Crime Shop Hemingway and the FBI in Cuba
© Stan Lauryssens
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This is a non-fiction story about espionage, about Ernest ‘Papa’ Hemingway’s spy ring in Cuba and about World War II submarines in the Gulf Stream.
It is 1942. Hemingway spends his time fishing, shooting and drinking. When the FBI offers Papa the opportunity to join the war effort without leaving Cuba, he organises his own private spy network that gathers information about Nazi and Fascist activities on the island.
Papa’s spy ring is officially codenamed Crime Shop, though he himself refers to it as The Crook factory.
The cast of characters in Hemingway’s ill-fated venture into espionage includes his wife Martha Gellhorn, the American ambassador to Cuba nicknamed Cowboy Braden, some Spanish Civil War heroes, sixteen FBI agents stationed in Havana, the chief of the Cuban police who played Latin lovers in Hollywood movies, the infamous Winston Guest who is Winston Churchill’s godson, FBI director J.Edgar Hoover and a handful of Cuban informers: waiters, fishermen, a Basque clergyman nicknamed The Black Priest, Havana
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prostitutes and their pimps. Papa even enlists his sons Mousie and Gigi.
On the recommendation of President Roosevelt, the U.S.Navy at Guantanamo equips Hemingway’s fishing boat, the Pilar, with a radio, a collapsible rubber dinghy, a Thompson machine gun, hand grenades and depth-bombs and Papa goes submarine hunting, at a time when 'wolf-packs’ of Nazi U-boats operating in the Gulf Stream are able to cut off Cuba and the Bahamas from the American mainland.
The Pilar heads for Haiti.
According to its clearance papers, Papa’s fishing boat is on a scientific mission sponsored by the National Museum of Natural History in Havana.
On 26 June 1943, an FBI agent codenamed SIS#396 and stationed in Havana despatches the following confidential urgent message to FBI director J.Edgar Hoover in Washington: ‘Ernest Hemingway is continuing a check of coastal waters off northern Cuba for the possibility of enemy submarine or clandestine Nazi radio activity.’
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Gary Cooper and
Ingrid Bergman
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Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergman, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor also play supporting parts in this adventurous tale of deceit.
Behind the boat, a long dark brown shadow wings up and a spear longer than your arm bursts out of the water followed by two black eyes as big as saucers and a sharp dorsal fin.
‘Feeesh, Papa, feeesh!’ Gregorio Fuentes yells from the flying bridge and he stamps his feet up and down.
There comes the shadow again, as fast as the shadow of a plane moving over water …
‘A big one is committing suicide,’ Hemingway grins.
Five, ten minutes. Half an hour maybe. The big broad spear shoots out of the water followed by the giant head.
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The line scorches out again and zings and screams. Papa is tired. His muscles ache, his legs are shaking, his fingers bleeding. The lightning-fast fish jumps out of the water and takes one look at the boat and speeds away like a speedboat with all the line that is left. Papa pulls, cranks, pulls, cranks. The fish goes deeper, deeper than one could ever imagine. Pull, crank, pull, crank. Gregorio and the crew on the bridge can see the dark shadow of the big fish zigzagging through the water.
‘It’s huge! A monster! At least 800 pounds!’
‘The Joe Louis of the Gulf stream,’ Papa says contentedly.
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“Stan Lauryssens writes so well that you can almost smell the dust blowing through the windows.”
Derek Blyth in The Bulletin
Ernest Hemingway’s venture into espionage and submarine hunting is backed by Hemingway’s 1942-1943 FBI file that is quoted throughout the typescript.
Crime Shop: 80,000 words
Non-fiction
16 page b/w picture section
Final draft—in English—available now.
For more information » info@stanlauryssens.com
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