Cuba has offered inspiration and passion to many. The well known author Ernest Hemingway made his home in Cuba from where he withdrew many of his most aspiring work.

People did sometimes ask Hemingway why he chose to live in Cuba. Late in 1948 he wrote an article for Holiday magazine in which he talked about his life there, offering his readers verbal snapshots of cool mornings at the Finca, cockfights and pigeon shoots, but most importantly the incomparable marlin fishing in the Gulf Stream, which he lovingly called "the Great Blue River." On one level his late novella The Old Man And The Sea could be read as a tribute to the Gulf Stream. The following is an exerpt from his Islands In The Stream :
He got into the car and told the chauffeur to go up O'Reilly to the Floridita. Before the car circled the plaza in front of the embassy building and the Ayuntamiento and then turned into O'Reilly he saw the size of the waves in the mouth of the harbor and the heavy rise and fall of the channel buoy. In the mouth of the harbor the sea was very wild and confused and clear green water was breaking over the rock at the base of the Morro, the tops of the seas blowing white in the sun.
It looks wonderful, he said to himself. It not only looks wonderful, it is wonderful.