Guardian.co.uk by Conor Clarke in Havana and Ewen MacAskill in Washington

The dining room in Ernest Hemingway’s house, Finca Vigia in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba. Photo: Conor Clarke
The bullfighting posters are just as he left them, and so are the 9,000 books that line even the bathroom walls. The den, cluttered with mounted heads from hunting trips around the world, still has a well-stocked bar, with bottles of Old Forester bourbon and Gordon’s gin an arm’s length from his favorite sitting chair.

Finca Vigia, or Lookout Farm, 10 miles east of Havana, is the place Ernest Hemingway called home from 1939 to 1960, and it is there that the author’s abundant tastes, in literature and in life, are on display. Visitors can see where Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea, where he dined with Errol Flynn and where Ava Gardner was reported to have skinny dipped.

Hemingway liked trouble, and the chances are he would have enjoyed the fact that he is still creating it almost 50 years after his death. Finca Vigia has become a symbol of the struggle between the US and Cuba.

For the past two years, a group of American organizations has been working to restore the battered house and save the manuscripts and books. But US sanctions against Cuba have hindered the group’s attempts to collaborate with the Cuban government. The Bush administration’s response has been mixed, flitting between acquiescence and obstruction.

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