-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-