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In the Havana of the 1930s and 1940s, where wrought-iron balconies leaned over streets thick with music and sea air, Ernest Hemingway kept a standing relationship with the city’s most distinguished watch and jewellery house. The officially licensed Hemingway timepieces that carry his name today are not a marketing afterthought, but the continuation of a genuine friendship — a tribute paid in Swiss precision and Latin soul. This is the story of how a writer, a city and a watchmaker came to share the same idea of time.
A patron, a city, a friendship
Hemingway spent nearly two decades on the island, and it was here, at his home Finca Vigía on the outskirts of Havana, that he wrote The Old Man and the Sea. Through those years the Cuervo y Sobrinos boutique was woven into the rhythm of his days — a place to linger, to talk and to choose. According to Angela Hemingway, who today presides over Hemingway Limited, the writer acquired one of his most famous watches from the house itself. The connection was never invented for an advertisement: it was simply true.
That bond reaches back to the very origin of the brand, founded in 1882 by Ramón Fernández Cuervo and his nephews — the sobrinos who gave the company its name. By the time Hemingway became a regular, the boutique had grown into a meeting point for a remarkable cast of figures drawn to Havana’s golden years, when the city was the most glamorous capital of the Caribbean. The watch and the writer belonged to the same world.
When the brand chose to honour that history, it did so properly. The Hemingway watches are produced in collaboration with Hemingway Limited, the organisation that manages the author’s trademark and legacy — making Cuervo y Sobrinos the first Swiss house to offer an officially licensed Hemingway timepiece. The collection made its debut in 2022 and was expanded in 2023 during the Hemingway Days in Key West, where John Hemingway, the writer’s grandson, attended as guest of honour.
He kept good company. The same boutique counted Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein and Pablo Neruda among the figures who passed through its doors, each drawn to a house that had become part of the texture of Havana life. Yet of them all it is Hemingway whose name the brand chose to inscribe on a watch — perhaps because no one embodied the island’s blend of intellect and appetite, discipline and abandon, quite as he did. To wear the Hemingway is to keep a little of that company.
*Explore the world of Cuervo y Sobrinos in the official online shop.*
Hemingway Icónico
Cuervo y Sobrinos pays tribute to its longtime and loyal customer Ernest Hemingway, celebrated writer and authentic legend of the 20th century, with the launch of a new collection entirely dedicated to the writer.
Limited Edition of 882 pieces.
2.800,00 CHF
A Historiador at heart
For all its literary resonance, the Hemingway is first of all a Historiador. It belongs to the same family as the classic Historiador collection, and shares its signature: flamboyant yet ergonomic lugs that sweep out from the case, and the unmistakable vintage character that has made the line the brand’s most recognisable silhouette.
The case measures a balanced 40 mm in stainless steel — slim enough to slip beneath a cuff, generous enough to hold the eye — and is protected by a double-domed sapphire crystal with anti-reflective coating. A signed, screw-down crown secures the watch to 10 ATM of water resistance. The detail collectors return to, however, is written rather than engineered: around the inner ring, the rehaut carries one of Hemingway’s own lines — “In order to write about life first you must live it.” On the caseback, the Hemingway logo seals the dedication.
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An art déco inheritance
The vintage character of the Hemingway is not nostalgia for its own sake; it is a continuation of the art déco sensibility that shaped Havana during the brand’s first golden age. The proportions are considered, the lines clean, the typography of the numerals drawn with the confidence of the 1940s and 50s. Even the warm dial tones belong to that era — the colour of aged paper, of tobacco, of late light on a terrace. It is mid-twentieth-century elegance, translated for the modern wrist.
What keeps the watch from feeling like a costume is restraint. The case stays slim, the dial uncluttered, the references quiet enough to reveal themselves slowly. This is the discipline the Historiador line has always practised, and it is what lets a watch so full of story remain, on the wrist, simply elegant. A tribute that shouts is no tribute at all; the Hemingway prefers to murmur.
Products by Category
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Hemingway Icónico
2.800,00 CHF -
Hemingway Icónico
2.800,00 CHF -
Hemingway Icónico ‘The Fisherman’
3.500,00 CHF
The Icónico and “The Fisherman”
Within the line, two interpretations stand out. The Hemingway Icónico carries a pointer date complication and dials in warm, sepia-tinged tones — cream and brown — that recall the colours surrounding the writer during his Cuban years; the cream version is paired with a light brown leather strap. It is offered as a numbered, limited edition of 882 pieces, a figure that keeps it firmly in the world of the collector. For those drawn to a deeper register, the Icónico in brown offers the same vintage spirit in a darker key.
The Hemingway Icónico “The Fisherman” takes a different course. It adds a GMT function and a steel bracelet in a piece conceived as a homage to the Caribbean Sea and to The Old Man and the Sea itself — a watch for those who, like Santiago, measure their days against the horizon. Each model in the line wears the Hemingway logo on the dial and, on the crown, a phrase from the author: small reminders of a life lived at full intensity.
Choosing between them is less a question of specification than of temperament. The cream Icónico is the daylight watch — warm, open, made for terraces and long lunches and the unhurried pace of an island afternoon. The brown is its evening counterpart, quieter and more introspective, the colour of a study lined with books. “The Fisherman”, with its second time zone and its steel bracelet, is the travelling Hemingway, the one forever bound for the next port. Whichever a collector chooses, the watch reads as a chapter rather than an accessory — which is exactly how the brand intends its Historiador pieces to be worn.
| Historiador Hemingway Icónico — CreamPointer date · 40 mm stainless steel case · cream dial · light brown leather strap · Sellita SW221-1 automatic movement · numbered limited edition of 882 pieces.Shop now → |
Hemingway Icónico
2.800,00 CHF
Cuervo y Sobrinos pays tribute to its longtime and loyal customer Ernest Hemingway, celebrated writer and authentic legend of the 20th century, with the launch of a new collection entirely dedicated to the writer.
Limited Edition of 882 pieces.
1 in stock
Swiss craftsmanship beneath the dial
Behind the literary references sits serious watchmaking. The Icónico is driven by a Sellita SW221-1 self-winding movement, a 26 mm calibre beating at 28,800 A/h on 26 jewels, with a 38-hour power reserve and a finished oscillating weight engraved for the occasion. It is the kind of dependable, well-decorated automatic that suits a watch meant to be worn rather than locked away — an expression of the Swiss savoir-faire practised at the brand’s atelier in Capolago, on the shores of Lake Lugano.
There is a quiet logic to the choice. Hemingway prized things that worked — boats, typewriters, fishing reels — and distrusted ornament for its own sake. A robust automatic with an honest power reserve, finished with care but built to keep time, would have suited him. The combination of Swiss craftsmanship and Latin soul is, in the end, the whole point: precision in the service of feeling.
| El valor del tiempo — the value of time, measured not in hours alone but in lives fully lived.See the Hemingway timepieces in the online shop. → |
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A timepiece for those who live before they write
There is a particular wearer the Hemingway speaks to: the one who reads late, travels often and believes a watch should carry a story as well as the time. It is not a loud watch. Its presence is literary — measured, considered, quietly confident — and it rewards the person who knows what the line on the rehaut really means.
Worn with linen in the heat of summer, or with a jacket on a long evening, it does what the best tributes do: it makes the past feel present. More than a century after the sobrinos opened their doors, and decades after a novelist made their boutique part of his routine, the friendship endures — now on the wrist.
Time, for Hemingway, was something to be spent generously. The collection that bears his name invites the same philosophy: live first, and let the watch keep the record.
| Discover the Hemingway collection and find the timepiece that speaks your story.Discover the Hemingway collection → |
