Will the bell toll for Hemingway's Havana home?

President Bush has gone along with some food sales to Cuba, mostly as a gesture to American farmers looking to expand foreign markets. But the administration has resisted congressional efforts to ease the ban on travel by Americans to the communist island - even refusing the request of an Iraq war veteran to visit family there - and has reversed steps taken by the Clinton administration to facilitate family contacts.

The Trust's Mr. Moe says his organization stepped in after another organization already involved with Hemingway archives and memorabilia, Boston's Hemingway Preservation Foundation, was denied a license last year to take a survey team to look at the house.

"We convinced the people at State that this was a legitimate exception to the [travel-ban] policy," he says.

Moe says the designation of Hemingway's house simply recognizes "an important piece of cultural heritage for us as well as for the Cuban people," and says its preservation shouldn't offend anyone. "I think most people see this for what it is," he says; "it doesn't have a political dimension to it."

Of course preservation efforts anywhere rarely escape political connotations, whether because of association with a dark or controversial past, or because preservation of old sites is sometimes seen as a tactic for stalling development and modernization.

For example, the 2005 "endangered historic places" list issued by the Trust last week includes much of downtown Detroit and the "hallowed ground" corridor of Civil War battlefields in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, which the Trust says is threatened by suburban sprawl.

The additional strike the "Outlook Farm" project has going against it is that it involves the political hot potato of Cuba. Quips Ros-Lehtinen, "If the National trust has run out of legitimate US buildings to protect and refurbish, I can provide them with a very long list of historic buildings in my congressional district that can use some refurbishing and maintenance."

Just how far any binational preservation of Finca Vigía proceeds may depend on how the project is perceived: as simply the restoration of an old house with intrinsic cultural value, or as a site for Cuban tourism. "If Castro wants a pretty tourist attraction, let him pay for it," says Ros-Lehtinen.

Wayne Smith, director of the Cuba Project at the Center for International Policy in Washington and a former chief of the US Interests Section in Havana, notes that the Hemingway Foundation's request for a travel license last year was denied after critics labeled the project as a boon to Cuban tourism.

"My guess is that this year the thing was presented in a different light, and it went through," Mr. Smith says. Noting that Treasury's OFAC office "has a lot of new people," he says this year's license approval probably squeaked through on its "reasonable" cultural merits.

But Smith - a longtime advocate of more open relations with Cuba - says he doubts the travel license is any harbinger of a broader shift on ties to Cuba.

"This is very preliminary, but the real sign will be whether or not they can put in any money to restore the house," he says. "I doubt one travel license means there's a new direction on Cuba they're planning to take."

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