From 7-13 September 2014, Dr. Jeffrey Boutwell, Secretary of US Pugwash, and his colleague Mavis Anderson of the Latin America Working Group (LAWG), helped organize a US-Cuba Hemingway Commemorative trip to Cuba that involved John and Patrick Hemingway, grandsons of Ernest Hemingway, and several prominent US marine biologists and environmental scientists.
The delegation of 13 participants commemorated the 60th anniversary of Ernest Hemingway’s Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 and the 80th anniversary of Hemingway’s first journey on his cabin cruiser Pilar from Key West to Havana in 1934. The people-to-people trip also included meetings on ways in which the United States and Cuba can work together to protect and preserve the natural resources of the Gulf Stream and Florida Straits that Hemingway so passionately loved.
In November 2014, LAWG and US Pugwash hosted John Hemingway, Dan Whittle (Environmental Defense Fund) and Jorge Angulo Valdes (Center for Marine Research, University of Havana) for meetings at the US State Department and on Capitol Hill, as well as a briefing at the National Press Club, to further press for opening up US-Cuba relations so that scientific and other cooperative projects would be possible across a broad range of mutual interests, to the benefit of both countries. As John and Patrick Hemingway have written, “It’s time to move beyond 50+ years of antagonism to normalized relations.”
For more information, see: U.S.-Cuba Hemingway Commemorative Project by the Latin America Working Group Education Fund – Latin America Working Group
Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs 