Let Cuba-specialised travel journalist Lydia Bell guide you in the footsteps of literary hero Ernest Hemingway, who made this island his home and playground. Along the way you’ll enjoy the best destinations, culture and food this intriguing island has to offer.
In Havana, Cuba’s jewelled capital, Valerie Hemingway, Hemingway’s personal assistant and daughter-in-law, will accompany you to Finca Vigia, where she lived with the Hemingways during the last months of Ernest’s life. She will then travel on with you to the exquisite blue waters of Cuba’s north coast, where Hemingway loved to fish for marlin. With Lydia and further Cuban guides always on hand, too, to accompany, interpret and explain, this seven-day trip of a lifetime will additionally include colonial Trinidad and the lush nature of Vinales.
Valerie Hemingway’s memoir Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways offers a unique perspective on the final years of novelist Ernest Hemingway by telling the story of the author’s relationship with one of the world’s most famous writers. Valerie Danby-Smith was a young journalist working in Spain in 1959, when her editor instructed her to track down Hemingway and interview him. Danby-Smith and Hemingway struck up a friendship, and the author invited the nineteen-year-old journalist to join him as his personal secretary. She held the position for about two years before leaving. But her closeness with Hemingway continued almost until the day when the author committed suicide. Later Danby-Smith joined Hemingway’s widow in sorting through the manuscripts and papers the author left behind. She also married Hemingway’s son Gregory, and lived with him for over two decades.
Those tangled relationships are chronicled in Running with the Bulls. “I felt that Hemingway was very affable and kind, when I met him,” the author told James Plath in an interview in Remembering Ernest Hemingway. “I didn’t even know if I would get the interview, and I was in a way surprised but not in a way surprised to—not because of him, but because I tended, if I wanted to do something, to find a way to do it.” Hemingway invited Danby-Smith to join him and his entourage in Pamplona, Spain, for a week for the famous running of the bulls—in which young men chase wild bulls through the streets of the city. “How I became the secretary, at the end of the week everyone was planning the future and a lot of his guests were going down to Malaga for the famous 60th birthday party,” the author told Plath, “and so he or Bill Davis said to me, ‘Are you coming down to the birthday party?’ and I said, ‘Oh, no, I have to earn a living. I have to go back to Madrid and continue working.’ It was after that, Ernest sort of said to Bill, ‘Well, if Valerie has to work, why can’t she work for us?'”
With Cuba Private Travel you will…
Visit Finca Vigia, Hemingway’s beloved Havana farm, accompanied by the writer Valerie Hemingway, Ernest’s personal assistant and later, daughter-in-law. Enjoy rare and exclusive inside access to the farm, which is usually seen from the outside
Take in the atmospheric bars, restaurants, and hotels where the Cubaphile novelist drank, ate, lived, and worked.
Drop into the sleepy fishing village Cojimar, where Hemingway fished twice a week from his boat, Pilar, followed by a tapas session we will replicate.
Enjoy unique cultural experiences and interesting introductions such as private access to the Cuban National Ballet, private tours of small galleries and famous artists’ studios, a behind-the-scenes look of Havana’s grandest old mansions, and more.
Travel on via catamaran through the idyllic waters of the north coast, where Hemingway loved to fish, getting off the boat in Cayo Guillermo, where Hemingway set key passages from The Old Man and The Sea. Kayak, sunbathe, spa, and be spoiled in the lovely restaurants.
Discover Vinales, the Unesco-protected tobacco-growing valleys with its riding, hiking, and mysterious limestone peaks.
Enjoy the magic atmosphere of cobbled Trinidad, Cuba’s colonial set piece, and its glorious, isolated valleys.
