His eyes were cheerful and undefeated until the end

When Papa Hemingway's Pal Died

BY ALBOR RUIZ

"Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same colour [sic] as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated."
He was describing Santiago, the fisherman of his novel, "The Old Man and the Sea," but Ernest Hemingway could have been talking about Gregorio Fuentes. The real-life Cuban fisherman is said to have been the model for the old man.
Fuentes died Jan. 13, 2002 at his home in Cojímar, the fishing town 10 miles east of Havana where Papa set his literary masterpiece.
The Cuban sailor was 104 when cancer got the best of him, but friends and family attest to the fact that his eyes, just like those of the old man in the book, remained cheerful and undefeated until the very end.
The novel tells the agonizing story of an ancient fisherman fighting with heart and soul to reel in a gigantic fish. "The Old Man and the Sea" won the writer a Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and was partly responsible for his 1954 Nobel Prize in literature.
Widely thought to be the novelist's inspiration for the weather-beaten sailor, the cigar-smoking Fuentes credited another old, anonymous Cuban fisherman.
"I was with Hemingway when he got the idea for 'The Old Man and the Sea,' " he recalled in 1999, in an interview with USA Today.
Fuentes, who captained Hemingway's yacht,the Pilar, for 20 years, remembered they were sailing along Cuba's north coast when they came across an old man in a small boat trying to reel in a marlin. He was battling sharks that had completely surrounded him.
"We stopped and offered to help, but the old man shouted for us to get away," Fuentes said at the time.
"Later, we heard the old man had died, which saddened Papa deeply. I know that is why he wrote the book."
It was friendship at first sight for Fuentes and Ernesto, as Cubans simply called the famous writer.
"You and me, we're like brothers," Hemingway would tell Fuentes.
They met in 1928, when the fisherman rescued the writer, whose boat had run out of fuel off Cuba's coast during a tropical storm. Hemingway moved to the island from Key West in 1940 and Fuentes became the skipper of his yacht.

Drinking buddies
During the 20 years the writer lived in Cuba, the two men would go out fishing and would share the warm sun, the clear moon and more than a shot or two of golden Cuban rum. Hemingway enjoyed his skipper's company, and Fuentes knew he had become part of the writer's literary imagination.
Fuentes was born July 18, 1897, in the Canary Islands but arrived in Cuba in his early adolescence, never to leave again. Not long ago, he was still a common sight at the restaurant Las Terrazas in Cojímar, looking out into the sea and telling those who cared how he and his friend used to "come here" to savor a good seafood meal.
Until 1960, when Hemingway moved back to the U.S. for medical treatment (he committed suicide in 1961), Cuba was the backdrop not only for "The Old Man and the Sea," but also for many other of his writings.
Cubans liked the larger-than-life, bearded Americano who loved drinking mojitos at Old Havana crusty bars. They also understood his greatness, and El Vigía, the farm where he lived outside the Cuban capital, is today a widely visited museum dedicated to remembering his life and works.
But with the death of Fuentes, skipper, friend, fellow adventurer and literary inspiration, Hemingway's memory also died a little. No one else in Cuba was as close to him as was the fisherman. And no one else can truly say, as Fuentes could, "I remember him every day of my life."