In January, Cuba began accepting requests for electronic access to 3,197 documents, which once belonged to Ernest Hemingway. Unedited manuscripts, a screenplay for “The Old Man and the Sea,” letters and insurance binders, among other papers, were kept at the author’s residence at Finca Vigia outside Havana, his home from 1939 until 1960. The papers were scanned in a partnership between Cuban national heritage authorities and the New York group Social Science Research Council, said Ada Rosa Alfonsa, director of the Finca Vigia museum.
Academics, researchers, and others can petition the Cuban heritage council for electronic access, Alfonsa said, but unfortunately no previously unpublished documents have been discovered. Sarah Doty, of the Social Science Research Council, said that the John F. Kennedy library in Boston, entrusted with many other Hemingway artifacts, received CDs and microfilm images of the Finca Vigia documents. The council is “still working with Cuba as to who will be able to access the information,” she said.