“‘EYES THE SAME COLOR AS THE SEA’:
SANTIAGO’S EXPATRIATION FROM SPAIN AND ETHNIC OTHERNESS IN
HEMINGWAY’S THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA
JEFFREY HERLIHY
Morningside College
In each of Ernest Hemingway’s novels, the expatriation of the main character is a principal
rhetorical device - and it is a theme which critics often neglect. In The Old Man and the Sea
(1952), Hemingway employs the perspective of a Spaniard in Cuba to broaden the scope of the
narrative. As the author explains in a letter to Lillian Ross, “The Old Man was born a catholic in
the island of Lanza Rota [sic] in the Canary Islands” (SL 807). Santiago is an outsider in the
Cuban fishing village of Cojímar and, as this analysis will demonstrate, his cultural distance
from the local community is a principal motivation in his actions. Probing the political, social,
and cultural contexts that would affect a Spaniard who had “eyes the same color as the sea” (10)
living in a former colony, this study examines Santiago’s foreignness in the novella to establish
how the protagonist’s social and cultural otherness would shape his actions and sense of self in
Cuba.
The existing critical reception of The Old Man and the Sea has overlooked Santiago’s
Spanish origins, an oversight that has had a profound importance on the interpretation of the
work. Every critic—including Spaniard Angel Capellán—reads the novella as though Santiago
were Cuban, despite the fact that he was born in Spain and, as this study will demonstrate,
THE HEMINGWAY REVIEW, VOL. 28, NO. 2, SPRING 2009. Copyright © 2009 The Ernest
Hemingway Foundation. Published by the University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho.
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resided there until adulthood. An analysis of the old man’s life will demonstrate that he lived in
the Canary Islands long enough to forge Spanish cultural sentiments; this investigation will make
clear that Santiago is a foreigner in Cuba attempting to associate himself with his new
community through cultural rites specific to the place.
A person’s sense of collective identity is a composition of cultural, social, ethnic,
linguistic, and familial influences. While stating that Santiago was born in Spain’s Canary
Islands, Hemingway appears to leave the amount of time that Santiago lived there unclear.
Before emigrating to Latin America, Santiago worked on ships that ran from the Canary Islands
to the African coast, and as an old man he dreams from time to time about the lions he saw from
the decks. The narrator remarks that Santiago “dreamed of Africa when he was a boy” (OMATS
24, my emphasis). Hemingway’s use of the term “boy” throughout the text to refer to this
period in Santiago’s life does not necessarily indicate that Santiago moved to Cuba as a child. In
much of the Spanish-speaking world, including Cuba and the Canary Islands, the terms
synonymous with “boy”—chico and muchacho—can refer to males until they marry, even if they
are still single in their 30s. As Hemingway uses the word “boy” with its Spanish-language
connotations, the label does not indicate that Santiago left the Canary Islands before forging a
Spanish sense of identity.
An enigmatic dialogue between the old man and Manolin helps clarify how many years
Santiago lived in Spain. Manolin explains that “[t]he great Sisler’s father was never poor and he,
the father, was playing in the Big Leagues when he was my age” (22). Santiago responds,
“When I was your age I was before the mast on a square rigged ship that ran to Africa” (22).
George Sisler (the great Dick Sisler’s father) first played professional baseball at age 22, and
JEFFREY HERLIHY 27
therefore Manolin should be 22 during the novella and Santiago should have been the same age
when working as a foremast hand out of the Canaries.
Several critics have interpreted this dialogue with different results;1 Hemingway’s own
notes concerning this phrase on the original typescript have yet to be considered in the
discussion. Hemingway made a notation on the typescript to clarify the cryptic message about
the age of the two characters. The initial typed draft reads: “The great Sisler’s father was never
poor and he was playing in the Big Leagues when he was my age” (EH Typescript). Above the
text between the first “he” and “was” (located in the phrase “and he was playing”), Hemingway
inserted “, the father,” by hand. With the correction, the typescript reads “The great Sisler’s
father was never poor and he
, the father,
was playing in the Big Leagues at my age” (EH
Typescript, my emphasis). The change insures that “he” refers to George Sisler, and because
George Sisler premiered for the St. Louis Browns in 1915 at age 22, Hemingway’s addition
confirms that Manolin is 22 years old during the novel and that Santiago lived in Spain at least
until his early twenties (if not longer).2 When, in the first film version of The Old Man and the
Sea, director Peter Viertel changed Manolin’s words from “my age” to “sixteen” without the
author’s consent, Hemingway insisted that the narrator explain: “The boy was not accurate here”
(qtd. in Fuentes 247). Hemingway also objected to casting Felipe Pazos, age 11, as Manolin,
because the boy looked like a “tadpole” (Viertel 279). In both the novella and the film, then, the
author took steps to underscore the idea that Santiago grew to manhood in the Canary Islands,
not Cuba.
