Did Ernest Hemingway copy his friend’s ideas for Cuban classics?

Some of the novelist’s best-loved work bears ‘striking resemblance’ to that of an unknown journalist

One was a Cuban newspaper reporter working to support his family andwriting fiction in his spare time. The other was one of the world’s most famous novelists on the planet, a larger-than-life Americanwho came to Havana in search of inspiration.

New research shows that Enrique Serpa, a little-known Cuban author, wrote in a way that sparked the creative genius of Ernest Hemingway, who wrote some of his most celebrated works while living in Cuba in the middle of the twentieth century. Professor Andrew Feldman, a US academic, said there were strong parallels between Serpa’s stories and works later written by Hemingway, including To Have and Have Not and The Old Man and the Sea. Although “not a plagiarism situation”, the stories were “incredibly similar, a striking resemblance in terms of themes and style”.

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