Ernest Hemingway's grandsons join fight to save marlin in Straits of Florida

Ernest Hemingway's grandsons sailed into the fishing village that inspired The Old Man and the Sea in a campaign to save game fish like the giant marlin that dragged the fictitious Santiago out to sea.

John and Patrick Hemingway arrived on Monday in Cojimar, on the eastern outskirts of Havana, to begin a weeklong visit to try to enlist Cuban marine scientists to join an effort to conserve billfish in the Straits of Florida.

Billfish include species of marlin, sailfish and spearfish that Hemingway was instrumental in cataloguing 80 years ago, when he first took his fishing boat Pilar from Key West to Cuba.

"This we feel very strongly about because it ties in with my grandfather and his love for fishing and his love for Cuba," said John Hemingway. "We think it's vitally important that both countries work on this together. Both of them use this water."

More than 100 townspeople, including cheering schoolchildren, greeted the Hemingways' yacht as it sailed into Cojimar from the Hemingway Marina on Havana's western edge.

They laid flowers at a bust of "Papa", who spent years in Cuba, including long stretches in Cojimar, the unnamed hometown of the protagonist in The Old Man and the Sea. The work won Hemingway the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1953 and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature a year later.