Latin American Network Information Center - LANIC

-DATE-
19840401
-YEAR-
1984
-DOCUMENT_TYPE-
ARTICLE
-AUTHOR-
F. CASTRO
-HEADLINE-
HOW ERNEST HEMINGWAY INFLUENCED CASTRO
-PLACE-
CUBA
-SOURCE-
PARADE MAGAZINE
-REPORT_NBR-
FBIS
-REPORT_DATE-
19840401
-TEXT-
How Ernest Hemingway Influenced

THE NOVELIST ERNEST Hemingway was Fidel Castro's first inspiration in the
art of guerrilla warfare.

I made this discovery when Castro turned to the question of literary
influences in the course of our weekend talks in Havana. Hemingway had
lived in a house in the small town of San Francisco de Paula, near Havana,
for a year or so after the 1959 revolution. Castro told me that the two had
met and talked two or three times.

"But," he said, "it was never a real conversation, despite the fact that
Hemingway's books exercised a certain influence on our guerrilla concepts."

"How so?" I asked him.

Castro said that the best example was From Whom the Bell Tolls, where
"everything takes place behind enemy lines, all action is in the rear
guard...then how the guerrilla groups live, how they moved, how they
remained alert how they acted when the cavalry arrived.

Castro said he read this book 1946-when he was 20 years old and seven years
before his first revolutionary feat-- "with great interest." Of course, he
said "I had ideas about the possibility of irregular warfare, but
Hemingway, in that work of his, had expressed everything--how the
guerrillas developed with absolute freedom in the rear guard of the enemy."

"All the action occurred behind Franco's lines," he added. "All the
personages-- the North American, they gypsy, others--were irregulars in the
rear guard. For example, the incident when they tried to blow up the
bridge, when they were aiming the machine gun, and the cavalry approached
almost 200 meters away, and the guerrillas withdrew. In this Hemingway
book, one could see and appreciate the possibilities of irregular warfare
because, in truth, nobody had taught us the ideas of that type of combat."
-END-


LANIC |