A friend recently gave me a copy of The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, which, to my shame, I had never read.

I’ve now corrected course. If you’ve never picked it up yourself, I recommend doing so; at only 96 pages, the value-to-time-spent ratio comes out pretty high.

The Pulitzer-Prize winning novella chronicles the three-day journey of an elderly man named Santiago as he fishes off the coast of Havana. Through triumphs and challenges, he demonstrates undying determination. It reads easy, with a narrative style reminiscent of a childhood bedtime story.

Thumbing through The Old Man caused me to reflect on Hemingway’s Cuba of the 1950s and how it compares to Cuba today. Much has changed since the fictional Santiago went out to catch a fish.

Fishing was once an inextricable part of Cuban life. Shortly after Hemingway published The Old Man, however, Fidel came to power and nationalized the fishing industry. He methodically replaced artisanal fishing with a centralized industry that could publicly demonstrate the power of Cuban Communism. Here are his words on the topic:

We will no longer be speaking of small fishers with a dugout canoe or sail boat; we will be speaking of fish harvesters with increasingly modern means of production and larger boats; they will not be fishing only on the continental shelf but will be going out into the oceans. [1]

The simple practice of fishing gradually became less accessible to regular Cubans. But it didn’t stop there. In recent decades, the Cuban fishing industry overall has declined, suffering from overfishing, environmental factors, and a dilapidated fleet. Cubans now eat less fish than ever. In 2019, Reuters reported:

Cubans eat a quarter of the seafood they did at the end of the 1980s, according to official data, and just a fraction of the global average fish consumption per capita, leading them to joke bitterly about being an island without fish. [2]

Today, setting sail for the purpose of fishing (or any other activity) is essentially banned, because boats are often used for illegal migration to Florida. For regular Cubans, fishing in Havana has thus become a largely terrestrial activity. Walk down the Malecón and you’ll find old and young people wrapping lines around a small piece of plywood. The wood serves as a primitive handle and reel. Hoping for better odds of a catch, some innovative Cubans are using a method that involves condoms blown up like balloons that can float a line and hook further out from shore.

A single catch can greatly impact their financial situation or calorie intake. Rarely, it seems, do they catch anything. Perhaps they would have better luck on the open sea, but most Cubans will never know the seafaring life of Hemingway’s old man. They certainly know one thing, however: his tireless determination.

[1] Fishing for the Revolution: Transformations and Adaptations in Cuban Fisheries, Sabrina Doyon, Département d'anthropologie, Université Laval, Canada.

[2] An island without fish? Cuba aims to tackle problem with law overhaul, Reuters.