Display of Cuba photos ties Hemingway, Evans
By Coralie Carlson, Associated Press
April 29, 2004

KEY WEST, Fla. - In spring 1933, Ernest Hemingway had escaped the Depression on a borrowed boat to Cuba, where he fished, drank and gathered material for his next novel, To Have and Have Not.

For three weeks, he crawled through bars and bistros with a young Walker Evans, who would soon become known as one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century.

© Walker Evans Archive/The Metropolitan Museum Of Art
A young Walker Evans took this photo, titled Havana Citizen, in 1933. Evans became one of the greatest American photographers of the 20th century

But for decades, the tale of their friendship and influence on one another's work remained hidden in boxes in a Key West bar. Once opened, Benjamin "Dink" Bruce discovered 46 original photographs taken by Evans in Havana in 1933.

Bruce, together with the Key West historical society, unraveled the mystery of the photographs, and two Americans working together in the midst of a repressive Cuban dictator, Geraldo Machado.

The never-before-exhibited original photographs and the Hemingway-Evans story are on display through Dec. 15 at Key West's Museum of Art & History at the Custom House. A national tour through 2007 will follow.

" . . . if you look at Walker Evans' photographs and read Ernest Hemingway's writing, it's exactly the same style," Claudia Pennington, executive director of the Key West Art & Historical Society, said.

Descriptions of Evans' photos - including one showing a homeless man sleeping against a wall on a Havana street - appear in To Have and Have Not, which opens with this line: "You know how it is there early in the morning in Havana with the bums still asleep against the walls of the buildings; before even the ice wagons come by with ice for the bars?" Bruce, the son of Hemingway's right-hand man, Toby Bruce, discovered the pictures in boxes of artifacts his family recovered from a storage room at Sloppy Joe's, a favorite Hemingway watering hole.

After his suicide in 1961, Hemingway's fourth wife donated many of his belongings at Sloppy Joe's to the Kennedy Library in Boston and the Key West museum. The remaining items were left in storage and eventually moved to the Bruce family collection.

They included images of people lining up for bread, bodies with slit throats and a marquee of a movie theater playing A Farewell to Arms.

In his research, Bruce found a book, Walker Evans: Cuba, published by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

The one missing puzzle piece, Bruce said, was proof that the photos were printed and exchanged in Cuba. He returned to his collection of Hemingway artifacts and found a letter from Evans to Hemingway on stationery from a Western Union in Havana, addressed to the Cuban hotel where Hemingway was staying.

According to Pennington, the photos probably came into Hemingway's hands because Evans feared his negatives would be seized and destroyed by Machado operatives in Cuba, so he asked his friend to ferry the photos back to the United States aboard a boat, the Anita.

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