I have the impression that most people who used to read regularly and are now in their fifties or sixties once had a symbolic affair with Ernest Hemingway. In 1980s Cuba, profitability was never a serious consideration. Publishing houses flooded the streets with thousands of volumes sold for next to nothing—often cheaper than a plain cheese pizza. Even so, the books gathered dust in the shops. Among them, Hemingway’s complete works could be found without effort.

I first encountered him through A Moveable Feast—an intimate and nostalgic portrait of interwar Paris. It was easy to picture him roaming the city when it was still a vibrant hub for artists, writers, and intellectuals from across the globe, particularly those of the so-called “Lost Generation.” The stories unfolded over golden, crusty baguettes and lovesick wanderings, or over drinks shared with Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. The atmosphere was one of cafés, evening strolls, and literary salons. Nothing out of place, nothing it wasn’t meant to be.

Later I read The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Green Hills of Africa, in which he details his hunting experiences and reveals his barely concealed passion for violence and blood. The intellectual bond I had formed with him through his modest and almost wholesome Parisian adventures made me an unthinking accomplice to that carnage. I remember my visits to the humble Natural History Museum in Havana’s Capitolio. At first, I wandered its halls like Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente, driven by a nearly morbid love for wild creatures; later, like the Hemingway of those pages—killing whatever crossed my path.

My first doubts about the writer—still not well articulated—surfaced with his stories about boxing. He had brushed the subject in A Moveable Feast, but only in passing. In The Sun Also Rises—better known for its portrayal of bullfighting—and especially in Fifty Grand, boxing became a central and deliberate presence. Beneath it all, Hemingway’s literature revealed a man haunted by the mere possibility of weakness, one who embraced a disciplined, almost cautious violence as a way of life. The Old Man and the Sea, his most famous work, I read last—in English—because I wanted to practice the language, and more importantly, because it was short. That was the only reason.

I, too, was a fool, though a far more modest one: I smoked on public buses in the late ’80s, once shot a cat with an air rifle, threw potatoes at pedestrians from my balcony… I didn’t get into fights often, despite being raised between two solares. Perhaps later readings—my contact with Russian and German literature—shifted my spirit toward introspection, toward the quiet analysis of the human soul. I came to understand that violence leaves behind a greasy, indelible film on the heart—on both the one who suffers it and the one who witnesses it. I never pushed it far enough to suffer any lasting consequences. Suicide, too, is a form of violence. For a Catholic, it is an assault on the gift of life—a gift given, ultimately, by God. I sometimes wonder whether these violent traces are passed down through generations, slowly erased only by a century of good deeds.

Looking at the photograph of Margaux Hemingway my friend Claudio posted, I can’t help but see in her face a deep and desolate shame. Margaux took her own life, just like her grandfather. But unlike him, she couldn’t use decay as an excuse. Her death was a luminous act turned inward, committed at the height of her beauty and strength. Someone once told me, in a passing conversation, that none of it was really my fault—not even my father’s. If anyone was to blame, it was my grandfather. And even then, perhaps not even him.