Always “The Old Man”
Vaya con dios, Gregorio.

By Jeremy Hildreth, a freelance writer in Connecticut
January 26-27, 2002

Cojímar, Cuba — At age 104, Hemingway's "Old Man" finally cut the big fish loose.

"The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflections on the tropic sea were on his cheeks," Hemingway wrote describing Santiago, the protagonist of his Nobel prize-winning novella The Old Man and the Sea. I noticed similar spots on the visage of Gregorio Fuentes, Hemingway's longtime fishing companion and the acknowledged inspiration for Santiago, when I met him in April 2001. Evidently Gregorio's blemishes were not as benevolent as Santiago's, however. He died of cancer, last week, at the astoundingly ripe old age of 104.

Old Gregorio was a piece of living literary history, and a human tourist attraction of a singular sort. Hundreds of people came annually to the little fishing village of Cojímar, Cuba, about seven miles from Havana, hoping to be admitted to Calle Pesuela 209 to spend a few minutes with "El Capitan." Indeed, the address of the modest terracotta-roofed house is printed in nearly every traveler's guidebook to Cuba, and the ever-friendly Gregorio and his grandson-and-handler Rafael obliged as many visitors as possible. I remember reading somewhere that Gregorio considered it his duty to the revolution to play this role. Of course, the $10 visitation fee he charged — payable in U.S. greenbacks, por favor — might also have had something to do with it.

But it was a small price to pay, I thought, to see a living legend in his own home. (As it turned out, we were just in time. A few weeks after our visit, Fuentes became too ill to receive any more callers. We were almost certainly among the last Americans to meet him.)

At any rate, my guidebook was right on. We were greeted at the door by Rafael, who showed us inside to where Gregorio sat, in his trademark chair, wearing his trademark cap and smoking his trademark cigar. The old man, then 103, shook my hand with his trademark firm grip. He took my mother's hand and kissed it. "Ah, see, he likes the younger women," explained Rafael. My mom, in her fifties, was roughly half Gregorio's age.

Asked about his friend Ernest, Gregorio motioned toward his chest to indicate heartsickness. "I still miss him very much," he said. Hemingway and Fuentes had met exactly 70 years earlier, in 1931, while the two of them waited out a storm in Tortuga. They became good friends, and for the two decades that Hemingway lived in Cuba, his 38-foot cruiser, the Pilar, was skippered by Fuentes.

During World War II, Hemingway and Fuentes outfitted the Pilar with guns and got her official recognition as a Q-boat for use in hunting down German U-boats in Cuban waters. This was less about patriotism or adventure, believed Hemingway's wife Martha Gellhorn, and more about avoiding the gasoline rationing so they could keep fishing. When Hemingway died, in 1962, he willed the Pilar to Fuentes. Fuentes, however, took a vow, which apparently he has kept, never to fish again.

The Pilar itself is alive and well, albeit high and dry: It's displayed in a shed on the grounds of Hemingway's former house in San Francisco de Paula, a few miles from Cojímar. The house has been preserved as it was when Hemingway left Cuba, just days before Castro took power, more than 40 years ago. We stopped at Finca Vigia, as it's known, on our way to Cojímar, but even though we arrived well within published visiting hours, the property's gates were shut tight. A passerby solved the mystery: It was the 40th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and buses had come an hour before to round up all available workers, including those at the Hemingway museum, to "voluntarily" attend Fidel's speech in downtown Havana.

Gregorio's house in Cojímar is only a few blocks from the waterfront — and the famous La Terraza bar (immortalized as The Terrace in The Old Man and the Sea), where Hemingway and his friends would repair after a long day in the Gulf Stream. It was much easier to catch a mojito (a kind of Cuban mint julep made with rum), I figured, than a marlin, though according to Fuentes, Hemingway not only drank like a fish, he drank while he fished.

Cojímar's bay also is a notorious launching point for Cuban rafters hoping to reach asylum in the United States — 90 miles north. And a beautiful spot it is, too. Unfortunately, the day we were there, the magnificence of the crystalline, turquoise expanse was marred by the presence of a broken-down raft that had washed up on the beach, its passengers long gone. I imagine Hemingway and Gregorio must have tied up the Pilar a few hundred yards upshore in the evenings.

Back in Fuentes's parlor, Rafael showed us a book with photographs of his grandfather on the deck of the Pilar with Hemingway. Then he dipped into an adjacent room, returning with a vintage rod and reel. "This is 'emingway's fishing pole. Here is a picture of my grandfather with 'emingway and this fishing pole." So we, too, posed for pictures with Gregorio and the pole.

After thanking Gregorio and Rafael for their hospitality, I left behind a handful of ballpoint pens, which, like many basic consumer goods, are hard to come by in Cuba. Finally, I signed the thick and well-used guest book. After doing the same in 2000, journalist Jay Amberg wrote, "I was surprised that a fisherman from New Jersey had stopped by to see Fuentes the week before." Fuentes explained: "All the fisherman come to see me. They want to see me before I get too old." Amberg then remarked: "As I was leaving, I wondered how old is too old."

Now we know.