We've all seen the pictures of the 1950s American cars on Cuban streets, and even though we aren't allowed to visit the Forbidden Isle we think we have some faint idea of what it's all about. And then some of us find out different if we are lucky enough to cross the Straits of Florida. Kathy drove four hours to Miami earlier this month, then flew an hour to Havana and took a few pictures of her cultural exchange with the Godless communists across the water.
She was part of a Key West Botanical Garden trip to Cuba, and on that trip she traveled in a group that included someone intimately associated with Ernest Hemingway in some manner I can no longer recall, and thus it was she got a rare private tour of the writer's home in Cuba. When she showed me her pictures I begged to post them here and eventually she yielded a glimpse into the rare world that was Ernest Hemingway's favorite tropical retreat, Finca Vigia.
In English the house name means "Lookout Farm" and it is pronounced feenka vee-hee-ah, approximately, with the emphasis on the hee. It lies just southeast of Havana, in a suburb apparently known as San Francisco de Paula, close to the main autopista to Cienfuegos and miraculously enough you can look it up in Google maps! The home was built in 1886 by a Catalan architect who seems to have enjoyed creating a light and airy tropical environment very different to the Hemingway House in Key West, which I wrote about here July 17th 2008.
For Key West, Hemingway is a meal ticket and his stay in the city, which ended in 1938 with a divorce and the arrival of the completed Overseas Highway, is touted as one of the city's major claims to fame. Finca Vigia on the other hand has been closed to tourists by the Cuban government though I have read that they do allow some visitors to stand outside and look in these days. Naturally, thanks to the preposterous continuing embargo I am unable to verify that myself...
The World Monument's Fund has, according to the Internet placed it among the one hundred most endangered sites, but there again the house has apparently received major maintenance and now appears in good shape, at least from the pictures. 
The claim is that the house has been left exactly as it was when Hemingway left for the last time in 1960, down to the place settings on the dining room table and the location of the books scattered around the house. 
I don't suppose there is any way to verify this for sure of course, but by all accounts it is entirely possible that that is the case as the house still looks lived in- in 1950s style! Furthermore his boat Pilar, still showing it's home port of Key West, Fla, is restored and kept in a cradle under a roof on the grounds of the finca, fully fifteen kilometers from the sea...
Hemingway bought the home in 1939 after his wife apparently found an ad for it in the paper. He shot himself while in Idaho in 1961 so he used this house a lot longer than the ten years attributed to him in Key West.
Furthermore I have to say I have always found it profoundly odd that the Hemingway home in Key West is privately owned. There is something unnatural to me that a building that is claimed so forcefully by the public imagination in the US isn't actually a National Monument, but there it is. Paradoxically in Cuba where everything belongs to the state, more or less,the Hemingway home is perfectly preserved and at the same time largely inaccessible.
While the architecture is very different the interior touches, all those dead animal heads are definitely Hemingway's style:
I read somewhere that Hemingway had a library of some 9,000 volumes in the house and apparently they are all catalogued by the caretakers. And a few of them by Kathy too:
And I have no idea what this member of the party was photographing, if indeed that was what he was doing:
This lot look rather studious:
I also read that Hemingway had a collection of records, classical and jazz, and that his phonograph still works. That one I don't know, but the records are in the pictures:
I wish I could have been there but I gleaned what I could from Kathy's pictures, little details but stuff that one day soon we will all be able to see in person, perhaps:
Just one hundred miles south of where I'm sitting, and it might as well be on the dark side of the moon. 
A while ago someone asked me to do an essay on Captain Outrageous and I wasn't really sure I could pull it off. I was encouraged by the arrival at the Conch Republic Bed races, of a Captain Outrageous Cushman which I photographed as much as I could before it pulled away heading back to it's home base at the Fairvilla store:
I'm a bit vague on the details as I only ever met Captain Outrageous in passing but I believe he was a financial wizard Up North and he decided to do the old fashioned thing and drop out and tune in to his inner muse which produced some particular artwork:
The larger than life colors and the comic book like characters are pure captain Outrageous, and once seen never confused with someone else's work. He liked to paint vehicles but he would transform any utilitarian article into something worth looking at.
A van he painted was driven by a man who lived in my marina a few years back and it was a novel on wheels, but even something as small as a bicycle could get the Captain's attention:
Even though I am no collector I regret now that I didn't get myself something painted by the artist. He died a a year or so ago, shortly after he opened in his own gallery downtown. So now the only way to get a piece of Captain Outrageous's art is to buy it.
Or, if you are lucky you may stumble across a piece of it parked around town. Some owners are I expect, hoarding his irreplaceable work, but you'd be amazed how much of his rolling art is...rolling around town and in daily use.
His website is still up and functioning, so it might be best for those that are interested to zip on over and see the late great Captain Outrageous in his own, posthumous words:
It was time to haul the Bonneville to Pure Triumph in Fort Lauderdale for the major service that is due every 12,000 miles for the Bonneville. The motorbike is actually at 26,000 miles which is due to the fact that after the break-in period it got it's first proper service at 2,000 miles, so I am pretty much on top of the appropriate service intervals. This one was a doozy involving replacement of fluids filters and a top to bottom check. Cable lubrication, fuel hose replacement, you name it, they did it and the bill reflected their involvement. $1080 later, I have my Bonneville back and I am confident it is in tip top shape, or will be after I fork over another $300 for a new front brake rotor which is scheduled for replacement in early June. I used a non-Triumph brake pad which was hard enough to dig grooves in the disc. I am sticking with Triumph parts from here on, live and learn:
At least the rotor replacement job will be a matter of an hour so I will be able to ride the motorcycle up to Fort Lauderdale which I will enjoy a good deal more than driving the trailer.I noticed a couple of expensive Harleys on a trailer being towed instead of ridden. I noticed them because they were trundling down Highway One on their side stands which I learned a few years ago is the worst way to trailer a motorcycle.
It swayed horribly over every bump but it survived the journeys. One thing I learned from Vespa Fort Lauderdale was how to trailer my GTS, because when I first went to pick it up (in my own trailer) they sold me a rig to trailer it properly, balanced on it's front wheel and steadied from the handlebars:
It was a good thing I learned because the GTS kept crapping out on me and had to be towed back and forth so often I got a letter from the Sunpass people asking me if i wanted an upgrade for a trailer pass on the turnpike (no joke). Happily the Bonneville is proving to be more resilient but when it goes for a service it does have to suffer the trailering indignity. At least now I know how to do it right. 
The handbar strap I got for the GTS from the Vespa dealer still works on the Bonneville:
The loops go over the ends of the bars and extra loops stick out to which you attach the straps:
The straps compress the forks and press the front wheel hard against the front of the trailer holding the entire bike balanced and in compression:
Somehow this balancing act works perfectly if the bike is lined up properly and you tighten the straps evenly. The magazines assure us the forks suffer no damage from being compressed thusly. Using tis extremely simple system I can squeeze the 500 pound Triumph into my four foot by six foot utility trailer which was a perfect fit for the Vespa 250.The trick to loading the Triumph is to get everything prepared ahead of time. I lay out my straps and rags, which I use to cushion the straps against the sharp edges of the trailer. I usually put the machine into first gear and roll it up the ramp as fast as I can.
I laid down the plywood floor to give better support to the motorbike, but also to the side stand which I pull out once the Bonneville is in the trailer and blocked by first gear:
And just to prove to Jack riepe that my motorcycle and I aren't one and the same here I am waiting urgently for the doors to open so I could use the facilities:
For my money it looks fine on it's own:
And indeed I do prefer riding to trailering, but self sufficiency is a great thing. 
