With the recent death of Fidel Castro, we thought our readers would appreciate Seymour Topping’s appraisal of him in WAG’s November issue
http://www.wagmag.com/after-hemingway/. Top, as he’s affectionately known, was managing editor of The New York Times when he met the controversial Cuban leader in 1983. He discovered a man who, despite bedeviling 11 American presidents, had an abiding affection for American culture.
“He told us he had read everything that Ernest Hemingway wrote,” Top remembers. “In particular, he admired ‘The Old Man and the Sea,’ about a Cuban fisherman, because Hemingway had written a novel ‘simply about a man and his thoughts.’”
You wonder what Papa Hemingway – who met Castro only once, at a 1960 fishing contest during which he awarded the Cuban leader a trophy – might’ve done with Castro as a “Hemingway hero.”
– Georgette Gouveia
