Caterpillar Donates $500,000 to Preserve Hemingway House in Cuba

The donation will be used for the construction of the “Taller” (Workshop) building, which will house a laboratory with archive storage facilities at the Hemingway Museum in Havana.

“Caterpillar is proud to be a part of this significant project, and we’re committed to being a business and cultural partner with Cuba,” Caterpillar Chairman and CEO Doug Oberhelman said.

The Taller’s construction will be executed with U.S. materials, thus becoming one of the first construction projects on the island to use American components since the embargo was imposed more than 53 years ago.

“Because of our own deep history and rich heritage, we recognize the importance of preserving the rich Hemingway heritage that unites the American and Cuban people,” Oberhelman said.

Ernest Hemingway, who spent a lot of time at his Finca Vigia home, wrote segments of some of his most famous novels there including “The Old Man and the Sea,” which won him the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Today the house-turned-museum preserves a collection of personal objects and documents that belonged to the novelist and that includes books, hunting trophies, discs, guns, letters, photos, a typewriter on which he tended to write standing up, and the yacht El Pilar, on which he went fishing and sailed around the Caribbean.

“Hemingway lived in Cuba for the last 22 years of his life. It is where he collected his life’s work: correspondence, galley proofs, manuscripts, thousands of photographs...the collection is astounding,” Jenny Phillips, co-chair of the board of directors of The Finca Vigia Foundation, said in a statement.