This project offers a comprehensive analysis of how Cuban culture and language influenced Ernest Hemingway’s literature, biography, and aesthetic sensibility. “Aquí en la casa,” he wrote in 1950 from his home outside Havana, “hablamos español siempre.” The project aims to nuance the English-centric perspectives on Hemingway, using the letters he wrote in Spanish and reports from Spanish-language literary criticism bases of analysis. The correspondence (over 80 letters) has not been published or translated, and is—like much of the Spanish-language criticism of Hemingway’s work—virtually unknown to literary scholars based in the US. Upon discussing the project with Suzanne del Gizzo, editor of The Hemingway Review, I was invited to expand an article into a guest-edited instalment of The Hemingway Review. During a course release this spring, I will prepare revise this article, entitled “Cuba in Hemingway” for The Hemingway Review, work on a guest-edited instalment of the same journal, and prepare a proposal to submit to presses that expands the argument from the article and journal instalment into a monograph. The project will disseminate new material about Hemingway in Cuba and the role of the Spanish language in his literature; “Cuba in Hemingway” will also document the mutually influential and complementary cultural ties between the US and Cuba, examining Hemingway’s experience as a precursor to multicultural notions of citizenship.