Hemingway also gave his protagonist a name and nickname that allude to his Spanish
identity. The name Santiago evokes Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, a Spanish hero, who fought with and
against the Moors during the Reconquest in the 11th century. The battle-cry of his campaigns was
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“Santiago! Santiago!” because, according to the legend, Saint James appeared to fight for the
Christians in the battle of Clavijo. Like Santiago, Vivar was an exile who never returned to his
homeland in the north of Spain. As Henry Edward Watts explains in The Christian Recovery of
Spain, Vivar was “closely connected with the process of national deliverance” (70). Vivar
received the nickname campeador (campeón in modern Spanish) for his role as the “man who
had fought and beaten the select fighting-man of the opposite side, in the presence of the two
armies” (Watts 76). Similarly, Santiago receives the nickname campeón after arm-wrestling
with a negro from Cienfuegos—the strongest man on the docks—while bettors on both sides “sat
on high chairs against the wall and watched” (OMATS 69). Cubans frequently designate
foreigners by nicknames consistent with national origin—Ernesto Guevara, for example, was
dubbed “Che” for his Argentinean speech—and in this sense Santiago’s nickname, campéon,
may reflect his Spanish origins.
Santiago reminisces every night of “the white peaks of the Islands rising from the sea and
then he dreamed of the different harbours and roadsteads of the Canary Islands” (OMATS 25).
While Santiago does not express a nostalgia for Cuba, he constantly reminisces about his
homeland. He has repeated these tales about the Canaries so often that Manolin has grown tired
of them, responding, “I know. You told me” (22). Nationality has been defined as “the sentiment
of belonging to a community whose members identify with a set of symbols, beliefs and ways of
life” (Guibernau 14). The Cojímar community rejects Santiago—even laughing at him (OMATS
11)—and considering the number of years Santiago spent in the Canary Islands, his melancholy
recollections of Spain and alienation in the village, it is clear that Santiago does not identify
himself as Cuban.3 The fisherman is a Spanish emigrant, a man in exile from his homeland, and,
JEFFREY HERLIHY 29
just as it does for Hemingway’s previous protagonists—men such as Jake Barnes, Frederic
Henry, and Robert Jordan—this status has profound consequences on his life.
In a letter to Malcolm Cowley, Hemingway explained the in-depth knowledge of Cuban
culture concealed in his deceptively simple novella:4
If I wanted to I could have put in that everybody lived in the same road, and what
they did and what they thought. And how they lived and how they put in the
dingy race and bootlegging days and revolution and civil, medical and religious
trouble and every change in death and marriage and birth and economic thing I
know about the village [. . . .] This story, Malcolm, is what I knew and had
figured out in those early chapters with what I have learned since [. . . .] [W]hen I
wrote this Old Man and the Sea, I knew more and I could write with the same
degree of concentration and elimination . . . . (qtd. in Brasch 218-219)
Many concealed themes in the novella concern Santiago’s foreignness in Cuba. Richard Gott’s
monograph, Cuba: A New History (2004), discusses Spanish-Cuban relations during the colonial
and postcolonial eras. Gott points out that “until 1898, Cuba’s population was divided by race
and class and ethnic origin, and the country’s history was characterised by endemic violence and
ingrained racism” (5). Spanish immigrants established their own social circles apart from the
mainstream, and strove for a distinctly Spanish (not Cuban) community. Social clubs became a
principal mechanism for maintaining pockets of Spain in the colony. Spaniards established
“casinos, or social centres, in Havana, in some of the most sumptuous buildings in the city,” and
these venues “were designed as social meeting places, where daughters could be married off to
someone from the right region [of Spain]. They had their own theatres and libraries; they created
credit and savings banks; they wrote their own newspapers, notably the Diario de la Marina.
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They provided hospitals and schools for their members, everything from the cradle to the grave”
(Gott 120).
In this way, “Spaniards kept their regional identities alive” (Gott 120), and, as a
consequence, Cuban society fractured along lines of ethnicity and nationality. The divide
between native Cubans and Spaniards was manifest in eating and drinking habits, dress,
educational practices, pastimes, social ceremonies, vernacular and accent in the Spanish
language, and religious rites. Spaniards living in Cuba retained and defended their culture of
origin, shunned native Cubans, and, during the war of independence, “[m]ost Spaniards on the
island backed the Spanish cause. Recent immigrants and their children, the peninsulares, were
happy to fight, to reassert Spanish sovereignty” (Gott 75).
Santiago’s status as a Spanish-born man in Cojímar, then, has a significant impact on his
social condition. While he does not participate in expatriate Spanish social clubs nor openly
display a regional identity from Spain, as a European in an impoverished Cuban village, he must
assume some of the weight of his compatriots’ social inclinations in the former colony. Due to
his accent in the Spanish language, personal history, and ethnicity, Santiago cannot avoid
association with his place of origin. Consequently, Santiago adopts some of the cultural and
social practices of his new country in an attempt to ease the stresses of displacement—but, as we
see clearly in his dreams and anecdotes about Spain, the old man cannot integrate fully with the
Cuban community.
It is also important to interpret Santiago’s regional, or Canarian, heritage. While
Lanzarote is 100 miles from the African coast and 660 miles south of the Iberian Peninsula, the
islands are among the most traditionalistic regions of Spain. “The Canarians,” writes James
Minahan, are the “most conservative of the Spanish peoples” and have “a high incidence of fair
JEFFREY HERLIHY 31
hair and fair eyes” (145). Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo points out that the islands have clear
“reflections of a traditional peninsular society” (532). In the 19th and 20th centuries, many
Canarios emigrated to Cuba, and colonial ties to Cuba are still an active feature of Canarian
heritage today. During the imperial period, the Spanish government encouraged Canarians to
move to Cuba in order to offset the growing African presence on the island, and, consequently,
Caucasian ethnicity became an important part of the Spanish identity in the colony. As James
Parsons points out, the colonial government’s “reflected fears of a growing black presence and . .
