Joe Esposito writes:

It has been 55 years since the death of Ernest Hemingway, oneof the great writers of the twentieth century. On July 2, 1961,Hemingway, suffering from serious physical and mental problems,committed suicide in Ketchum, Idaho.

I have been studying Hemingway in connection with otherresearch. In the process, I have come across several coins andmedals that honor him and well as some other numismatistconnections. Cuba, where the author lived for twenty years andhad ties for much longer, has issued four Hemingway coins.

Hemingway loved Cuba and the Cuban people, and he was treatedas a celebrity. He had a grim view of Castro's predecessor,Fulgenico Batista, and was hopeful that Fidel Castro wouldimprove the lot of the Cubans. Castro later seized Hemingway'shouse, nine miles outside of Havana, and today it is a shrineowned by the government.

Three of the Cuban coins were issued in 1982: a silverfive-peso with Hemingway's image on the obverse along with hislife dates; a five-peso which paid tribute to his Nobel Prize andThe Old Man and the Sea novel (there is an image of a fisherman,presumably "Santiago," in the small boat on the reverse); andanother five-peso coin with Hemingway's fishing boat, Pilar, onthe reverse.

The fourth, and perhaps the most interesting, coin is a 2010Cuban five-peso copper with Hemingway and Castro on the reverse.It commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the only meetingbetween the two men. Castro participated in Hemingway's marlinfishing tournament, and won.

Elsewhere in the region, Jamaica issue a seven-coin proof setin 1994, and one of the coins was a five-dollar Hemingway coinwith the image of the author and the fisherman on a boat in thewater.

But for me the most noteworthy numismatic item ofHemingway is an 81-mm bronze medal produced by the French-Spanishmedalist Andre Belo. It has an obverse portrait of Hemingway andan impressionistic account of Santiago, the old fisherman,struggling to reel in a marlin on the reverse. The legend inlower-case letters: "le vieil homme et la mer" [the old man andthe sea].

A copy of this medal sits in my office, sometimes offeringinspiration for writing. Although certainly not rare, it is oneof my favorite medals. It was issued in 1976 by the Monnaie deParis (Paris Mint).

Among other works by Belo, who was born in 1908, are medals ofcomposer Henri Sauguet, literary critic Charles Sainte-Beuve,musician Erik Satie and writer George Sand(Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin)--all French--as well as "TheAfternoon of a Faun."

There are some other interesting items related to Hemingwayand numismatics. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in1954 and donated his gold medal to a provincial Cuban Catholicchurch. The medal was stolen in the 1980s, but was recovered andis now closely held by the Catholic Church.

To read the complete article, see:
Ernest Hemingway and Numismatics(www.ghostofherodotus.com/2016/09/ernest-hemingway-and-numismatics.html)