Ernest Hemingway is back at Havana’s Floridita

Those who traipse into El Floridita, Havana’s world-class restaurant and bar, will be astounded to see a life-size statue of famed U.S. writer Ernest Hemingway leaning on the counter with a cup of daiquiri, the cocktail that got itself a good name for being Hemingway’s favorite drink.

The 1.75-meter-tall, 900-lb. bronze piece was wrought by sculptor Jose Villa Soberon and placed right on the same corner of the bar counter where the author of The Old Man And The Sea used to quench his thirst by sipping the popular cocktail that put the Havana bar on the map forever.

“We wanted to bring Hemingway back to El Floridita, right in the same spot where he always stood,” said Katiuska Criado, a PR official for the bar and restaurant that was founded in 1817 under the name of La Piña de Plata (The Silver Pineapple).

Back in the 1930s, the place was renamed El Floridita as part of a nifty marketing ruse thought out to lure an American clientele that was at the time barred from drinking any alcohol as a result of the Prohibition Act.

Mr. Hemingway, the 1954 Nobel Prize winner, had a longstanding love affair with the island of Cuba where he even wrote some of his most famous novels and short stories. He came to Havana in 1928 from Paris with his second wife Pauline Pfeiffer in tow.

He lived for a whole year at the Ambos Mundos (Both Worlds) Hotel in Obispo Street where he finished writing and revising his novel For Whom the Bells Toll.

All along his tormented life, the American writer came back to the island nation many times and wound up buying La Vigia Farm in San Francisco de Paula, right in the outskirts of Havana. There he gave the finishing touches to his 1952 novel The Old Man and the Sea that eventually made him the recipient of the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature.

He stayed at La Vigia for a last time in 1960 where he sketched out the manuscript of his novel Islands in the Stream, his last work before killing himself.

Cuban sculptor Villa Soberon portrays a humble Hemingway with an unbuttoned shirt, clad in sandals and leaning over the counter. The U.S. writer seems to be waiting for late Spanish bartender Constantino Rivalavuelta to fix him the icy cocktail that always put a touch of the tar brush to his Caribbean day.