. desire to ‘whiten’ the population” drove efforts “to attract canarios” to Cuba (191). In fact, the
precise purpose of the Real Junta de Fomento in Havana was “the promotion of immigration of
the white race to Cuba, especially canarios” (qtd. in Parsons 191). These white “newcomers
typically moved up to become mayorales,” or bosses, while Afro-Cubans toiled in slavery, and
thereafter were limited to subordinate social status (Parsons 191). 5
To this day a festival in the Canary Islands celebrates the whiteness of Spaniards in Cuba
and ridicules Afro-Cuban traits. During Carnival in La Palma, men dress either as indianos
(Spaniards who immigrated to Cuba and returned to Spain) or as Negra Tomasa (a mythic Cuban
woman with sexual powers). Indianos don typical Cuban clothing such as white shirts, straw
hats, and necklaces of flowers, and carry straw suitcases filled with fake money. The men cover
their faces and arms with talcum powder to accentuate Caucasian racial characteristics. The
other masqueraders, dressed as Negra Tomasa, wear African hair pieces as well as enormous
fake hips and breasts, and smear black shoe polish on their skin to simulate African skin tone.
The racial element of the celebration demonstrates the importance of whiteness to the Canarian
identity and marks the deep ethnic divide between Afro-Cubans and Europeans in the Caribbean.
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During four centuries of colonial occupation, Spaniards remained a minority in Cuba.
The outcome of Spanish colonial domination of Cuba was racism, as Spaniards adopted an
assumed social superiority over the Cuban people. In 1873, Antonio Gallenga described
immigrants from Spain in Cuba as “[p]rejudiced and bigoted” (41), reflecting metropolitan
colonialist biases (5). As a result, Cuba experienced a post-colonial backlash against ethnic
Europeans in the 20th century. Acrimonious feelings toward Spaniards are still present in Latin
American cultural celebrations such as Quemando el viejo (burning the old man). In this
festivity that marks the New Year, participants set a “Viejo” (a blue-eyed effigy of a Spaniard)
on fire, jump over the ashes for good luck, and stomp out the remains in celebration. In the same
vein, many Latin American leaders today openly shun European heritage. In 2003, Hugo
Chávez changed the name of the date memorializing Columbus’s incursion to “The Day of
Indian Resistance,” remarking that “[w]e Venezuelans, we Latin Americans, have no reason to
honor Columbus.”6 In 2006, Bolivian President Evo Morales said that Latin America’s 500year “campaign of resistance was not in vain,” and continued, “We’re taking over now over the
next 500 years. We’re going to put an end to injustice, to inequality.”7 Similarly, Jefferson
Pérez, an Ecuadorian race walker, remarked that “when I won the gold medal at the Olympics in
Atlanta, I renounced the inferiority complex that they have put upon us for 500 years” (1A).
Spanish leaders occasionally continue an attitude of assumed superiority over Latin
Americans. In 2007, King Juan Carlos I of Spain said “¿Por qué no te callas?” (“Why don’t you
shut up?”) to Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in a public forum, addressing Chávez as “tú”
(which, in Spanish is used for close acquaintances, family, or children, and is insulting in other
circumstances). Spaniards celebrated their king’s comments; thousands downloaded the sound
bite of Juan Carlos’s words as a cellular ringtone.8 A few months later, many of the viejos burned
JEFFREY HERLIHY 33
in the streets in 2008 New Year’s celebrations were effigies of the Spanish king, some with
“Why don’t you shut up?” written across the forehead.9
Relations between Spain and Cuba were even more strained in Santiago’s lifetime. José
Martí—leader of Cuba’s independence movement and national hero in the late 19th century—
was exceedingly anti-Spanish. Despite being the Havana-born son of two Spaniards, Martí’s
“Manifesto of Montecristi” calls for Cubans to end relationships with people from Spain. “Burn
the tongue,” he writes, “of whomever told you I served the mother country” (51). Martí
maintained that the Spanish occupation of Cuba was “aggressive and insolent” and that Iberian
influence “was atrophying the life of its own children” (85). The revolutionary Cuban leader also
called for hostilities against the Spanish living on the island, calling them “impure people that
will pay” (23).
As a result of this backlash, a mere “40 percent of the half million Spaniards who came to
Cuba in the first 20 years of the Republic remained there” (Gott 119). The complicated social
context in the former colony “made migration to Cuba less attractive, and the mood in Cuba
changed after the revolution in 1933. Spanish immigrants were no longer made welcome. The
great tide of refugees at the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 headed for Mexico City rather
than Havana” (Gott 120). In 1951, when Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea, Cuba was
still a harsh social climate for Spaniards.10
This places Santiago in a precarious position. The old man does not have the financial
resources to return to Spain, he enjoys no fraternal relationships with other Spaniards, and the
Cuban community is openly hostile to people of his cultural and national background. In spite of
these circumstances, Santiago attempts to reduce the social distance between himself and his
adopted community by participating in Cuban cultural activities, including baseball. Several
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scholars have researched the baseball references in The Old Man and the Sea. Philip Melling, for
example, argues that Hemingway uses baseball in the text to emphasize the influence of the
United States in Cuba during the early 1950s. This critic contends that baseball is the tool of a
capitalistic system which “developed an empire and acquired new lands through a process of
pacification and control” (14). According to Melling, Hemingway uses references to baseball in
the text to create a protagonist who “worships America from afar” (23).
