CUBA: Thousands of the novelist Ernest Hemingway's documents and photographs found decaying at his Havana estate are to be preserved, thanks to US funding and Cuban co-operation.
The conservation plan includes restoration of the Pilar, a wooden power boat Hemingway used for deep-sea fishing and occasionally patrolling for German U-boats among the islands of the Gulf Stream during the second World War, and various stuffed animal heads and rifles wrapped in parcel paper.
The manuscript material is expected to shed light on the final years of the writer's life at Finca de Vigia, the hilltop house outside Havana where he lived for 20 years before he killed himself in Idaho in 1961.
More than 2,000 documents kept in filing cabinets and boxes in the basement include manuscript material and letters to his wife Mary and son Gregory, his editor Max Perkins and Adriana Ivancich, the young Italian countess he was in love with.
More than 3,000 photographs and undeveloped negatives will be preserved in the project, a collaboration between scholars, the Hemingway family and the Cuban government.
On Monday, President Fidel Castro joined Hemingway family members and a US congressman who advocates ending the US trade embargo on Cuba at a signing ceremony for the plan by a swimming pool at the estate.
"This was his primary residence in the last part of his life and when he left he was expecting to come back, so he really took just a few things," the writer's grandson, Mr Sean Hemingway, said.
"He was a tremendous collector of everything. He kept things as memory aids for what he was writing about. He was a real pack rat."
The documents include a discarded epilogue to For Whom the Bell Tolls, said Ms Jenny Phillips, granddaughter of the writer's editor. Ms Phillips found out about the treasure trove of documents during a visit to Cuba two years ago. "There is no new book in the basement, but there are many, many script materials that show steps in the writing process of the existing books," she said.
The bookshelves at Finca de Vigia (Lookout Farm), a nine-acre estate in San Francisco de Paula, 19 km east of Havana, also hold more than 9,000 books, many annotated in the margins by the Nobel prize-winning novelist. The walls of the house are crowded with antelope heads from hunting trips to Africa and bullfighting paintings. Bottles of gin, Campari and Bacardi rum still sit on the bar.
"His spirit still resides in the house. You feel he has just stepped out to pick up his mail down the driveway," Ms Phillips said. After Hemingway's death, his widow, Mary, gave the property and its belongings to the young revolutionary government of Fidel Castro. Today it is a museum, although the public can only glimpse the interior through the windows.
Hemingway left the Pilar to Cuban fisherman and companion Gregorio Fuentes, a model for his character in The Old Man and the Sea (for which Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954). Fuentes later gave the boat to the museum and it will be restored, Ms Phillips said.
Mr James McGovern, a Democrat member of the US House of Representatives, who helped bring about the agreement between Cuba and the Hemingway family, said the Cuban and American people had been kept apart for too long by political enmity and rhetoric.
At the signing ceremony, Mr McGovern said it was time to "tear down" the 40-year-old US trade embargo against Cuba and build new relations between the two countries. Under the agreement signed by Cuba's National Council of Cultural Heritage and the Social Science Research Council, a New York-based non-profit organisation, the documents will be preserved and copied by digitalisation and microfilm. Copies will be stored in the JFK Library in Boston.
Ms Phillips expects to raise $500,000 through donations to fund the project. The Rockefeller Foundation had given an initial grant of $75,000.
"This is a beautiful initiative," said President Castro, who attended the ceremony dressed in his trademark green military fatigues. He said he learned about irregular warfare in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway's novel set in the Spanish Civil War, and had read the book three times before he took to the hills of eastern Cuba as a guerrilla fighter.