Ernest Hemingway's widow gave his Cuban house to Castro's government in 1961 and shipped his papers and paintings out on a shrimp boat

Hemingway rented Finca Vigía outside Havana from 1939 and bought it in December 1940 for 12,500 dollars. He wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea there. He left Cuba for good on 25 July 1960, and that autumn the Cuban government expropriated foreign property. He killed himself at his home in Idaho on 2 July 1961. After the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 the United States had banned travel to Cuba, and President Kennedy made a special arrangement so that his widow, Mary, could go. She met Fidel Castro, and crates of papers and paintings left Havana on a shrimp boat for Tampa. The house and the rest of its contents went to Cuba, which made it a museum. In November 2002 Castro, Hemingway family members and US Representative James McGovern signed an agreement in the house's garden: the original documents stay in Cuba, and digital and microfilm copies go to the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. The Finca Vigía Foundation reports more than 10,000 manuscripts, letters, scrapbooks and photographs conserved and digitised, and says the house still suffers from humidity, termites and hurricanes.