Gregorio Fuentes

Who was Gregorio Fuentes?

Gregorio Fuentes was a fisherman and the first mate of the Pilar, the boat belonging to the American writer Ernest Hemingway.

Fuentes was born on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. He first went to sea as deck boy with his father at age 10. As a teenager worked on cargo ships out of the Canary Islands to Trinidad and Puerto Rico, and from the Spanish ports of Valencia and Sevilla to South America. He migrated permanently to Cuba when he was 22. He attempted to reclaim his Spanish citizenship in 2001.

In 1938, Fuentes replaced the Pilar's original first mate, Carlos Gutiérrez, after Hemingway's mistress, Jane Mason, hired him to be the first mate of her boat after becoming jealous of Hemingway's relationship with Martha Gellhorn.

Fuentes, a lifelong cigar smoker, died from cancer in Cojimar in 2002, never having read The Old Man and the Sea. He was 104 years old.