Man is essentially the arbiter of his own destiny, although at times it appears as if adverse situations render him quite helpless.The
Old Man and the Sea is an exemplary novel depicting the immense courage and guts of a man who is on the wrong side of his age , and his epic battle against catastrophic adversities . After struggling hard and losing everything in this battle, he embraces victory of a different kind.
The Old man and the Sea is a novella about an old Cuban fisherman and his epic battle with a giant Marlin. After going eighty-four days without catching a fish, Santiago, the old Cuban fisherman becomes the butt of all the jokes of his small
village people, who called him 'salao’ since he could not catch any fish for a long period. Santiago then prepares for the epic battle with nature. Giving their insulting words a cold shoulder , he went to the sea with firm determination. In the words of Hemingway “every thing about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated'. After a fierce, agonizing battle with a giant marlin for three days far out in the Gulf Stream, he ultimately snatched triumph from the mouth of the ordeal. Much before it was written in 1952, Hemingway had crossed the Florida straits along with the team headed by the Key West bootlegger named Joe Russell in 1932 to reach Cuba for
fishing, which was only a day’s boat ride from Key West. It was the beginning of a warm relationship between Havana and Hemingway, lasting for more than 28 years.He brought his own craft, the Pilar, in 1934, for fishing. It was the fishing village of Cojimar, near the finca, where the Pilar was docked. It was here where the author of "The Old Man and the Sea" lived with his boat. The Cubans love "The Old Man and the Sea" because it centres around them and uses the fishing village of Cojimar, several miles from his home, as its setting. The focal theme of the work i.e., "A man is not made for defeat...a man can be destroyed but not defeated', seems to have inspired the Cubans in their struggle against imperial forces and inspires the less fortunate in the social order to fight and assert his position in the society, since
that is the only way to survive like a human being. Death in the process of struggle only brings immortality.