Sailing to Hemingway’s Cuba

For Dave Schaefer on his 32-foot sloop Dream Weaver, the urge to see Cuba now and track down Ernest Hemingway’s old haunts was too strong to resist. The voyage began on Lake Champlain near Burlington, Vermont. Travelling alone, with friends joining as crew when they could, Schafer sailed through the historic Champlain Canal to the Hudson river, along the East coast and the Intracoastal Waterway, finally arriving at the keys. Leaving Key west, Schaefer sailed 90 miles across the Gulf Stream to Marina Hemingway in Havana. For the entire century, Cuba had been the stage for the glamorous and powerful; Teddy Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill, the mob years under Meyer Lansky, Krushchev and Kennedy bringing the world to the brink of war over missile installations, the disaster at the Bay of Pigs, the charisma of che, and endless embargoes. The last year of the millennium marked the centennial of Hemingway’s birth and the fortieth anniversary of Fidel’s Revolution…