But Melling, like many previous critics, misinterprets the role of baseball in 20th century
Cuban society. Baseball in the colonial and post-colonial Caribbean was more than a pastime; in
fact, profits from the first professional Cuban baseball league were funneled to guerrilla groups
fighting for Cuban independence against Spain.11 Emilio Sabourín, founder of the Cuban
league, was sentenced to life in prison by the Madrid government during the war for
independence (Guttmann 82), and due to baseball’s associations with revolutionary movements
in Cuba, the Spanish government banned the game outright in 1869. Roberto González
Echevarría points out that “[b]aseball was a sport played [in Cuba] in defiance of Spanish
authorities” and notes that the pastime was “secessionist and dangerously violent” (34).
Baseball, then, is a social rite that both connects the Spanish Santiago to his Cuban community
and separates him from the colonial past. As Arnold Van Gennep points out in Rites of Passage,
forging a place in a new social group involves rejecting the values of a previous world (130).
Santiago also uses Cuban religious rites to strengthen his ties to his new community.
While Spain and Cuba are both predominantly Catholic cultures, there are saints, rites, and
ceremonies specific to each country. Hemingway, a convert to Catholicism, draws heavily on
religious symbolism in The Old Man and the Sea.12 While remarking, “I am not religious”
(OMATS 64), Santiago has images of both the Virgin of Cobre and a Sacred Heart of Jesus in his
JEFFREY HERLIHY 35
home. He pledges to say “ten Our Father and ten Hail Marys” and make a “pilgrimage to Virgin
of Cobre” if his fishing is successful (65). The Virgin of Cobre, a sixteen-inch high statue of an
apparently mulatto Virgin Mary, is enshrined in a basilica formerly dedicated to Santiago, the
patron saint of Spanish conquest. Believed to have miraculous powers, the Virgin has ties to
Cuban independence. Cuban veterans believed that the Virgin of Cobre intervened on their
behalf in 1895-1898, aiding the rebels in their fight for liberation from Spain. The soldiers
appealed to the Vatican to name her patroness of the island, and in 1916, Pope Benedict XV
made the Virgin of Cobre Cuba’s most important religious icon (Daniel Reinoso interview with
the author).13
The Virgin of Cobre is not an exclusively Catholic figure; she also represents a goddess
in Santería, the Afro-Caribbean faith. The Virgin is syncretized with Oshun (also spelled
Ochún), the goddess of womanly love, marriage, and rivers (including, perhaps, the Gulf
Stream—that river in the sea). The egg is a symbol of Oshun, as are the colors yellow, red,
copper, and gold, and the deity punishes the unfaithful through stomach ailments. The pilgrims
who seek the statue (whether followers of Catholic or Santería rites) bring pebbles, eggs, mirrors,
sweet-tasting treats, and copper bracelets as offerings (Reinoso interview with the author).
Allusions to such symbolism in the novel suggest that Hemingway was certainly aware
of Oshun’s spirit, and that Santiago may be. For example, while struggling for the marlin against
the sharks, the old man could “hardly breathe now and he felt a strange taste in his mouth. It was
coppery and sweet and he was afraid of it for a moment” (OMATS 19). In what may be an
allusion to Oshun’s power to cause an unsettled stomach, Santiago also eats a raw dolphinfish
(dorado) and remarks that while it is not sweet, “I have chewed it all well and I am not
nauseated” (79). The old man’s prize marlin had stripes that “were wider than a man’s hand with
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his fingers spread and the fish’s eye looked as detached as the mirrors in a periscope or as a saint
in a procession” (95) and a female marlin he reminisces about has a “colour almost like the
backing of mirrors” (48). The last time he sees his great catch, it is “in the reflection from the
street light” (121). Sargasso weed in the Gulf Stream also has nuances of the goddess, looking
“as though the ocean were making love with something under a yellow blanket” (71), and the
loggerhead turtles are “yellow in their armour-plating, strange in their love-making” (35-36).
Santiago imagines a pot of “yellow rice” (15) to share with Manolin, and as the marlin pulls the
skiff, “yellow weed [was] on the line but the old man knew that only made an added drag and he
was pleased. It was the yellow Gulf weed that had made so much phosphorescence in the night”
(53). The old man also dreams of the “long yellow beach” (80) where he saw the lions in Africa
as a young man.
At least one critic feels that Santiago ignores Santería. “Resisting the influence of
African Powers—Yemaya, Eshu, Eleggua, and Ochosi,” writes Phillip Melling, “Santiago shows
no interest in the healing capabilities of the Afro-Cuban ceremony.”14 Instead, this critic
continues, Santiago concentrates on the American pastime of baseball for strength only to find
out that “the quest for human perfectibility in baseball is not transferable to the spiritual
landscape of the Caribbean” (22). Yet while Santería is never directly mentioned in the book,
Santiago is surrounded by Santería symbols. In a letter to Lillian Ross, Hemingway remarks that
Santiago “certainly believed in something more than the church” (SL 807).
