Watches

 

Hemingway’s Cuba: The Story of Cuervo y Sobrinos

Step back in time to Havana, Cuba in the days of Ernest Hemingway. In the 1930s to ’50s, “La Casa,” the Cuervo y Sobrinos watch boutique, was a gathering place for the world’s elite — Hemingway, Churchill, Einstein, Clark Gable and Caruso among them.

The men enjoyed cigars, coffee, cocktails, and conversation as they shopped the Swiss-made timepieces designed by the Cuervo family, each signing The Golden Book, the shop’s guest log.

As the Cuban revolution began to foment, the Cuervo family exiled to Europe and Mexico.

Locking up their design documents and The Golden Book in La Casa’s basement safe, they hoped to return and resume business once the political situation calmed down. But that was not to be.

The shop remained closed for decades, and the prestigious brand sank into oblivion until 2002 when current owner Marzio Villa re-launched the brand in Europe, resurrecting it to its former glory.

Today’s Cuervo Y Sobrinos: The Only Swiss Luxury Brand With a Latin Soul

Visiting the original La Casa in Havana, Villa found the designs and The Golden Book still intact in the shop’s safe.

Today, the watches are again manufactured in Switzerland, each is delivered in an authentic humidor, with all designs harkening back to the brand’s Latin heritage. The vintage styles recreate the sense of a lifestyle that today’s stressful, frenetic distractions make almost impossible.

As chronicled in the watch magazine, Revolution, in 2016, Keith Sandburg, the first U.S. watch journalist to visit Cuba reports, “Cuba, and Cuervo y Sobrinos, touched me and changed my view of life, work and time.”

As Sandburg found, wearing a Cuervo y Sobrinos transports you back to an era when time took on a different dimension.

Available in Central Texas only at Copeland Jewelers in Austin, Texas.