Hemingway's calling leads him to his greatest catch as a writer, just as Santiago's refusal to abandon his calling leads him to his greatest catch, the spiritual victory at the end of his odyssey at high sea on the Gulf Stream. Hemingway is in Cuba in the early 1930s because he, like Santiago, follows his calling. It is no coincidence that Hemingway comes upon the tale of a Cuban fisherman towed out to sea by a great marlin, and after four days, rescued by other fishermen who drove off sharks circling his small skiff, lashed the skiff to their craft, and brought him home to Havana in 1934 (Scribner xxvii). Cuba is a land of fisherman poor in material possessions but wealthy beyond measure in spirit. Cuba, as the contemporary Cuban scholar Mary Cruz relates, 'is a land of Santiagos' (Cruz 204). Like Hemingway all of his life as a writer, Santiago is willing to enter the seas of life with joy for the journey before him, with faith to endure any struggle and a will to survive. Santiago is a fitting protagonist for Hemingway's greatest work. What Flamenco Sketches is to the lexicon of Miles Davis - a highly-crafted, lyrical, deeply spiritual, and passionate expression of Davis' jazz aesthetic framed in the cante jondo of Spanish flamenco music - The Old Man and The Sea is to Hemingway's work: an impassioned expression of Hemingway's lyric voic evoking the soul of Spanish culture and Cuban culture, rich in spiritual and mythological connections. Cante jondo, similarly, casts a mournful tone in its flamenco rhythms not unlike that Hemingway reveals in The Old Man and The Sea. Cante jondo, like The Old Man and The Sea, moves at a ballad tempo, speaks to life and death struggles, and embraces sorrow and joy in equal measure. The Old Man and The Sea leads to a reading of The Epistle of James through Ernest Hemingway's deep understanding of Spanish Catholicism and Cuban culture Hemingway's greatest work, it is his cante jondo, his 'deep song' in homage to the suffering of his generation.

Jondo song