It is also essential to emphasize that this Spaniard promises a “pilgrimage to Virgin of
Cobre” (54) instead of a religious journey on the Camino de Santiago. Rather than a voyage to
the tomb of his namesake apostle, the patron saint of his native land, Santiago promises a
pilgrimage to the icon of his adopted country—a Virgin who achieved fame in part by
JEFFREY HERLIHY 37
interceding against the Spanish. In this sense, a close attention to Cuban religious rites and
pilgrimage could be understood as part of the old man’s quest to identify with the people of
Cojímar.
The Cuban language is another social mechanism in the text. While expatriate
protagonists in Hemingway’s other novels are multilingual, Santiago ostensibly speaks only
Spanish. However, Hemingway’s use of that language in The Old Man and the Sea demonstrates
Santiago’s control of a dialect particular to Cuba as the old man leaves behind his native
Canarian speech patterns and adopts the Latin American vernacular. For instance, “galano”
means “well-dressed” in Spain but identifies a species of shark in Cuba; “dentuso” means “bigtoothed,” and “dorado” means “golden” in Spain—while in Cojímar the words refer to different
fish. The old man also employs “brisa” in its Cuban sense. While in Spanish dictionaries
“brisa” means “breeze,” in Cuba the word also refers to the trade wind and to hunger.
Hemingway plays a word game with this Cubanism: “He looked at the sky and saw white
cumulus clouds built like friendly piles of ice cream.” Observing the tasty clouds, Santiago
remarks “Light brisa” (OMATS 60). Such words could have been translated to English, but by
adhering to Spanish, Hemingway retains their additional nuances.
This table shows all the Castilian words in the text with their peninsular and Cuban
meanings:
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Page(s)
Cuba meaning
Spain meaning
Salao
9
Unlucky
Salty
Guano
14-15
Thicket/palm frond
Bird droppings
Bodega
16
Pantry/general store
Wine cellar
Jota
21
Letter “J”/homosexual
Letter “J”
Que va (sic)
22, 25
No way!
No way!
La mar
28
The sea
The sea (poetic)
El mar
29
The sea
The sea
Dorado
34, 73
Dolphinfish
Golden
Agua mala
34-5
Man-of-war jellyfish
Bad water
Cardel
50
Fishing line
Fishing line
Brisa
60, 124
Easterly wind/Hunger
Breeze
Calambre
61
Cramp
Cramp
Gran Ligas
6-7
U.S. Baseball Leagues
Big ties
Tigres
67
Tigers (baseball team)
Tigers
Juego
67
Game/Match/Revolution
Game (activity)
Un espuela de hueso
67
A bone spur
A bone spur
El Campeon (sic)
69
The Champion
The Champion
Dentuso
100, 102, 104
Mako
Big-toothed
Ay
107
Exclamation
Exclamation
Galano
106-108, 112-113
White-tipped shark
Well-dressed
Tiburon (sic)
125
Shark
Shark
Hemingway was multilingual and had years of experience with peninsular and Cuban
variants of the Spanish language. While the author employed an array of Spanish in the text, the
majority is Latin American dialect. So, while Hemingway could have used the English word
“game” instead of juego, when Santiago thinks of baseball, the Spanish appears because in Cuba
the word juego is complex in its reaches. As María Jesús Nieto notes, in their first public
conversation, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez metaphorically interchanged the words “‘juego’
JEFFREY HERLIHY 39
and ‘revolución’” (39). The novella’s insistence on Cuban usage demonstrates that Santiago has
separated himself from his linguistic roots. The old man’s application of Latin American
vernacular is a significant step toward social integration, as the mere pronunciation of a word or
formula, observes Van Gennep, “has the effect of creating. . . [a] bond” (32).
Hemingway uses just one instance of Spanish particular to the Canary Islands in The Old
Man and the Sea, and does so in a manner corroborating Santiago’s use of Cuban dialect as a
social device. When Malcolm Cowley wrote to Hemingway pointing out an apparent mistake in
Santiago’s use of two different names for the same type of fish in the novella, Hemingway
answered that Santiago knew precisely what he was saying: “This fish was a small tuna, but the
old man being from the Canaries, would call him ‘albacora’ and think of him generally as
‘Bonito’” (qtd. in Brasch 222). This letter substantiates much of the seminal concept of this
study: the cultural displacement of Hemingway’s Canarian protagonist affects his behavior.
Santiago retains his Spanish essence, “thinking” of the fish one way and expressing it—a
conscious change in action—another.
Food and drink also play a role in the novel’s exploration of Santiago’s assimilation to
Cuban life. Martin, the owner of the Terrace Restaurant, gives Manolin and Santiago Hatuey
beer with their meal (OMATS 20, my emphasis). The beer is named for the 16th century Taíno
chief who left Hispaniola to fight the Spaniards in Cuba. This indigenous leader spearheaded
native resistance against the Europeans and is renowned as the first fighter against colonialism in
the New World. Despite his efforts, Velázquez and Cortés pillaged the island; Hatuey was given
up to the Spanish by his own men and executed. According to legend, the conquistadors offered
the chieftain salvation if he would accept Jesus. The Taíno asked the Spaniards if other
Christians were in heaven, and when a missionary replied that there were many, Hatuey declined
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the offer.14 And thus, Martin (whose name derives from Mars, the God of war) gives beer named
for America’s first freedom fighter to Cojímar’s resident Spaniard.
