Actor David Soul (Starsky & Hutch) Restores Hemingway's Chrysler--in Cuba

Ernest Hemingway and pre-Castro Cuba go hand-in-hand: Just ask anyone who ever had to read “Old Man and the Sea.” It's fitting that the author left his last automobile, a 1955 Chrysler New Yorker convertible, on the island before his suicide in 1961.

Auto restoration is pretty low on the list of day-to-day priorities in post-revolution Cuba. Long presumed lost, the Chrysler, much-decayed, was found in 2011.

 

 

The car is now the subject of “Cuban Soul,” an upcoming documentary film about the New Yorker's history and ongoing restoration.

Cuba isn't exactly wealthy these days -- and the most ready source of vintage spares, the United States, has been cut off from trade with the island nation since the Kennedy administration.

But there's always a workaround. Actor and singer David Soul (of “Starsky and Hutch” fame) took an interest in the project, and his British passport kept the parts flowing.

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..... You might not know it from his books, but Ernest Hemingway was something of a car guy. He owned a 1929 Rolls-Royce Phantom II (purchased after A Farewell to Arms was published that year) customized to accommodate his hunting gear.

 

(David Soul with Papa Hemingway's last ride, a 1955 Chrysler New Yorker convertible. The restoration is proceeding slowly. -Cuban Soul photo)

 

Hemingway bought a Plymouth convertible with wire wheels for his fourth wife, Mary.

Hemingway had to surrender his cars and his boat Pilar after Fidel Castro came to power.

Mary Hemingway handed the keys to the family doctor, but it’s had numerous owners over the year.

The Hemingway Museum’s Ada Rose recently tracked the car down, and now it’s getting sympathetically restored—slowly—with the help of Starsky & Hutch actor David Soul, who’s making a documentary about the whole thing called Cuban Soul.

 

(The restoration underway--in the open air, which makes sense in Cuba. Maybe not in Alaska. -Cuban Soul photo)

 

(David Soul (seated) at the Hemingway Museum in Cuba. Chris Paquin photo)

 

Ref: Actor David Soul (Starsky & Hutch) Restores Hemingway's Chrysler--in Cuba (cartalk)