Havana haunts a traveller's imagination. Partly, it's the columned beauty of aged colonial buildings, some dating to the 1700s. It's also the lingering issue of "the revolution", still provoking anxiety in xenophobic circles. But Havana beckons for another, more intimate reason.

Ernest Hemingway, one of the past century's most admired novelists, chose it as his home and did his greatest work there. His legacy is clear, his books read and loved, not just by adults but schoolchildren. The International Hemingway Colloquium is well established, the 11th to be held from June 21 to 24.

Hemingway's early writing appeared when he was in his 20s, working as a reporter for the Toronto Star, later filing stories from Europe. In 1937, he covered the Spanish Civil War for a variety of papers including the Star. Then he discovered Cuba, which became his home until 1960, the year before his tragic death. He settled in Havana in a small hotel that opened while he was still in Toronto. It's called Ambos Mundos and stands in the heart of Habana Vieja, old Havana. The rose-tinted building faces a square, where stilt walkers parade daily on the cobbled streets around it.

We settled in a room on the fourth floor, almost directly below the one in which Hemingway lived. His room, number 511, is now a small museum, open Monday to Saturday.

When we entered, we were struck by its spartan style -- the bed he slept in, probably dreamt in, the table he sat at, and, most poignant of all, the old typewriter on which, it's said, he wrote these words in 1939: "He lay flat on the brown pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees."

Thus opens the novel that set him apart as one of the brilliant literary lights of the 20th century, For Whom The Bell Tolls.

Hemingway loved Cuba, and not just the land and the people. He loved its drinks. He was, as his biographies attest, a prodigious drinker. He was also a man who preferred commoners to the upper class -- hence his sympathy for the revolution.

So he favoured a rather plebeian rum-based Cuban cocktail called a mojito. He drank them often at La Bodeguita cafe near Ambos Mundos. Hemingway made the drink and restaurant famous, but when we went, it was the mojito we remembered and the food we forgot. (It's best forgotten.)