Hemingway's inspiration for 'The Old Man And The Sea' dies in Cuba aged 104

Gregorio Fuentes, believed to be the inspiration for Ernest Hemingway's story The Old Man And The Sea, died in Cuba at the weekend…

Gregorio Fuentes, believed to be the inspiration for Ernest Hemingway's story The Old Man And The Sea, died in Cuba at the weekend, aged 104. He had become a one-man tourist attraction in the decades before his death.

He still lived in the village of Cojimar, near Havana, where he once used to embark on marlin-fishing trips with the adventure-loving Hemingway. Foreign journalists could usually get an interview in exchange for a bottle of rum.

"My grandfather was loved by everyone," his granddaughter, Ms America Aguas Fuentes, said outside his simple house in Cojimar. "He used to really enjoy recounting stories, especially about the wonderful times he had with Hemingway, whom he always carried with him in his mind."

Mr Fuentes died at his home on Sunday morning and was buried at a cemetery in the nearby village of Guanabacoa in the afternoon.

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Although still lucid, he was suffering various ailments associated with old age.

"He was a humble man of the people, who showed great mastery in the arts of the sea and left a legacy of friendship which is an example to us all," a friend, Mr Jose Miguel Diaz Escrich, said.

Hemingway's Nobel prize-winning 1952 masterpiece modelled its central character, and his colossal struggle to bring in the fish of his life, on Mr Fuentes. "The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck," Hemingway wrote in his opening description of the fisherman.

"The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.

"Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same colour as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated."

Last November, the writer's niece, Ms Hilary Hemingway, presented the International Game Fish Association's "Captain" award to Mr Fuentes at the Havana yacht marina named after her uncle.