The farm La Vigía, or briefly Finca Vigía, is the farm in Havana where the renowned American writer Ernest Hemingway (1866-1961) lived from 1939 to 1960. In 1962, all the property was converted into a museum in honor of Hemingway's life and works. After years of disrepair, it is now restored and opened to public (since 2007).

Finca Vigía occupies an area on a hill, where a surveillance post of the Spanish army was stationed until 19th century, as the hill has an excellent view of downtown Havana. The farm is named after this feature (Lookout Farm).

In 1886, the Catalan architect Miguel Pascual y Baguer that had recently lost two of his children, bought the land to build a house for his family. By this way, he wanted to forget the pain, generated by the death of his children. In this farmhouse he lived with his family until 1903. After this date, the property passed into the hand of different owners.

Ernest Hemingway was staying in Hotel Ambos Mundos during his visits to Havana. Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s third wife, was tired of bar-hopping lifestyle of Hemingway and wanted to move from the small hotel room (number 511) to a spacious residence in the tranquil suburb of Havana.  When she discovered the ad about Finca Vigía in a Cuban newspaper, she convinced Hemingway to leave the hotel room. Thus, Hemingway first rented Finca Vigía in 1939, and bought it for 18.500 pesos ($12.500) in 1940. He used the first royalty of this book For Whom the Bell Tolls, published in 1940, in purchase of Finca Vigía.

After Hemingway divorced Gellhorn in 1945, he kept the farm and lived there during the winters with his fourth and last wife Mary Welsh, a former Time magazine correspondent. It was Mary Welsh that converted the farmhouse to a splendid mansion by furnishing it to her delight. The vibrant Cuban culture and the clime at the farm made Hemingway to feel good in Havana. Thus, Finca Vigía became his stable winter residence.  He lived there until one year prior his death in 1961.

When the rebels, headed by Fidel Castro, took power on the island, overthrowing the Batista’s bloody regime, the relations between the US and Cuba worsened considerably, and in 1960, the US started to lay an embargo on Cuba. Hemingway left Cuba for the last time in July 1960. Everybody is the same opinion that Hemingway was fully intended to return to Cuba.

Hemingway looked positively to the uprising on the island, headed by Fidel Castro, expressing his thoughts by saying:” We the Cubans are going to win”. When the new regime began in Cuba:” I am very glad to be here...because I consider myself Cuban…I sympathize with the government and all our difficulties.” The new government replied to his sympathy by holding the Ernest Hemingway International Billfishing Tournament in 1960.

After returning to the US from his trip to Spain, Hemingway was worrying about staying in Cuba. He knew that one day in the close future, he would be driven to leave the farm in Havana and move to the US to live in his house in Ketchum. When the US broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba, he had to cut his ties with Cuba, as he was an American citizen and his citizenship would be withdrawn, if he would continue to stay in Havana. After the invasion in Playa Girón in 1961, the crisis between the US and Cuba deepened. When Hemingway committed a suicide in the US due to deep depression that he was suffering since a long time, the Cuban government expropriated Fina Vigia, along with all foreign properties in Cuba.

The same year, Hemingway’s widow Mary flied to Cuba and held a meeting with Castro. As Mary Hemingway mentions in her memoir, Castro personally came to the farm, toured the residence and climbed the tower. Mary was successful in persuading Castro to transport certain easily movable personal property of Hemingway to the US. Thus, she took with what she could stuff into the shrimp boat that she used in arriving in Havana. She transported some paintings and a few books to the US, along with his manuscripts that are now in the Kennedy Library, in Boston. In 1962, the Cuban government converted Finca Vigía into a museum, devoted to Ernest Hemingway, with all the property “donated” by Mary Hemingway. 

The house is preserved almost exactly as Hemingway left it, when he departed from Cuba for the last time. Therefore, access into the house is restricted to the visitors that can get only the opportunity to peer in windows and doors.

Hemingway was a cat lover. His fondness for cats peaked at Finca Vigía. The grey cat, named Princesa, was his first cat in Finca Vigía and the number of his cats increased to 50, while he was living there. Many different stories are told about Hemingway’s cats; some true, some exaggerated, but everybody has the same opinion that the cats were roaming freely in all the rooms of the house. When Mary Hemingway moved into the farm in 1946, she constructed the tower for Hemingway, where he would write his novels, but Hemingway preferred to work in the bedroom, so that eventually the first floor of the tower became the home for the cats parallel to the increase in their population.

His favorite cat was a black and white tom, called Boise. He devoted 35 pages to Boise in his novel Islands in the Stream. Every cat had a name, like Good Will, Christobal, Feather Puss, Zane Grey, Clark Gable, Uncle Wolfer, among others. It is argued that it was in Cuba that Hemingway began to collect polydactyl (multi-toed) cats, because, like the Cuban fishermen, he believed that such cats would bring good luck. However, there is no evidence that any of Hemingway's cats in Cuba was polydactyl. Currently, there are no cats in Finca Vigía.

Besides the fifty cats in the farm, Ernest Hemingway had also four dogs. His love for his pets can be seen today in the manner that he interred them with gravestones in his garden. The Black, Linda, Negrita and Neron shared the farm with the cats in peace.  Hemingway’s favorite was the Black that was shot by a Batista’s soldier at the entrance of the farm, as the pet wanted to stop him. Hemingway was very upset because of this tragic event.

Hemingway was very productive in Finca Vigía. He wrote much of his famous novel For Whom the Bell Tolls here, which he started to write in Hotel Ambos Mundos. Here, Hemingway wrote his masterwork The Old Man and the Sea (published in 1951) that was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He dedicated this prize to the Cuban people. Across the River and Into the Trees (published in 1950) is another work that he completed in Finca Vigía. He started to write The Garden of Eden here in 1946 and worked on it until his death (published in 1986). Meanwhile, he started to write Islands in the Stream around 1950 and almost completed it in 1951 (published in 1977). Again, he started to write A Movable Feast in 1920s and almost completed in Finca Vigía (published in 1964).