Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with RetroPod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

Early in the morning on July 2nd, 1961, Ernest Hemingway, one of the giants of American literature, committed suicide.

Hemingway's death at age 61 stunned the country. He had won the Nobel

Prize for Literature seven years earlier, an honor celebrating the spare prose he employed

in telling sweeping stories of war, adventure, and the sea.

But beyond the loss to American letters,

the immediate aftermath of Hemingway's passing presented what seemed like a not-so-minor international predicament.

Hemingway died just three months after President John F. Kennedy's disastrous

Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, a CIA operation in which 1400 Cuban exiles were secretly

trained to overthrow their own government. In Cuba, just about everything the author had ever written,

draft after draft, letter after letter, was left in his home there, unattended, almost up for grabs.

Hemingway's widow, in addition to grieving, had to scramble to get it all back as the countries nearly went to war.

Though Hemingway died at his cabin in Idaho, that was never really home to him.

Home was Finka Vahia, a Spanish-style casa he moved to in 1939, about 20 minutes from Havana.

He was a sportsman.

He loved to fish, to sail, to be shirtless on the sea.

Cuba was the perfect backdrop for his life and his writing, according to Hillary Justice, a prominent Hemingway scholar.

He worked on literally everything there at some point, but the ones that are most obviously

connected to Cuba would be to have and have not and the old man in the sea, but it was also

there that he wrote, for whom the belt holes, across the river and into the trees. He actually did the bulk of his mature writing

while he was based in or homed in Cuba. And he built a private life there with Mary,

his fourth wife, who was, like his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, a globe-trotting journalist.

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