I laughed out loud reading your comment. I remember reading Mad magazine and a parody of Hemingway when I was 13 and thinking this stinks just like reading Hemingway.
I had no clue about how closely tied to events (activity) he actually was until reading this. I just thought he was a Nazi sympathizer when I was younger and decided to ignore him (unless a school assignment). My most striking impression of Hemingway is a Mad magazine parody!
The guy was just obsessed with death. Father killing himself with a gun to the head in the childhood home with the wife downstairs. I could see where he would get off on it.
The problem of Hemingway and Communism is complicated. Some of what I will say here is based on information I gained reading the Wikipedia article “Ernest Hemingway.” He had direct experience with the Facist Franco dictatorship in Spain and the Spanish Civil War of the latter 1930s. Adventurous young men from the Western democracies volumteered in Spain to fight the Facists who were supported by Hitler and the rising Nazi threat. The anti Franco Spanish groups were supported by the Soviet Union. Both Germany and Russia used Spain as the testing ground for their newest developed military arms and tactics. The Nazi bombing of civilians in Guernica was a new horrible war development. As the following quote shows, if Hemingway was recruited by Soviets in 1941, it was in connection with his trip to China which was being attacked by Nazi German ally Japan. To hate Nazis made it logical to cooperate with Soviets, and as the quote also shows he returned to pre Castro Cuba with fighting Germany on his mind even though war had not yet been declaired.
“In January 1941, Martha (his journalist wife) was sent to China on assignment for Collier’s magazine.[101] Hemingway went with her, sending in dispatches for the newspaper PM, but in general he disliked China.[101] A 2009 book suggests during that period he may have been recruited to work for Soviet intelligence agents under the name “Agent Argo”.[102] They returned to Cuba before the declaration of war by the United States that December, when he convinced the Cuban government to help him refit the Pilar, which he intended to use to ambush German submarines off the coast of Cuba.[17]”
He had several severe accidents including severe head injuries before he returned to his home in Cuba around the time of Castro’s successful revolution. He was no longer able to organize his literary efforts successfully, By 1959 he had decided to move to Idaho and bought a home. Subsequently the Castro government seized his property and library and he was unable to recover his unpublished manuscripts. His health deteriorated and he commited suicide as the Wiki article reports. “Hemingway’s behavior during his final years had been similar to that of his father before he killed himself;[162] his father may have had hereditary haemochromatosis, whereby the excessive accumulation of iron in tissues culminates in mental and physical deterioration.[163] Medical records made available in 1991 confirmed that Hemingway had been diagnosed with hemochromatosis in early 1961.[164] His sister Ursula and his brother Leicester also killed themselves.[165] Other theories have arisen to explain Hemingway’s decline in mental health, including that multiple concussions during his life may have caused him to develop chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), leading to his eventual suicide.[166][167][168] Hemingway’s health was further complicated by heavy drinking throughout most of his life.[115]”
Personally I came to the MD, VA, DC area shortly after JFK’s election. At that time most of the people I knew thought that Castro’s victory was a good thing, Batista was an evil dictator with business ties with the US Mafia, and that the people who were killed early in his rule probably deserved the death penalty. However it was not too long after that we all were changing our opinion as Castro broadened the population he was choosing for imprisonment and execution. Soon there were only 2 people left among those I knew who were still singing Castro’s revolutionary songs at parties. The rest of us were sadly disillusioned and were very sad when the Bay of Pigs failed.
After reading the Wiki article and reviewing my own experiences, I suspect Hemingway experienced his own disillusionment, which may have contributed to his suicide.