You don't have much difficulty finding Ernest Hemingway in Havana. It seems he's there at almost every turn. Photos of him and his literary, movie-star and political friends speckle the walls of La Bodeguita del Medio and El Floridita bars, close to the town centre, and the room in the Ambos Mundos Hotel where he worked on For Whom the Bell Tolls is still a shrine for tourists and literature lovers, some 40 years after he left it.
On the strength of that novel, Martha Gellhorn encouraged Hemingway to buy Finca Vigia (Look-out Farm), at San Francisco de Paula, on the outskirts of Havana, for $18,500. Now visitors pay $3 to see the spacious, Spanish-style bungalow where he lived for the best part of 20 years, most of that time with his wife, Mary Welsh.
The property stands at the top of a road lined with a terrace of small, brightly coloured one-storey houses, some crumbling. Inside Finca Vigia's white wooden gates, the driveway leads to a car park and souvenir shop, then veers left, towards the house, half-hidden behind palms. The building, with its terraces, tower and swimming pool seems luxurious in comparison with the houses below.
At the front door, Hemingway's bell, which he used to ring when guests arrived, is mostly silent now. You are not welcome to enter, but must observe, like some kind of time trespasser, from windows and doorways, the house which has apparently been preserved much as Hemingway lived in it, until, unwell in mind and body, he left for the last time in 1960. The following year, in Ketchum, Idaho, he shot himself with a double-barrelled shotgun.
From the front door you can see through the tiled hall into the dining room, where the table is set. Hemingway always had an extra place laid at dinner time in case a friend dropped in, and now it's set with china and Murano glassware, as though for guests who will never come.
French windows open out of several rooms on to terraces. On the right-hand side of the sittingroom chairs are visible and a drinks table - complete with bottles of rum, whisky and Campari. Yes, Isaac the guide confirms, they are the originals, still half full. To the left is Hemingway's record collection - more than 800 records, from Bach and Verdi to Louis Armstrong, Cole Porter and Benny Goodman - with some flamenco and calypso for good measure. The record player still works, and it's not hard to imagine the scene switching into life with music, the clink of glasses and voices raised in discussion.
The house is full of reminders of the writer's time in Spain, Africa and the US. The walls bear a ceramic plate from Picasso, paintings by Roberto Domingo of bulls and bullfighting, and stuffed heads of kudo, oryx, American antelope, gazelle, water buffalo, deer and elk shot by Hemingway and friends.
The guide moves on. That's where Hemingway used to stand, and write, with his typewriter propped up on a Who's Who in America; under a window ledge, all neatly stacked in pairs, are the size 47 moccasins which he wore without socks. A short distance from the house a tower offered a refuge for his 50 or so cats: on the top floor Hemingway apparently looked out at Havana through a telescope, or read his galley proofs. A path lined with palms leads past the area where he kept cocks for fighting, to the swimming pool, empty now. The well that used to fill it, so Hemingway could sit on its steps chestdeep in water, has long since dried up.
Behind the house, firmly planted on dry land far from the shore, is the Pilar, the 42-foot boat that took him on many a fishing expedition, with skipper Gregorio Fuentes, to catch marlin or tuna, or other big fish off the coast. Hemingway left the boat to Fuentes, but he hadn't the money to keep it, and passed it on to the state. Now it's housed under a giant wooden canopy.
Fuentes - now reputedly aged 103 - is living some miles away, in Cojimar, from where he and Hemingway used often head off fishing. And it was off this coastline that Hemingway set The Old Man and the Sea. When he feels up to it, Fuentes is happy to be interviewed by tourists - at a price. But the day I go his "not available" sign is up outside the door.
Back in Havana, tourists are happily following Hemingway's dictum of "My mojito in La Bodeguita and my daiquiri in El Floridita", and in the Ambos Mundos, which has been renovated in recent years, there's a steady trickle of tourists going up the magnificent wrought-iron lift (which was there in Hemingway's time) to the fifth floor. Hemingway stayed there regularly in the 1930s, in room 511. Much has changed, but the furniture and typewriter did belong to him - they're on loan from Finca Vigia.
Hemingway is credited as saying he liked the Ambos Mundos because it was quiet and he could work there. But salsa music now drifts in from the roof terrace and street beyond. And in San Francisco Plaza, 20 minutes' walk away, along the docks, neither the immaculately groomed waiters in the tourist cafes, nor the young men in offices seem familiar with it as the opening scene of Hemingway's novel, To Have and Have Not. In this city, it seems, Hemingway the man looms larger than Hemingway the writer. Perhaps it's how he would have wanted it.
