Cuba and the U.S. need to cooperate on fisheries

Cuba and the U.S. need to cooperate on fisheries
BY JOHN HEMINGWAY AND PATRICK HEMINGWAY
October 8, 2014

Recently, we traveled to Cuba to help celebrate two important
anniversaries honoring the legacy of our grandfather, Ernest Hemingway.

For five days, with a group of Americans that included marine scientists
under the auspices of the Latin America Working Group of Washington,
D.C., we experienced the hospitality and warmth of the Cuban people as
we celebrated our grandfather and had discussions on promoting U.S.-Cuba
cooperation to protect the marlin, tuna and other game fish of the
Florida Straits that are such an important part of the image that
Hemingway's generations of readers have had and continue to have of the
man and of his work.

Of the two anniversaries, the first was a celebration of Ernest's
arrival in Cuba 80 years ago aboard his beloved fishing boat, the Pilar,
after a trip across the Gulf Stream from Key West to Havana. The other
anniversary is of our grandfather's 1954 Nobel Prize in literature.

He later donated the gold medal to the people of Cuba, saying, "This
award belongs to Cuba, because my works were created and conceived in
Cuba, in my village of Cojimar, of which I am a citizen."

On our first day, we traveled by boat to Cojimar harbor, cruising down
the coast in fishing boats similar to the Pilar from the Hemingway
Marina near Havana. More than 100 people greeted and embraced us that
morning in an outpouring of love and respect that made us realize just
how deeply Ernest felt about being a citizen of Cojimar. We talked with
fishermen in their 80s who had known Ernest when they were boys, and we
hugged and posed for photos with groups of school children.

We had lunch at his favorite restaurant, La Terraza, sitting at his
favorite table and looking at many photographs of him on the wall.

A few days later, we helped celebrate the 60th anniversary of our
grandfather's Nobel Prize in literature, given to him in large part for
his enduring tale of a Cuban fisherman's struggle to capture a giant
marlin with just bait and tackle and a tiny skiff, and of his eventual
defeat.

"The Old Man and the Sea" is a classic of American literature, and we
were afforded the rare honor and privilege of seeing and holding the
actual Nobel medal, which our Cuban hosts graciously brought to the
Finca Vigia from its usual repository at the sanctuary of La Virgen de
la Caridad del Cobre outside Santiago de Cuba. Touring our grandfather's
house and lingering over the photographs, books and other personal items
collected over a lifetime -- which included living in Cuba for more than
20 years -- we could easily see just how much he truly was a citizen of
this island.

In addition to being an avid sports fisherman, our grandfather was a
devoted naturalist who kept meticulous records of the marlin, tuna and
other varieties for which he fished in the Gulf. In the summer of 1934
he joined forces with the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia to
learn more about these highly migratory species, and the specimens and
records he collected and kept now exist as the Hemingway Archive at the
museum in Philadelphia.

Our grandfather acquired this visceral need to explore and understand
nature from his father, Dr. Clarence Hemingway, on fishing trips they
took into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the early 1900s. In turn,
this passion was passed down to our grandfather's sons and, finally,
from our father to his children. This love and respect for the natural
world and all its resources is a family legacy, one that we would like
to see manifested in U.S.-Cuba cooperation to protect the resources of
the Florida Straits, despite restrictions on trade, travel and
scientific cooperation against Cuba in place since 1961.

By protecting those ocean resources that are vitally important to the
tourism and sport fishing economies of both South Florida and Cuba, we
hope to honor our grandfather's passion for cataloguing and
understanding the natural world. We find it hard to believe that someday
the giant tuna and marlin that were the inspiration for so much of his
art and life might no longer be found in the Florida Straits, but we
know that this danger exists. The twin pressures of pollution and
over-fishing are real.

We hope that our journey to Cuba will begin to address these problems
and restore balance to an important and delicate ecosystem that is of
vital importance to both the American and Cuban people. We also hope
that the cooperative nature of our trip will help demonstrate that
better relations between the United States and Cuba are possible and
desirable.

It's time to move beyond more than 50 years of antagonism to normalized
relations.

John Hemingway and Patrick Hemingway wrote this under the auspices of
the Latin-American Working Group in Washington, D.C. This is reprinted
from the Miami Herald.

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