“They sat on the Terrace and many of the fishermen made fun of the old man and he was not angry. Others, of the older fishermen, looked at him and were sad. But they did not show it and they spoke politely about the current and the depths they had drifted their lines at and the steady good weather and of what they had seen.”

The Terrace Hemingway wrote about in The Old Man and the Sea was La Terraza, a fisherman’s bar in the small village of Cojimar, a 20-minute taxi ride from Havana. This is where Hemingway docked his boat, Pilar, and the bar, still there, is where he spent many an afternoon drinking with fishermen like Anselmo Hernández, an old man who was “thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.”