Hooked for life

In Havana, one week before President Obama unthawed half a century of cold relations with Cuba, I talked to the last fisherman to have known Ernest Hemingway. Oswald Carnero came from Cojimar — where the writer kept his boat, the Pilar — and was one of the villagers to whom Hemingway dedicated his Nobel Prize after publishing The Old Man and the Sea. Carnero had met him in 1950, aged 13. ‘He was bringing in a big marlin on his boat. He asked me if I could skin the fish.’

Thereafter Carnero sold Hemingway turtle flesh for soup and ran errands, scurrying back to the Pilar with bottles of White Horse, and going up to his house, the Finca Vigía. (‘Put your feet in the water,’ Hemingway told him, motioning at the pool, ‘Ava Gardener has just swum naked here.’)

Hemingway pumped Carnero for details of the Gulf Stream to incorporate in the film of The Old Man and the Sea, about an ageing Cuban fisherman who hooks a giant marlin.