Retrieves Ernest Hemingway's Writings
05/1961 AD helped
From The John F Kennedy Precedential Library and Museum, The Journey to the John F. Kennedy Library
Soon after Hemingway's suicide in 1961, the Cuban government told Mary Hemingway they were making a museum of the Finca Vigia, the Hemingways' Cuban home. The Hemingways had not lived in Cuba since the late fifties, and the Finca and its furnishings, the Pilar, and a Havana bank vault full of Hemingway's manuscripts remained in Cuba. Relations between Cuba and the United States were very tense--this was just after the Bay of Pigs--and U.S. citizens could not travel to Cuba. William Walton, a journalist and artist and Mary's friend from World War II, asked his friend President John F. Kennedy for help in getting Mary to Cuba. Within a few hours all was arranged.
As Mary recalled in an interview in the Hemingway Collection and in How It Was, Hemingway "never discarded anything but magazine wrappers and three-year-old newspapers, [and] had managed to stuff to its brim almost every drawer of the Finca." Mary and her crew sorted the important items from the junk, burning the latter in a bonfire below the tennis courts. Fidel Castro visited and then permitted Mary to put her boxes of papers and paintings on a shrimp boat bound for Tampa. Everything else is still in the Finca Museum.
Subjects Who or What helped?
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John F. Kennedy (JFK, John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy) 5th President of the Uni...
Objects To Whom or What was helped?
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Mary Welsh Hemingway American journalist and ...
Events in 1961 MORE