By the time the novella begins, Santiago has abandoned the food he ate as a young man
in Lanzarote in favor of Cuban fare. As Anthony Stevens-Arroyo has observed, “In the
Caribbean, the Spaniards had to assimilate” to new foods, which they did with some difficulty
(531). Traditionally, nutrition in the Canary Islands depended on “[livestock] herding and
cultivation of grain” (Stevens-Arroyo 538). While surrounded by water, “from the 17th century,
the [Canary] islanders supplied wine in exchange for fish brought by New England sailors, a
trade that sustained the islands following the establishment of more direct sea routes to Spain’s
American colonies” (Minahan 146). As a result, many typical Canarian dishes such as mojo
verde (beef stew), almogrote (a hard cheese), gofio (a grain-based dish), bienmesabe (almondbased sauce), and puchero canario (vegetable stew) do not derive from the sea. In the
Caribbean, by contrast, the native “diet consist[ed] largely of native tuber crops, such as manioc,
tropical fruits, and fish. The Spaniards disdained such sustenance, instead preferring to face
starvation” (Stevens-Arroyo 530). Santiago has no such disdain. Instead of representative dishes
from his native land, Santiago drinks shark-liver oil and eats raw fish as well as “[b]lack beans
and rice, fried bananas, and some stew” (OMATS 19).
Santiago’s clothing is another manifestation of his Cuban assimilation. The protagonist
wears a straw hat—presumably a round, wide-brimmed fedora. As the old man fights the marlin
in the middle of the night, the narrator tells us that he “had pushed his straw hat hard down on his
head” (46). Straw hats are part of the costume that indianos wear during Carnival in Palma to
stereotype and make fun of the canarios who returned to their home islands after living in Cuba.
Santiago, who wears his straw hat designed to protect against the sun with such seriousness that
JEFFREY HERLIHY 41
he does not even take it off at night, demonstrates why the Cuban hat became a target for
mockery.
Santiago’s relationship with his wife is also demonstrative of the Spanish themes in the
novella: “Once there had been a tinted photograph of his wife on the wall [of the shack] but he
had taken it down because it made him too lonely to see it (OMATS 16). Ostensibly, the Spaniard
married a Cuban woman and this relationship shapes his actions. Santiago’s promise to make a
pilgrimage to the Virgin of Cobre rather than to Compostela, may derive in part from a spiritual
bond with his wife, who had both a Sacred Heart of Jesus and Virgin of Cobre in their abode.
The presence of the Virgin of Cobre indicates that Santiago’s wife might have been a native of
the island. However, the Sacred Heart of Jesus holds specific iconic significance in Spain, and,
like the Cobre Virgin, the image has ties to the independence struggle in Cuba. John Lawrence
Tone has claimed that Carlist interventions in Spain during the Cuban movements for
independence from 1868-1898 shaped the outcome of the war. As he observes, “The Carlist
threat had diverted Spanish supplies and reinforcements back to the Peninsula, and Spanish
forces remaining in Cuba had to be assigned to static holding positions, where they became
ineffective and vulnerable” (156). The Sacred Heart of Jesus is a Carlist emblem in Spain, which
raises a question—were Santiago and his wife Carlist emigrants who adopted Cuban rituals?
The Carlist slogan “Dios, Patria, Fueros, Rey” (God, Country, Local Rights [of outside
realms], King) places the motherland before local rule in order of importance, but religion is
preeminent; so, a strict Carlist emigrant in the former colony would first be loyal to God, and
then to Spain, before Cuba. Another Carlist emblem in the text is the color red. Santiago advises
Manolin: “Be careful or you will even fear the Reds of Cincinnati” (OMATS 17). We may argue
about whether Hemingway is referring to a baseball team, the Communist Party, or the Carlists,
42
JEFFREY HERLIHY
but if we focus on the first and last, we discover that Santiago is making an historical reference:
the Cincinnati Reds—the first American professional team to field Cuban players—was founded
in 1868, the same year as “The Glorious Revolution,” which led to Spain’s first democracy. This
connection between the color red, the Ohio baseball team, the Carlist emblem, military victory,
and the year 1868 might seem coincidental, but when we consider that Carlos Manuel Céspedes
delivered Cuba’s first formal call for independence from Spain at the shrine of the Cobre Virgin
near Santiago, Cuba in 1868—the time-scheme of symbols squares together.
Red also had symbolic importance in the Spanish American Empire, and, earlier in
medieval Christian landholdings in Iberia during the Reconquest. In the Reconquest, a
brotherhood of knights named “The Order of Santiago” served in the most distant military
outposts of Christian Spain, those bordering on Moorish regions. These Castilian noblemen
vowed to live in poverty on the fringes of Christian society and their emblem was a red cross on
their breasts.15 Similarly, in the Castas paintings which the imperial government used to racially
categorize people in the Americas, red clothing represents “Spanish” ethnicity. “Pure”
Spaniards, for example, are depicted wearing red from head to toe, while others wear only one or
two red garments; the amount of red establishes their “Spanish” blood.16 Such symbolism
reframes some of the marlin’s social implications, as at one point Santiago eats a piece of its
flesh and remarks that “it was not red” (106).
