Ernest Hemingway lived in Finca Vigia, Cuba, for 21 years. Until now, all two decades of his correspondence and writings were unavailable to US researchers because of the whole embargo situation.

Thanks to the efforts of Rep. James McGovern (D-Mass.) and the Cuban government, replicas of the 3000+ Finca Vigia documents are now in the JFK library along with the gigantic Hemingway collection of 100,000 writings, 10,000 pictures and all sorts of personal items that his 4th wife, Mary, had donated after his death.

The archival replicas include corrected proofs of “The Old Man and the Sea,” a movie script based on the novel, an alternate ending to “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and thousands of letters, with correspondence from authors Sinclair Lewis and John Dos Passos and actress Ingrid Bergman. The documents were previewed Thursday and will likely be available to researchers in late spring. […]

The microfilm copies at the JFK Library provide scholars a window into the period that occupied half of Hemingway’s writing life, which before left a “black hole” in Hemingway studies because the material was off-limits to biographers, Spanier said.

Rep. McGovern is an advocate of normalization of US-Cuba relations, so he hopes this is just the first step in that direction.

Some snippets of the correspondence and writings from Finca Vigia: