet NKVD (precursor of the KGB), the Office of Strategic Services, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation all seemed to conclude that he never lived up to his full potential.

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Understanding that supply lines would determine the outcome of the war, German high officials, studying Allied sources of fuel and metal, seized momentum and took to the offensive to cut them off. Admiral Doenitz sent German U-boats to attack key fuel sources in the Caribbean during Operation Drumbeat: mines in Guyana, refineries in Aruba, New Orleans, and Houston, oil tankers as they emerged from Venezuela. From February to November of 1942, the Germans sank over 400 ships worldwide, and 263 of these were in the Caribbean. At the entryway to the Caribbean Sea and Gulf Stream leading to the Panama Canal, Cuba occupied a strategic position for controlling naval traffic.

On March 12, a German submarine sent tremors across the skins of island residents when it sank the Olga, a freighter, and the Texan, an oil tanker, in the narrows between Wolf Lighthouse and Cayo Confites, very near Cayo Romano. With much of its fleet destroyed by the Japanese Pearl Harbor bombing or engaged in the aftermath in the Pacific, the United States Navy found itself outgunned and ill prepared to defend against the imminent threat of German torpedo boats in Caribbean waters, so it called for yachtsmen and small boat owners to arm themselves as auxiliaries in the fight, offering federal funds for those who joined up.

As one of the first yachtsmen to respond, Ernest received 500 dollars per month from the US Navy for his reconnaissance. The money equipped the Pilar with depth charges and machine guns (and bait and alcohol), transforming his boat into an emergency defense vessel that would patrol the Cuban coast. He named this mission “Operation Friendless,” after his favorite cat. Just after the operation began, his sons, released from school for summer vacation, rushed down to Cuba to join their father and his crew of friends, a band of rag-tag sailors and would-be warriors on a real war mission against the Nazis: pursuing U-boats in the cayos while fishing, swimming, and sunning in the endangered straits of tropical paradise. During the war when gasoline was in short supply and strictly rationed to others, Ernest received tanks of gasoline, discreetly delivered from the US embassy to his home where they were routinely buried by drunken Basques in his backyard. The month that Ernest began his mission, the first gas chamber was operational at Auschwitz-Birkenau in order to exterminate Gypsies, Sinti, Jews, resistance fighters, and other prisoners of war en masse.

Along for the ride were beefy British polo champion Winston Guest; wild-eyed, balding Spanish Loyalist Roberto Herrera Sotolongo; Basque pelota player Francisco Ibarlucia, or “Paxchi”; such sea- men as marine-gunner Don Saxon, “Sinbad” Juan Duñabeitia, ribald priest Don Andrés, Cuban first mate Gregorio Fuentes, communication specialist (from the American embassy) John Saxon, Catalan bar- keep Fernando Mesa; and others, like José Regidor and Félix Ermúa, aboard a few weeks but not possessing the stamina to stay with Captain Hemingway until the end.

Armed with machine guns, anti-tank guns, bazookas, hand grenades, and a communication tower, a crack team of Ernesto’s closest friends headed directly to the source of the torpedo attack in the crystalline waters between Cayo Guillermo and Santa Maria, between the palms, beneath the sun, and guided by boat captain and tavern owner Augustín Tuerto, “Guincho,” who knew the terrain and took the author through the mangroves in the straights near Cayo Francés to the exit point near Nuevitas.

Ernest considered mounting heavy machine guns to the Pilar but later recognized this idea as impractical. Instead, his crew would have to lure the “Krauts” to the surface, direct fire at the U-boat’s steel hull (to suppress use of their 88 mm deck guns), and move in just close enough for one of his jai alai players to lob a grenade in the conning tower with his special skills. An insane plan, which he pursued with the same wild imagination and delight as he did his childhood adventures in the Walloon woods with his father. Now the son hunted the bad guys with his own children and a passion resembling obsession.

At first praising her husband’s bravery, Martha avoided inconvenient questions and accepted an assignment with Collier’s that summer, taking a two-month hiatus to study the effects of the war on several Caribbean islands. When she returned and found Operation Friendless continuing, Martha departed to New York and Washington, DC. When she was away, he complained of loneliness—he might “die of sadness” without her and without sex: “[Mr. Scrooby] probably will be permanently ruined for disuse.” Countering her husband’s grumbles, Martha reaffirmed a necessity for fulfillment and invited him to celebrate advancements of her career: “Will you be able to come back and celebrate with me? You must be nearly nuts now, in your floating sardine box, with all those souls and all those bodies so close to you. I admire your patience more than I can ever say. You are a disciplined man. I love you Picklepot. Are the childies having fun?”

While Ernest and Martha Hemingway’s letters continued to profess their mutual longing, periods of self-imposed exile grew ever more frequent, on assignment, or at sea, with conflict kindling each time they reunited. In their relationship there was intimacy, love, gratitude for their good fortune and the moments they shared together, as well as acute sensibility to each other’s personalities, nostalgia, neglect, frustration, and bitterness. Writing him at their home, Martha entreated her husband, who had exiled himself from her on a mission in the cayos: he had been married so much and so long that she could not affect him and longed to become like they once were in Madrid or in Milan, unmarried, and happy together. Immersing herself in writing during Ernest’s absences at the edge of the sea, Martha finished a novel called Liana in June.

Hunkered down near Cayo Confites hunting German submarines with his “crew,” Ernest received Martha’s manuscript, and between mission reports, mosquito attacks, pig roasts, and idn poker games, he read by oil lamp and edited it assiduously. Returning it to her, he offered reconciliation: “Let’s be friends again. ‘Lest we be friends there is nothing. It is not such a long way to go.’ Rilke wrote, ‘Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.’ I haven’t protected you good, and touched you little and have been greeting you scoffingly. But I truly respect and admire you very much. And of this date and hour have stopped scoffing, which is the worst of all.”

She would integrate his feedback and responded to his note with appreciation and affection: “Bug my dearest, how I long for you now . . . Oh my I love you and oh my I am homesick for you. I want to fix up your beard in beautiful braids like my Assyrian.”

When Martha learned during prepublication from her publisher, Charles Scribner, that the Book of the Month Club and Paramount had passed on Liana, she wrote her husband defiantly, “In my heart, I always knew it was not destined to be a best-seller.” Yet the novel was positively reviewed by the Washington Post, the Nation, the New Republic, the New Yorker, and the New York Herald Tribune, who respectfully said that Gellhorn was an artist with “splendid sultry grace,” who had “come of age” and written a simple story with sensitive reverberations. Its 27,000-copy first printing sold quickly, making it a bestseller despite Martha’s misgivings.

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Excerpted from Ernesto: The Untold Story of Hemingway in Revolutionary Cuba. Used with permission of Melville House Publishing. Copyright © 2019 by Andrew Feldman.