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Ernest Hemingway as a public and literary figure maintains an ongoing connection to Cuba more than half a century after leaving the island in July of 1960, one year before his suicide in Ketchum, Idaho. This cultural link exists not only in the many places that the American author frequented during his more than two decades in Cuba-such as his Finca Vigía residence in San Francisco de Paula, the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana, and his two favorite downtown watering holes, the Floridita Bar and La Bodeguita del Medio-but also in contemporary Cuban film, documentaries, essays, and even crime fiction.1 Adiós, Hemingway (2001) by Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a mystery novel that features two parallel narratives, one with a fictional recreation of Hemingway in 1950's Cuba, and a second with a contemporary criminal investigation of a cold case related to the American writer.2 With this juxtaposition of the past and present in Cuba, Padura not only presents an evaluation of Hemingway's life and work on the island, but also establishes an important contrast between these two periods in recent Cuban history.
Adiós, Hemingway begins with a short introduction that explains why Padura decides to continue writing about the former police detective turned private bookseller Mario Conde, the protagonist of the Las Cuatro Estaciones mystery series of 1991-1997. Padura writes that while working on La novela de mi vida on Cuban poet José María Heredia, his Brazilian publishers at Companhia Das Letras asked him to participate in the Literatura ou Morte collection, a series of crime novels featuring authors such as Borges, Stevenson, and Rimbaud as characters in each book. Padura quickly chose Hemingway as his subject, a novelist "con quien h[a] tenido por muchos años una encarnizada relación de amor-odio" (10). Padura also notes that he decided to "pasarle mis obsesiones al Conde-como h[a] hecho tantas otras veces-, y convertirlo en el protagonista de la historia" (10), which means that Adiós, Hemingway is more a subjective consideration of Hemingway as a person and as a writer than it is a traditional crime novel. More important, as Padura has noted in a magazine interview, all of the Mario Conde books are actually "falsos policíacos" that serve as "un pretexto para tratar otros intereses míos, que tienen...