Episode 1 - Ernest Hemingway and Tony Oliva: : A Tale of How They Met (Prologue)

This (somewhat) fictional story is a tribute to two men whose love for Cuba and baseball is beyond question: Ernest Hemingway and Tony Oliva. In the summer of 1960, Hemingway was sixty years old and in failing health. He and his fourth wife, Mary, were forced to leave their bucolic estate southeast of Havana. For nearly twenty-two years, the Hemingways had made the Finca Vigía (i.e., ”Lookout Farm”) their home base, but now, under pressure from the U.S. government to leave Cuba, which was becoming more dangerous under the new Communist regime, they vacated their beautiful, fourteen-acre property just outside the little village of San Francisco de Paula. Meanwhile, Oliva was playing baseball for his district team in the Pinar del Río province in western Cuba. This story is part yarn, part fantasy and part truth. It is left to the listener and the reader to decide which parts are true and which are fiction.