• Submitted by: manso
• Travel and Tourism
• 06 / 13 / 2011

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HAVANA (AFP) – Dwindling fish numbers, high seas and political ostracism did little to dampen spirits as an American team took home first prize at a major deep-sea fishing event in Cuba at the weekend.

Organizers of the 61st International Ernest Hemingway Billfishing Tournament complained that President Barack Obama's administration had prevented around 20 fishing boats from traveling over for the event.

"Hopefully the Obama administration will realize that a fishing tournament, even more than a tourist and sports event, is an encounter between peoples, a bridge of friendship," tournament spokesman Jose Miguel Diaz told reporters.

The United States was still the most represented country at the event, which included 21 fishing yachts and fishermen from 14 countries. The American boats "De Bait Able" and "Unclaimed" picked up first and third places.

Diaz blamed the low volume of fish in the waters off the northern coast of Havana on global warming.

"Sixty-one years ago, fishermen said the needlefish ran from late April to early June, but now there is global warming, climate change," he said.

The Hemingway tournament is conducted under a "tag and release" policy in order to protect the species.

Hemingway, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, lived in Cuba for 21 years at a colonial house near Havana where he wrote his masterpiece "The Old Man and the Sea." The writer founded the fishing tournament in 1950.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110612/