How do we know we’re in Cuba? Blaring salsa music! Shiny cars! Non-white servants who alert white people to danger! Papa: Hemingway in Cuba is NOT historically accurate! It’s not even historically considerate. I should have had a sense of what I was in for when I saw the trailer and iconic American novelist Ernest Hemingway (Adrian Sparks) was dodging gunfire in the streets of Havana. That… probably didn’t happen?
But still, I wanted to see Papa for Giovanni Ribisi, who plays Ed Myers, a character based on a journalist Hemingway mentored, Denne Bart Petitclerc, who also wrote this film’s screenplay. It’s important to point out the screenplay is based on one hero-worshiping account because it also explains why so much of Papa is made up of unapologetic lies.
