The Asheville, North Carolina, restaurant reflects a life remade in exile.
“My father used to call it a ‘silver spoon life,’ until that life was taken away when he was 17 years old,” says Alex Fraga, owner of Hemingway’s Cuba in Asheville, North Carolina.
Alex’s father Antonio, known as Tony, often recounted his final days in his native country of Cuba when his family of engineers and doctors lost all their wealth at the hands of dictator Fidel Castro.
“I had three choices: go to jail, go to the firing squad or leave,” Tony recalled. In January of 1960, Tony and his family fled Cuba.
At first, in America, the Fragas had to share housing with four other families. Tony took a job as a mail clerk with IBM in New York and eventually worked his way into a managerial position in Detroit, where Alex was born. Later, with his wife and four children, Tony went out on his own, moving to Miami in 1979 to establish a real estate company and later expanding into hospitality. That firm, FIRC Group, is now headquartered in Asheville…