Will the bell toll for Hemingway's Havana home?

A house sags in Havana - and not just any house, but Ernest Hemingway's favored residence, where he wrote such classics as "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and "The Old Man and the Sea."

And so, declaring the sorry state of Finca Vigía a threat to a piece of American cultural history, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has named the old farmhouse on a hillside overlooking the Cuban capital one of America's most endangered historic places. At the same time, it has announced a binational program to begin preservation of the Nobel-Prize-winning author's cherished "Outlook Farm."

What makes the hands-across-the-Straits-of-Florida project so noteworthy is not just the fact that it is the first time the National Trust has placed a site outside the United States on its list of America's most endangered historic places.

It is also that the designation and restoration project involve working with the regime of Fidel Castro - the Western Hemisphere's sole remaining nondemocratic government, the annual target of human rights organizations for imprisonment of dissidents, and an "outpost of tyranny" in the eyes of the Bush administration.

Given that context, the Finca Vigía project can be seen two ways: as a people-to-people cooperative project placing a common cultural interest above political antagonism; or as one more crack in the embargo on exchange with the hemisphere's last dictatorial regime.

For Richard Moe, the National Trust's president, it is clearly the former. "We are not trying to argue policy [with this designation], we are simply trying to get to Cuba to preserve this endangered place," he says, "and to do it by working within the context of the two nations."

So far the project entails only the travel of a survey team from the US to work with officials of the Cuban Culture Ministry to assess what is needed to preserve the colonial-era house where Hemingway lived from 1939 to 1960. Although the State and Treasury departments have granted the Trust a license for a survey team to travel to Cuba legally, Mr. Moe is careful to add, "We do not yet have a license to take in any financial resources to restore the house."

And whether or not that ever happens remains a question whose answer is mired as much in the politics of the Cuban-American community as anything else.

Already the Trust's initial look-see at Finca Vigía,planned for this summer, is raising heated objections from opponents of any dealings with Mr. Castro's Cuba, including key members of Congress.

Declaring herself "100 percent against US funds being used to refurbish properties in a terrorist country such as Cuba," Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, a Cuban-American, says, "I will do all I can to stop this nonsensical venture."

According to Alex Cruz, Representative Ros-Lehtinen's press secretary, the congresswoman on Friday wrote letters to the State Department, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), and the National Trust, seeking a reversal in the granting of the travel licenses.

How far she and other critics of the project will get with an administration that appears to have been convinced of the designation's cultural value remains to be seen.

Page: 1 | 2