“The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck,” wrote Ernest Hemingway of the title character in “The Old Man and the Sea.” “Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.”
To anyone who had ever laid eyes on Gregorio Fuentes, it was clear that Hemingway was describing Fuentes, the longtime captain of his boat, the Pilar, on which the author went marlin fishing during his many years in Cuba.
When the 104-year-old Fuentes died on Jan. 13, tributes came from across the world: Fuentes, people said, had been the inspiration for Hemingway’s classic novel; the grizzled fisherman and the fabled writer had been blood brothers.
But the old man who was so praised last week may well have been much less a muse than a simple man swept along by fate.
Born July 11, 1897 in the Canary Islands — not Cuba — Fuentes came to the island at the age of 8, when he was orphaned on a ship on which his father had been a cook. He settled in Cojimar, about 10 minutes by car from Havana.
“Everyone loved my father,” said America Fuentes, his 77-year-old daughter. “All his life, he was loved.”
By the time Gregorio Fuentes met Hemingway — one day in the early ’30s when he escorted the Pilar through the harbor with his own boat — he had acquired a ruddy exterior, a gruff manner and a host of stereotypical Cuban vices, including cigars and rum.
His notoriety in Cojimar rested on his uncanny ability to survive hurricanes; Fuentes, it seemed, could be out in the middle of the sea during a storm and return unscathed.
When Fuentes met him, Hemingway was well into his prime and had been suffering from a host of physical ailments and the ill-effects of celebrity. Cuba, which would be his home for more than 30 years, was refuge. Fuentes, whose English matched Hemingway’s rudimentary Spanish, may have been the perfect companion.
“What I have been told is that Gregorio told Hemingway, `Don’t worry, whenever you’re in Cuba, I’ll take care of you’ — and that’s what happened,” said Ernesto Lopez, a doctor at one of Cojimar’s neighborhood clinics. “But as much as they were great friends, he also worked for Hemingway.”
`Feesh, Papa’
In fact, in a 1965 article in Atlantic Monthly, Robert Manning describes a 1954 visit to Hemingway in Cuba in which Fuentes is depicted as one of several servants. The old man’s only words are while they’re fishing on the Pilar. “Feesh, Papa, feesh,” Manning quotes him as saying.
Over time, Fuentes — frequently accompanied by a boy from the village who would also be echoed in “The Old Man and the Sea” — went with Hemingway on hundreds of fishing trips. Often, they hung out at a cozy Cojimar bar called Las Terrazas. Hemingway even attended America’s wedding.
“What I always heard, really, was that `The Old Man and the Sea’ was Gregorio’s story, that Hemingway pretty much transcribed it, although in his own majestic style,” said Lopez, in an opinion widely shared in Cuba.
But that is not what Manning suggests in his article, based on his interview with Hemingway.
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“I knew two or three things about the situation, but I didn’t know the story,” the writer told Manning about the creation of “The Old Man and the Sea.” “I didn’t even know if that big fish was going to bite for the old man when it started smelling around the bait. I had to write on, inventing out of knowledge.”
Only a model
In other words, Fuentes may have been the model for the old man but hardly the spark: Hemingway had to find the arc of the story as in any other narrative, by himself.
By the time Hemingway left Cuba — he supported Fidel Castro but left almost as soon as Castro took over — Fuentes had possession of the Pilar, which he frequently said was a gift from his American friend.
But that was less an act of generosity than it sounds: Hemingway gave Fuentes the boat only after the Cuban government refused him a permit to destroy it.
When Hemingway killed himself in 1961, Fuentes and other local fishermen donated pieces of bronze for a bust of the writer that still stands on Cojimar’s shore. The monument lists Hemingway’s birth year as 1898 — wrong by one year (should be 1899).
“That was what Gregorio said,” explained Arturo Arango, the author of “El Libro de La Realidad” and a 16-year resident of Cojimar. “And he was Hemingway’s friend, so everyone went along with it.”
After that, Fuentes faded into obscurity. Every now and again, a rare foreigner — usually Russians or Eastern Europeans, the only regular visitors to Cuba then — would wander into Cojimar and somebody might uncover the old man’s past. Mostly, no one cared.
It wasn’t until the ’90s — when Cuba’s economy collapsed after the fall of the Soviet Union and tourism became the vehicle to keep the island alive — that Fuentes came back into the public’s conscience.
“Suddenly, tourism made him relevant,” Arango said.
Feeding the tourists
At first, it was a trickle of academics and journalists, some of whom said Fuentes would trade an interview for a bottle of rum — a characterization both Fuentes and his family resented. They’d ask Fuentes about “The Old Man and the Sea.”
Then Las Terrazas went through several renovations and finally settled into a nostalgic mode that exploited its connection to Hemingway. The owners gave Fuentes his own table and, in exchange for his authenticating presence, free meals.
By then, Fuentes had adapted the story of Santiago, Hemingway’s luckless fisherman, as his own. Now he himself had caught that marvelous marlin, and lost it too. Hemingway’s fiction became Fuentes’ reality.
No longer did foreigners have to know he existed, or to struggle to find him. Las Terrazas’ staff would point out the old man to any tourist who wandered in, prod him to share a memory or two, and even snap a picture with Fuentes for the visitor.
In this way, Fuentes became a tropical version of Ishi, the native American rustic that the University of California publicized as “The Last Wild Man in North America” in the early 1900s. Like Ishi, Fuentes was a relic from a romanticized past on display for anyone willing to pay to look.
Eventually, his family also became part of the act, putting up a sign at Fuentes’ neat white corner house that announced visiting hours. Occasionally, tourist buses would stop by. Although pay was not required, it was expected.
As the 21st Century approached, Fuentes remained lucid, but he got crankier. He could still be convinced to tell a story or two but they had become packaged, and the old man told them almost by rote. Eventually, he became ill with cancer, and though he had constant medical care, it became almost impossible to make public appearances.
The day he died, Fuentes was to have received a tribute at Cojimar’s only church. He was buried within hours of his last breath in nearby Guanabacoa, in a simple but well cared for cemetery. Only about 40 people came to the burial.
Arango wasn’t surprised by the low turnout.
“In reality, he was a pretty common guy, like dozens of others in Cojimar,” he said. “He just got lucky he worked for Hemingway, and that he lived to be 104.”