Papa's Cuban Life Unfurled for British Academic

A lecturer from the University of Wales, Swansea, has been granted access to the unpublished archive of Ernest Hemingway’s life in Cuba, the first time the material has been made available to anyone outside the country.

Philip Melling, a reader in the department of American studies, has been given permission to study research conducted by Cuban writers and academics over the past 40 years.

The research has not been publicized outside Cuba and Dr Melling hopes the archive will uncover some "groundbreaking findings" in helping to understand the writer’s life and work in the country in which he lived for more than 30 years.

"The island was a huge influence on both him and his writing," said Dr Melling. "Additionally, Hemingway was a big influence on the Cuban people, particularly on Fidel Castro, and he is revered throughout the island, his books taught on all school and university curricula."

Dr Melling was granted access to the archived research after meeting the director of the Ernest Hemingway Museum and the Jose Marti International Journalism Institute, Gladys Rodriguez, at a Hemingway conference in Havana last year.

The lecturer is particularly interested in Hemingway’s work on indigenous cultures (Cuban-African culture was a preoccupation of his), which he believes could alter how Hemingway’s oeuvre is viewed as well as being "an important anthropological and sociological record".

Hemingway, who was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1954, lived in Cuba on and off from the 1930s until 1960, when ill health forced him to return to the US, where he was born. He left behind his book collection and all his correspondence. His house, La Finca Vigia, was turned into a museum and has been looked after by the Cuban government ever since. The writer committed suicide in 1961.

Dr Melling hopes to travel to Cuba in the spring.