While Santiago seems to be a life-long fisherman, it is important to note that before the
novella begins he worked “turtle-ing for years off the Mosquito Coast” (OMATS 14), and that
prior to emigrating to the Caribbean, he worked on a square-rigged ship—a class of vessel better
adapted to long-range oceanic trade than regional fishing. Santiago, then, began fishing as an
adult. Another age reference in the novella clarifies the old man’s work history in the village.
JEFFREY HERLIHY 43
Manolin asks, “How old was I when you first took me in a boat?” Santiago responds: “Five”
(12). C. Harold Hurley has determined through baseball statistics that the narrative takes place in
1950 (“Just ‘a boy’” 103-115). If Manolin is 22 years old in 1950, then the two first went fishing
in 1933. On the initial excursion, the young boy was nearly killed because Santiago “brought the
fish in too green and he nearly tore the boat to pieces” (12). Susan Beegel has pointed out that
Santiago “delivered Manolin from the sea in a violent birthing” (“Eternal Feminine” 203).
Beegel’s observation fits Hemingway’s scheme for historical metaphor in The Old Man and the
Sea—as 1933 was the year of the first Cuban Revolution, an event that brought new life to
Cojímar in the form of female suffrage, an 8-hour workday, a Department of Labor, free
university registration for the poor, and annulment of the Platt Amendment (save the naval base
at Guantánamo). It was also the year that Hemingway caught his first marlin in the Gulf Stream
(Valenti 55).
Santiago is an expert in the mechanics of line-fishing when the novella takes place—but
seventeen years earlier he was a novice still learning marlin behavior. After emigration and
“many years” hunting turtles (OMATS 36), Santiago may have begun fishing as a response to
financial and social problems—but with mixed results. The fishermen in Cojímar “made fun of
the old man,” and the older men, Santiago’s contemporaries, “looked at him and were sad” (11).
He attempts to earn their respect with his fishing skill: “He kept [his lines] straighter than anyone
did, so that at each level in the darkness of the stream there would be a bait waiting exactly
where he wished it to be for any fish that swam there. Others let them drift with the current and
sometimes they were at sixty fathoms when the fisherman thought they were at a hundred” (35).
An expression of these social concerns occurs after the sharks ravage the marlin. Rather
than untie the plundered carcass, in a social gesture Santiago sails on to port with the remains of
44
JEFFREY HERLIHY
the dead fish still fastened to the hull. (It is certain that he has the strength to untie the marlin,
because upon returning he is able to carry the mast and sail to the shack.) Before leaving the
harbor Santiago “stopped for a moment and looked back and saw in the reflection from the street
light the great tail of the fish” (OMATS 121). During this last, fleeting look at the fish, Santiago
perhaps considers that others will soon see the carcass and understand his fishing prowess. Next
morning his first question to Manolin concerns the community’s actions: “Did they search for
me?” (124, my emphasis).
Santiago’s identity as a “fisherman” is full of uncertainty and he must verbalize it for
reinforcement: fishing is what “I was born for” (OMATS 40) and “the thing that I was born for”
(50). “You were born to be a fisherman” (105), Santiago tells himself, uncertain about his third
career. “Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought” (50). The Spaniard takes up
fishing for social approval, but it is a catastrophe, and in fact there is no mention of Santiago ever
catching a fish alone: “[R]emember how you went eighty-seven days without a fish,” remarks
Manolin, “and then we caught big ones every day for three weeks” (10, my emphasis). The old
man was unaccompanied throughout this dry spell—only once Manolin rejoined him did they
catch fish for twenty-one days. Manolin and Santiago are also together when they hook the
female marlin whose mate jumped in the air to behold her in the bottom of the skiff (49-50).
While many critics assert that Gregorio Fuentes—a blue-eyed man born in the Canary
Islands who emigrated to Cuba at age four—was the model for Santiago (Beegel, letter), Stuart
B. McIver believes it was Carlos Gutiérrez. Hemingway met him in the Dry Tortugas in 1929
and they fished together for several years. Gutiérrez told Hemingway about a fisherman from
Majorca who spent days in the Gulf Stream fighting a fish only to lose it to sharks. Hemingway
wrote to Maxwell Perkins, “I am writing a wonderful story of the Cuban coast. I’m going out
JEFFREY HERLIHY 45
with old Carlos [Gutiérrez] in his skiff so as to get it all right” (SL 479).17 During his time with
Hemingway, Gutiérrez, who had decades of experience in area waters, lost the ability to fish, as
Santiago has apparently done at the beginning of the novella, embarrassing himself among his
peers. “Only too clear in the logs,” explains McIver, “is Hemingway’s increasing anger and
frustration [with] the many errors of the forty-eight-year-old Carlos.” Gutiérrez’s inability to fish
cost Hemingway “major catches,” and he noted in the Pilar’s record that “Carlos [had] gone
completely to pot” (qtd. in McIver 40).
