Ernest Hemingway was a Rolex man. For many years, it was famously an Oyster Perpetual, to be precise. But it’s not hard to picture the golden dial of the Historiador Tradición from Cuervo y Sobrinos strapped to his wrist, as the bullfighter, Nazi ass-kicker, and Nobel prize-winning novelist hunches over his old typewriter, pounding out Old Man and the Sea, a fresh mojito undoubtedly within fingertips’ reach while the horn section from a Benny Moré album echoes its brassy chorus from the other room. See, the legendary author was, after all, once a client of Cuervo y Sobrinos (“Cuervo and nephews”) — a retailer that got its start in the late 19th century as the premier jeweler in Havana, Cuba. It was there that the family jeweler sold co-branded Rolex, Patek Philippe, and Longines watches, much like Tiffany has done throughout the years, to discerning clients like Winston Churchill and Clark Gable prior to the Cuban revolution. And as the story goes, one of those clients was also, indeed, Hemingway himself.
Ernest Hemingway at his Havana home, “Finca Vigia,” in 1953
Now, to be absolutely clear, that doesn’t technically mean Hemingway actually wore a Cuervo y Sobrinos like this Historiador Tradición, it simply means he was a customer of the famed jewelry store, but it does seem highly likely that some of the timepieces he prized over his literary career would have been purchased at the island’s most notable jeweler. Perhaps most importantly, though, the mere possibility that this watch could fit such a narrative speaks to the transporting power of its luscious mid-century aesthetic — one brought back to life by an otherwise little-known Swiss indie.
Like stepping off an old twin-engine onto a grassy island airfield and taking in that first deep breath of salty air, there’s an awful lot to absorb when measuring first impressions of the Historiador Tradición when it hits your wrist. Particularly how it could have come from the mind of the designer responsible for the original Vacheron Constantine ref. 6087 but only after an extended holiday in the Caribbean, whereupon correspondence with Switzerland was conducted via lime juice-stained postcards bearing pencil sketches of deeply textured dials and claw-lugged cases. As part of the CyS Historiador collection, the Tradición is an impressive re-issue of a heritage reference, one that represented a very specific period of transitional design in the 1950s when the bold “maximalist” principles of Art Deco were slowly making way to the cleaner aesthetic of mid-century minimalism. It marries the two “just so,” albeit under a light haze of Cuban cigar smoke drifting lazily over a case filled with amber-colored bottles of rum.
