Santiago is 101 now, and he is the original old man of Hemingway's The Old Man And The Sea. The novel was written in 1952 and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. "Santiago's" real name is Captain Gregorio Fuentes, and he lives at Cojimar, a little harbour near Havana in Cuba, from where he and Hemingway fished for marlin - "big, big ones" - for the best part of 20 years.
Cojimar was where Hemingway kept his boat, El Pilar, which Gregorio captained for 20 years. They had always fished together, Gregorio recalled, since that first time they met in New Orleans in the early 1940s. Gregorio had been fishing in the Gulf of Mexico and had stopped off there.
People from all over the world used to come to Cojimar to fish for marlin in those days, Gregorio recalls. They came from Spain, Italy, Russia, Africa. But that has all stopped now.
Everyone in Cojimar believes that Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea is Gregorio, despite the age difference at the time. Then Gregorio probably always looked old. "Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same colour as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated."
Gregorio believes he is Santiago too. In his modest home on a slope, there is a large picture of himself, Hemingway, and El Pilar. It was painted in 1990 by a C Salowski. The picture in Gregorio's house is number 74 of a limited edition of 600. It was presented to Gregorio by a Mr Bergman.
Gregorio lives not too far from the La Terraza restaurant, which Hemingway frequented during the 1940s and 1950s, when he fished out of Cojimar. It is still dominated by his presence, with paintings and photographs of him all along its walls. "They sat on the Terrace and many of the fishermen made fun of the old man and he was not angry."
Further along the harbour in Cojimar they have erected a bust to Hemingway's memory, and a sixkilometre stretch of sea off Havana has been named Hemingway's Mile. He gave it that name himself sometime during the many hours of the many years he spent undulating on its waves, fishing.
In 1950, Hemingway donated a cup as first prize in a fishing competition which was, and still is, held in May every year off Marina Hemingway, Havana. In 1960 the man who won the prize was Fidel Castro, who had led his successful revolution, against all the odds, the previous year. There is a photograph in La Terraza of Hemingway presenting Castro with the cup in 1960. He had caught the biggest fish.
You would imagine from all this that the `Hemingway trail' would be a major feature of tourism in Havana, but this is not so. Even though tour companies do offer a "Hemingway special", they rarely undertake them because of lack of take-up by visitors. This may be because Americans can't visit Cuba, under US legislation, and because Hemingway is not as well known in the non-English speaking world. The interested visitor simply has to plot the tour himself.
Hemingway first visited Cuba in 1928. During the 1930s he stayed at the still-beautiful Ambos Mundos hotel in Old Havana. While there, he used to frequent a bar called La Bodeguita del Medio. Nowadays you can get a Hemingway Special anywhere in Cuba. It is a potent mixture of rum, mint, and sugar cane juice.
After the Spanish Civil War Hemingway returned to Havana and ended up buying an estate called Finca Vigia near the city, in 1939. It is not far from Cojimar. He lived and wrote in that house until he returned to the US in 1960. They say he rose at dawn each day, and would write for six hours, standing in oversized moccasins before a typewriter.
When he returned to the US in 1962, he donated the house to the Cuban people. Since then it has been preserved as he left it and is known as Museo Hemingway. Visitors can look, but they cannot enter. Groups of middle-aged women guard it like demons at the gates of hell.
You can stand at the open front door and peer in, or press your nose against the windows and take a peek, more like some a voyeur than a voyager. And you are not allowed take any photographs. The house is beautiful, airy and bright, as befits Cuba's warm, wonderful climate. Magazines with jaded covers rest on the sitting-room tables with bottles of Cinzano and Bacardi in a wine-rack beside it, labels browned by age. The trophy room is a homage to machismo, with bullets and bullet casings neatly ordered on a table, and the heads of great animals killed on safari mounted on its walls.
"Perhaps it was a sin to kill the fish . . . But then everything is a sin. Do not think about sin. It is much too late for that and there are people who are paid to do it. Let them think about it. You were born to be a fisherman as the fish was born to be a fish. San Pedro was a fisherman . . ."
His writing room has a large mahogany table, with shelves and shelves of books, too far inside the window to be identified. On a wall is a sketch drawing of a bull, presented to Hemingway by Picasso. One of the guardian ladies was persuaded to allow a photograph be taken, for a dollar. But it had to be put her way discreetly, and out of the eyeline of any of her co-defenders.
The boat, El Pilar, is preserved in the garden of Hemingway's house, as are the graves of four of his dogs. In 1961 Hemingway left this paradise and returned to the US, where he committed suicide within a year. In Cuba they believe he had been diagnosed with cancer and that, rather than endure a long terminal illness, he decided to take a short cut.
"He knew he was beaten now finally and without remedy . . . He sailed lightly now and he had no thoughts nor any feelings of any kind. He was past everything now . . ." In a country where Americans are not top of any popularity lists, Hemingway remains an exception. He is seen there as one American, at least, who liked and respected Cuba.
