Question

Life history of g. L.fuentes in 200 words

Answer 1

Gregori

o Fuentes, fisherman: born Lanzarote, Canary Islands 11 July 1897; married 1920 Dolores Perez (died 1990; two daughters and two daughters deceased); died Cojimar, Cuba 13 January 2002.

Since the death of Ernest Hemingway in 1961, a cottage industry has grown up among the author's aficionados surrounding the true identity of the "cheerful and undefeated" old fisherman, Santiago, hero of what many claim was Hemingway's finest novel, The Old Man and the Sea, published in 1952 – the story of an old

man who hooks a marlin, his first fish in 84 days, but has to fight off the sharks if he is to get the fish back to land where he can sell the meat. It is a story of struggle, of loyalty, of fortitude and of a man who goes too far out in pursuit of his prey and pays the price. Two years later it was named in Hemingway's citation for the Nobel Prize for literature.

Much of the attention on who really was the old man, unsurprisingly, revolved around Gregorio Fuentes, long-time first mate and eventually captain of Hemingway's fishing boat, the Pilar. Fuentes, who died on Sunday in the village of Cojimar, 10 miles east of Havana, at the remarkable age of 104, certainly fitted the bill but for the fact that Hemingway conceived the idea for the book in the 1930s; at that time both men were in their thirties.

Nevertheless, it took 16 years for the first phase of Hemingway's "book about the sea" to make it to print; the second phase, Islands in the Stream, was published posthumously in 1970. An earlier book, To Have and Have Not (1937), paints a unflattering portrait of a first mate named Eddy whose main preoccupation is drinking rum, definitely not based on Fuentes