Photos by Bob Hoover, Post-Gazette Valerie Hemingway at the Hotel Victoria in Havana. The plaque honors Gabriela Mistral, a Chilean poet who won the Nobel Prize in 1945 and stayed at the Hotel Victoria in 1938.

By Bob Hoover, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

HAVANA -- Cuba is a day's boat ride from Key West across the Florida Straits, which once teemed with marlin.

Ernest Hemingway first made the crossing in the summer of 1932 with a Key West bootlegger named Joe Russell at the helm. Russell's bar would earn him some fame. He called it Sloppy Joe's.

	Hemingway's framed signature appears in the lobby of the Ambos Mundos Hotel. Click photo for larger image. Related stories: Papa's life is Cuban theme park In Cuba, they still remember 'Papa' Hemingway

The fishing was great. Hemingway, known even at 33 for lending a little fiction to his own life, claimed he caught 19 big fish that summer and gave the meat away on the Havana docks.

It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship between Havana and Hemingway, one that would last 28 years.

The writer bought his own craft, the Pilar, in 1934, for fishing and, briefly, a grandiose scheme to track Nazi submarines in 1943 before the U.S. Navy put an end to the foolhardy affair.

His regular haunts in Old Havana, the original Spanish settlement, and several docks away from the center city, are preserved today as shrines to the writer still revered by the Cubans as Papa.

While the spots take a backseat to the Finca Vigia, his restored 20-acre estate 10 miles east of Havana, they are part of the lore of visiting Havana, must-see stops for tourists.

	Entrance to the Ambos Mundos Hotel, a Hemingway favorite. Click photo for larger image.

"It's nothing more than an industry," said Valerie Hemingway, who married the writer's youngest son, Gregory, in 1966, five years after his father committed suicide. Her husband died in 2001.

"The Cubans continue to keep a tight hold on Papa," she said earlier this month in Havana. "They've created a 'Hemingway trail' of attractions you can visit. Personally, I think the whole Hemingway thing has been beaten to death."

Mrs. Hemingway became the author's personal assistant in 1959 when she was 19. She is one of the few surviving non-Cubans with memories of the finca (Spanish for farm) and Hemingway's final days there.

Her 2006 book, "Running With the Bulls," is the story of her time with Papa and his fourth wife, Mary. Her memories of the Havana days are told without the romantic twists favored by the Cubans.

"Now, at the Floridita, Ernest never stood in the corner of the bar, leaning on it," she says. "We all sat in the middle having a drink until our table was ready."

Kathleen DeWalt Room 511 of Ambos Mundos is now a Hemingway museum. Under glass are one of his typewriters and spectacles.

The Floridita, on Obispo Street, was Hemingway's watering hole after a day of fishing, where he drank a double rum and grapefruit juice. His record is 12 in one sitting.

Now, well-scrubbed and painted, the bar immortalizes its most famous customer with a bronze statue of a grinning Papa leaning on the bar in the far left corner.

Most days, at 4 p.m., the bartender places a "Papa Doble" in front of the statue.

When I wandered in, under the watchful eye of the doorman who's there to keep the average Cuban out, I, too, ordered a Papa Doble, as many tourists have before me.

My companion asked for a daiquiri, supposedly invented at the Floridita as well. Each drink was $6, long on juice and sugar, short on rum.

The next stop on the trail was the Ambos Mundos Hotel at Obispo and Oficios streets, Hemingway's Havana headquarters in the 1930s.

His favorite room, 511, is now a museum -- admission $2.40. Alfredo Jose Estrada, in his book "Havana, Autobiography of a City," says the room cost $2 a day when Hemingway stayed there.

It's a decent-sized room with a window overlooking the harbor and a cramped alcove for a bed.

"It was a wonderful place to make love but not to write," says Gladys Rodriguez, Hemingway expert and former director of the museum at the Finca Vigia.

That's why journalist Martha Gelhorn, soon to be the novelist's third wife, insisted on finding a bigger place in 1939, leading Hemingway to the finca and ending their days at the Ambos Mundos.

The hotel today is tastefully restored, painted a salmon shade on the outside. In its plush lobby decorated in 1920s decor is a cage elevator with an operator.

We took it to the rooftop restaurant on the sixth floor with a stunning view of El Morro, the 16th-century Spanish fortress and lighthouse at the harbor's mouth.

My final stop on the Hemingway Trail was the fishing village of Cojimar, near the finca, where the Pilar was docked. Today it's a uniformly dull collection of post-revolutionary stucco homes and an abandoned inlet where the Cojimar River reached the sea.

It was here where the Old Man of "The Old Man and the Sea" lived and kept his boat.

The only attractions are La Terraza, Hemingway's eating and drinking place, and a bronze bust of the writer looking out to sea.

The local fishermen rounded up scrap bronze in the 1960s to make the likeness, although this Papa has an odd resemblance to Russia's Vladimir Lenin.

La Terraza stands out from its dull neighbors. Small and cramped, its dining room offers a view of the water.

I never made it to the Hemingway Dock in Miramar, a Havana neighborhood of once upscale homes and foreign embassies. Hemingway used the dock for a fishing contest named after him in 1950, a competition won by Fidel Castro 10 years later.