A walk along Maso Street, starting from 20 de Mayo Boulevard in Cerro District of Havana, Cuba

A fan of Hemingway typed the following excerpt from a book by Mary Hemingway.

this feature covered a circular window on a second floor of a home

note the bar on the roof to aid the pulling up of materials

Broken sidewalks mean that many people walk on the road.
Innovative two and three-wheeled vehicles keep people moving

The "M" motif appears in the window bars and the railings

Number 367 Maso

Flowers in the ironwork

This private café serves items at 24 pesos per dollar

multiply by 4 and you'll get the cost in cents (multiply by 100 and divide by 24)

a sandwich for 48 cents (Euros)

Guayaba (GUAVA) and Cheese for 20 cents

I turned right on this intersection and went one block
to Panchito Gomez Street

This is the return up Panchito Gomez.

This looks like a fire trap

where are the railings?

I'm at the cornerof Panchito Gomez

Gaps between the homes reveal the relationships
between neighbors.  This gap looks more accessible

Swales provide shade on some side streets

A block farther up on the left is a sausage factory

One out of four apartment owners decided to paint

The sausage factory

There's a generator under that roof.   It turned on often
to provide power

somebody wrote that hemingway was shirking his duties as a US citizen by living outside the country.  he replied:  

This is the starting point of our walk.  Maso and 20 de Mayo

i always had good luck working in cuba... i moved from key west over here in 1938 and rented this farm and finally bought it when for whom the bell tolls came out...  it is a good place to work because it is out of town and on a hill so that it is cool at night.  i wake up when the sun rises and go to work and when i finish i get a swim and have a drink and read the new york and miami papers.  after work you can fish or go shooting and in the evening mary and i read and listen to music and go to bed.  sometimes we go into town or go to a concert.  sometimes we go to a fight or see a picture and go to la floridita afterwards.  winter we can go to the jai alai.  mary loves to garden and has a good flower and vegetable garden and fine roses... i lost about five years work out of my life during the war and i am trying to make up for it now.  i cant work and hang around new york because i never learned how to do it.  when i hit new york it is like somebody coming off a long cattle drive hitting dodge city in the old days.  right now im driving cattle and it is a long tough drive.  but this fall when the old man and the sea comes out you'll see some of the result of the last five years work.  you find me a place in ohio where i can live on top of a hill and be fifteen minutes away from the gulf stream and have my own fruit and vegetables the year around and raise and fight game chickens without breaking the law and i'll go live in ohio if miss mary and my cats and dogs agree.  

The fan had these comments:

Lovely flowers on Panchito Gomez

interestingly i never found in him the stuff about the cuban people and culture that keeps me there.  not that he wouldn't have appreciated those same things i don't think, but i suppose because those were different times:  consumerism hadn't taken over the world and there were lots of places where people were still people.  it didn't make cuba particularly special.