El Floridita, where daiquiris, chandeliers, and Hemingway’s shadow still linger © Photo by Jane Ammeson

Hemingway's Havana

Exploring the tumultuous life and lasting legend of Ernest Hemingway on the island he called home

Jane Ammeson

4 January 2026

I drove into Old Havana in a pink Chevy convertible with pink and white striped leather seats and fins so sharp that even a shark would go green with envy. It’s exactly like the car my great aunt bought after her divorce, but had to sell when she remarried, as her new doctor husband said it was too sexy.

Yoani Sánchez / When a passport is news

Yoani Sánchez
Photo by ALEJANDRO ERNESTO

When a passport is news

In Cuba, confidence is hard to build after decades of bureaucratic opacity

Yoani Sánchez / La noticia de un pasaporte

YOANI SÁNCHEZ
6 FEB 2013 - 15:24 COT

The day didn't begin well. The sun seemed to start off on the wrong foot, as they say in Cuba. In the morning the authorities had informed the political prisoner Juan Ángel Moya that they would not let him leave the country, for reasons of "public interest." He was the first to find himself excluded from the migration reform announced on January 14, greeted with a mixture of hope and wariness.

My turn came in the afternoon. So I showed up at the Immigration Department to find whether, at last, the little book with blue cover stamped with the arms of the republic was ready for my use. The girl behind the window gave me an unencouraging answer, which confirmed that the day had got off to a bad start. "Come back next week. We're running behind time," she said, albeit with a nice smile.

Like any other Cuban accustomed to the opacity of the bureaucracy, I was not very confident. They had thought better of it, was the first thing that came to mind. Then I began to speculate whether the promise of letting me out had been only a carrot to induce me to shut down the blog, to silence my opinion, so that I would sit at home in perfect silence until the day of departure. I thought back over everything I had written since I applied for a passport, and gradually sank into gloom. A denunciation of the existence of drugs in Cuba; a furious criticism of the secrecy surrounding the promised Alba-1 fiber-optic cable; and a text explaining that I was not about to turn into another person just so I could cross the national border. In short, I had behaved rather badly in cyber-space and now the punishment had fallen on me - such was the sum of my thoughts during most of that Tuesday.

I kept telling myself that nowhere in the world should the issuing of a passport be news

Just as the working day was drawing to a close at the offices, doormen closing grilles on official buildings and civil servants preparing to go home, a message entered my answer machine. "Pick up the phone, it's Immigration," said a feminine voice at the other end of the line.

The first thing I wondered was how they knew I was at home. Of course, if it's the Interior Ministry they know everything, I joked before returning the call. But then the dark day brightened unexpectedly, and the same official told me that my passport was ready. In the few hours since sunrise I had gone through the oscillations of optimism, then pessimism, then a rush of enthusiasm. A concentrate of emotions like those experienced through five years in which I received as many as twenty refusals. Suspicion is not wiped out so easily, doubt is a thing that lingers.

I made my way back to the office, telling myself that nowhere in the world should the issuing of a passport be news. Nor should there be any big fuss about the question of whether a citizen can board a plane or not. But Cuba has the peculiarity of anomaly, where irregularity is the regular thing.

So as soon as I had commented on Twitter that I had my document, an avalanche of calls, congratulations and requests for interviews fell upon me. The night ended with my sister almost in tears on the line, after a year and a half in which the Strait of Florida has kept us apart.

Today I woke up with the blue booklet beside my bed. Once again I took it in my hands. The day is beginning on the right foot, I thought, as I flipped through its pages for the umpteenth time.

EL PAÍS

Guillermo Cabrera Infante / Bites from the Bearded Crocodile

Guillermo Cabrera Infante y Miriam Gómez
Photo by Sara Facio

Bites from the Bearded Crocodile

By Guillermo Cabrera Infante

The decline of the so-called Cuban cultural renaissance started when Virgilio Pinera came down the ladder of the Czech airplane that brought him back from Brussels via Prague. He deplaned with mincing steps and, fluttering like a tropical butterfly suddenly sprung alive from a collector’s case, stopped briefly and then kneeled and leaned forward to kiss the red Cuban soil – only to smack the tarmac instead. (This gesture proved to be some sort of near-miss-cum-hubris for, you see, the runway had recently been covered with a Russian blacktop.) Though it didn’t really all begin then, but a few months earlier when Lunes, the literary supplement of the newspaperRevolucion, on which Virgilio Pinera was one of the principal collaborators (the word was usually meant in its second sense), was banned and closed down for good. Only it didn’t begin then either, but when they censored and sequestered PM, a documentary sponsored by Lunes that didn’t have any political content to warrant the seizure. That was really the beginning of the end. But let’s start at the very beginning – which was when dictator Batista decided to flee instead of fighting and the 26th of July Movement took over the Government in the name of the Revolution, its martyrs and the poor people of Cuba.