Word: fincas
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...Private World. Even though held in by injury and age, Hemingway's life-on a small plantation ten miles outside Havana, called Finca Vigia, or Lookout Farm-is still the special Hemingway blend of thought and action, artistry and nonconformity. The Hemingway of 1954 still has a bit of himself for the many sides of his life-and plenty left over to populate that private Hemingway world where the Hemingway heroes and heroines live their lives of pride and trouble, enduring with courage as long as they can, often destroyed but never defeated...
Rising up from one side of his villa is a white tower from which he can gaze meditatively at Havana and the sea, or at his own domain-the finca's 13 acres, including flower and truck gardens, fruit trees, seven cows (which provide all the household's milk and butter), a large swimming pool, a temporarily defunct tennis court. In the 60-foot-long living room, heads of animals Hemingway shot in Africa stare glassy-eyed from the walls. But most imposing of all are Hemingway's books. He consumes books, newspapers and random printed matter...
...Perpetual Weekend. For 15 years Hemingway has lived in Cuba. "I live here because I love Cuba-this does not imply a dislike for anyplace else-and because here I can get privacy when I write." But his life in Cuba is not quiet. Guests at the finca are apt to include friends from the wealthy sporting set, say Winston Guest or Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt; pals from Hollywood, such as Gary Cooper or Ava Gardner; Spanish grandees, soldiers, sailors, Cuban politicians, prizefighters, barkeeps, painters and even fellow authors. It is open house for U.S. Air Force and Navy...
...that day, army grudge-settlers had a fiesta. Castillo Armas, caught far off base at a friend's finca near Antigua, made it back to the capital tardily-and then only by leaving his car and skulking through ravines around an army roadblock. By dusk the army had forced him and the junta to agree to disband all irregular forces. Then the cadets and regular army soldiers marched the battered survivors of the anti-Communist Army of Liberation like P.W.s right through the capital's Sixth Avenue to a train that carried them back to their old headquarters...
Figueres, educated at M.I.T. and recently divorced from an American wife, is something of a phenomenon in Costa Rica. After college, he bought a barren finca in Cartago which he called La Lucha Sin Fin (Struggle Without End), in recognition of the farmer's never-ending battle with nature. There he learned firsthand about the peasants' problems, set up a private welfare state for his own workers. He built them clean bungalows, saw them well fed from a community vegetable farm and a dairy that provided free milk for every child. In 1948, when the outgoing government tried...