doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com 1/2 OT - Did they hunt on Cuba before Fidel?

The reason I'm asking is a while ago a member of a Russian gun forum posted pics of a "Hunting Firearms Museum" the he stumbled on while walking through Habana. The museum features a few hundred of (mostly "best") guns, some of which were received as presents from various Soviet Block leaders, while others labeled as "nationalized after the Revolution". Now, a natuve Cuban I know assures me there's no-one that hunts and nothing to be hunted on the island. I can swallow the "no-one" bit, but what about game birds/animals? Surely, if the former owners of the Purdeys and Parkers currently featured in the museum got their guns to Cuba, there must have been something to shoot the guns at (excluding Fidel)?

I was covering the revolution and interviewed Castro in 1960 and saw some nice guns at the DuPont residence near Veradero Beach, including a handsome Winchester lever-action, perhaps a 30-30, hanging over the fireplace. They weren't there for show. I've never seen bass (and alligators) as big and plentiful in the swamp country straddling the road running north of the Bay of Pigs which was closed to the invaders with a couple howitzers.

There was definitely duck hunting in Cuba - see E Hemingway.

A few years ago an auction house in Elmira New York sold Ernest Hemingway's Beretta S-series (I think it was a 3 or a 4)O/U 12 gauge. Along with it went the leg-o-mutton case with his name and address in Havana ink-stenciled on it and a photograph of him seated on a folding chair with a pile of doves at his feet and a combination of 3 or 4 very old and very young bird boys. All are staring into the camera, no smiles, dressed as they came from the hunting field. The gun brought $18K if I remember correctly but I swear that photograph was worth more than the gun. KBM

Thanks for the input, King, yet still I wonder. One often meets stories of great sea fishing around Cuba (like Hemingway, etc) but there doesn't seem to be any records of hunting there.

I read memoires of a former "head guide" of Zavidovo, the Soviet leaders' pet hunting preserve near Moscow. He describes a hunt to which Fidel and Raul Castro were invited while visiting the USSR. He doesn't believe the brothers ever hunted before, and they didn't get anything, probably because the weather was too cold for them to stand still. But he says everybody liked the Castros better than most of the "guests" they ever handled - very cheerful and easygoing people, always in a laughing mood.

Yeti - thanks, but could you please specify where to look? I've read lots of Hem's prose, but the duck hunting bits seem to have taken place in Florida...

Funny how I'm asking a question and the answer to it comes BEFORE I've posted it Thanks a lot!

So, there seem do be doves and ducks there, and I think there's quail on Bahamas so there's no reason why there souldn't be some on Cuba. Hmmm... gotta check if there's a season and is it legal to bring a shotgun there

I have seen a film, where Fidel is hunting Moose in Zavidovo. Our former president Kekkonen was too regular hunting quest in Zavidovo.

The Castro brothers weren't hunters. Their lives were more of books and streets. The Marxist theoretician, Regis DeBray, remarked in his books that the city boys with Castro in the Sierra Maestra weren't much compared to the more resourceful country boys who didn't think they knew everything and learned fast. Castro himself once blamed certain failures of the guerillas on a purely intellectual attitude toward war (which I thought may have been referring to himself).

The Atlantic Flyway beginning in the eastern Arctic includes Cuba.

I googled cuba hunting dove lodge and got about ten pages of stuff. Everyone hunts in Cuba except us. When Cuba opens up for us, everything will be in place. No outfitters will be getting in on the ground floor. They are already there. An example of a "positive look" at Cuban hunting is Thistlethwaite Outfitters.