Santiago left Spain forever as a young man; perhaps he planned to return to his
homeland, like many canarios who sojourned in Cuba, but his poverty made it impossible. The
old man comforts himself with a dream of young lions playing on a beach. Out on the water,
away from the pressures of social and economic failure in Cuba, he asks himself: “Why are the
lions the main thing that is left?” (OMATS 66). Lions out of their native habitat—in exile from
the plains of Africa—are the enduring image in the old man’s life (18). León is one of Spain’s
oldest provinces and possibly the birthplace of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, El Campeador;19 it was
one of the first regions of Spain to acquire Christianity from the Romans and to be reconquered
from the Moors. Lions are symbols of Spain, present on the state shield and flag, and the old
man may call this icon to mind to ease the pain of expatriation. The closing line of the text—
“The old man was dreaming about the lions” (127)—affirms that the loss Santiago endures
through emigration penetrates even the fisherman’s most glorious day in Cuba. Seeing the
“great long huge spine with a huge tail and the end that lifted and swung with the tide” (126), the
fishermen of Cojímar understand what has happened—Santiago’s struggle for days to land the
giant marlin, and its loss to the sharks—and appreciate his angling skills. They may perhaps
renew his title of Campeón. But Santiago remains a man in exile, isolated, and without a social
46
JEFFREY HERLIHY
community. His failure resonates throughout the end of the novella, and even his hopeful notion
that “A man can be destroyed but not defeated” (103) cannot balance the anguish he endures as a
result of the permanent separation from his native land.
NOTES
1
See “George Sisler, Manolin’s Age, and Hemingway’s Use of Baseball,” by Luis Losada; “Just
‘a boy’ or ‘Already a Man?’: Manilin’s Age in The Old Man and the Sea,” by Harold Hurley;
and The Old Man and the Sea: Story of a Common Man by Gerry Brenner (78).
2
Hemingway himself was 22 years old when he moved to Paris in 1921.
3
In 2005, a 57-year-old fisherman from Cojímar named Pípo (surname withheld at his request)
said that “all [in the fishing fleet] have been fishing together since they were small” and no one
from outside “is welcome to fish with us” (interview with the author).
4
Bickford Sylvester’s “The Cuban Context of The Old Man and the Sea” (1990) investigates
Hemingway’s use of absent background information in the text.
5
For further information on Canarios in Cuba, see James J. Parsons’s “The Canary Islands and
America: Studies of a Unique Relationship” (1985), Anthony Stevens-Arroyo’s “The InterAtlantic Paradigm: The Failure of Spanish Medieval Colonization of the Canary and Caribbean
Islands” (1993), and On Becoming Cuban: Identity, National Identity, and Culture (2007) by H.
Eugene and Lilian Youngs Lehman.
6
“Columbus ‘sparked a genocide’” <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3184668.stm>.
7
“Bolivia’s new leader vows change” <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4636190.stm>.
8
“‘Shut up’ Chavez is ringtone hit” <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7101386.stm>.
JEFFREY HERLIHY 47
9
“El ‘por qué no te callas’, de carton” <http://www.eluniverso.com/2007/12/17/0001/18/414
085B514D84FE7B31B29C4CD3C5CBB.aspx>.
10
Daniel Reinoso, a Cojímar historian, says that colonization “caused a hatred for the Spaniards
on the island” and this sentiment “lasted into the 60s. Castro erased all of that” (interview with
the author).
11
For more detail on the role of baseball in Cuba, see Peter C. Bjarkman’s A History of Cuban
Baseball, 1864-2006 (2007); Adrian Burgos Jr’s Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos,
and the Color Line (2007); and Paula Pettavino and Geralyn Pye’s Sport in Cuba: A Diamond in
the Rough (1994).
12
For information on Cuban religion, see Miguel A. de la Torre’s Santería: The Beliefs and
Rituals of a Growing Religion in America (2004), David H. Brown’s Santería Enthroned: Art,
Ritual and Innovation in Afro-Caribbean Religion (2003), and Diego A. Abich’s Religion in
Cuba (1983).
13
Hemingway presented his Nobel Prize medallion as an offering to the Virgin of Cobre.
14
For information on Hatuey in Caribbean history, see Clifford Statens, 148-161.
15
Upon Diego Velázquez’s acceptance into “The Order of Santiago” in 1559—several after
completing Las meninas—he updated the masterpiece by painting a red cross on his chest.
16
Francisco Clapera’s Castas paintings (c. 1775) are part of the permanent collection at the
Denver Art Museum.
17
In 1955 Hemingway named Marcos Puig as model for Santiago. Puig, a Majorcan, fished
France’s “Coast of Lions” as a young man (Baker 661).
48
18
JEFFREY HERLIHY
Beside the yellow sand footpaths at Luxemburg Gardens, sculptures of lions overlook the
pools, and there are Egyptian sphinxes at the door of 6 Rue Férou. Hemingway also uses a lion
displaced from Venice to Africa (and back again) in the fable “The Good Lion.”
19
While historians agree that Díaz was born in Vivar, a village outside Burgos, the year of his
birth is a topic of debate. Some scholars believe he was born as early as 1030, others assert it was
as late as 1048; Burgos and Vivar were both part of the Kingdom of León until 1037 (López 9498).
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