by JOEL WHITNEY
George Plimpton (center and top) and Ernest Hemingway (center) at bullfight, as seen in “American Masters: Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself.” PHOTO/Plimpton Estate/PBS
When Ernest Hemingway agreed to his famous Paris Review interview, he had no idea he’d be helping the CIA
In early 1959, George Plimpton was preparing to watch an execution in Cuba. The Cuban revolutionaries, led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, had just marched on Havana and ousted the US-supported dictator Fulgencio Batista. The young Paris Review editor and other New York literary figures arrived during a period marked by hope for a democratic Cuba. They were there, too, as witnesses. Wary of US media distorting events, the revolutionaries had called in writers and intellectuals to witness the changing of the guard.
The changeover involved infamous trials—and even more infamous executions—that had become increasingly controversial. Guevara had witnessed an earlier coup in the region, in Guatemala, and calculated that it had been possible only because the country’s new leader allowed military officers loyal to the imperialists to remain in their posts after the election. Fearing a similar US-supported rollback, Guevara insisted the war criminals who had done the dictator’s bidding must be tried, read an accounting of their crimes, and summarily executed.
In some versions of what happened next, it was Hemingway who, leisurely sipping tequila sunrises, took Plimpton to watch the prisoners offloaded from trucks and shot. In other versions, Hemingway stayed home and it was Plimpton and the other visitors from New York who viewed the shootings as entertainment. Regardless, the event marked a high point in Plimpton’s long cultivation of a friendship with Hemingway, which he had initiated with an interview request—the acclaimed author declined, cursing wildly—six years before. The interview nevertheless appeared in the famously apolitical Paris Review, which syndicated it around the world to literary magazines funded by the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom. The Paris Review offered it to the CIA’s literary family without Hemingway ever being told, and Plimpton quietly joined, however indirectly, the chorus of pundits, bureaucrats, and friends who politicized Hemingway’s home in Cuba when it had become politically taboo to live there. Not long after Hemingway returned from the island, his discomfort living in the nation of his birth, and the government’s relentless surveillance of him there, would lead to his suicide.
“Hemingway himself is an outrageous old man,” Plimpton wrote William Styron in 1953, proposing the interview to his co-editors during The Paris Review’s launch. “I met him in the Ritz bar where he agreed to give us an interview…. His language is what you’d expect, and I should guess the most difficult problem of the interview would be to tone it down…. He is in Kenya at the moment, adding some Mau Mau filth to his vocabulary…and will be back here in November.” If this progress report sounds less than adulatory, it may have been tongue-in-cheek bravado; gradually but emphatically, Plimpton came to idolize Hemingway. More likely, it pointed to the abuse that Hemingway doled out to the upstart editor, both verbal and physical.
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