By VANESSA ARRINGTON
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

HAVANA -- Many tourists in Havana pay tribute to Ernest Hemingway by drinking a frozen daiquiri alongside the life-size bronze statue of the late author at El Floridita restaurant, his onetime watering hole.

But few of them used to drink with the man himself at the restaurant's bar, like Lee Minor, a 90-year-old resident of Fort Myers, Fla.

"We had drinks together at the bar," said Minor, who spent much of the 1940s and 1950s traveling to Cuba as president of an American electrical company operating here. "He enjoyed friends, enjoyed knowing people."

Decades later, Minor returned to the island with his 60-year-old son for a tour of "Hemingway's Cuba" with a group of American Hemingway fans.

The travelers are among just a sprinkling of American groups still coming to Cuba after tough new U.S. restrictions against travel to the island took effect June 30.

Organizers of the group said the travelers came to Cuba, via Mexico, on a humanitarian license. They brought bags of clothing, medicine and school supplies to give to Cubans they meet on their weeklong trip, which ends Sunday.

Other groups come in direct defiance of the U.S. measures. Brigada Venceremos, a group of American activists, arrived via Canada earlier this week to the eastern city of Santiago, telling reporters they came in solidarity with Cubans and in protest of U.S. policy against the communist-run island.

The new U.S. rules are meant to squeeze the island's economy and push out President Fidel Castro by cutting the amount of cash coming in from the United States and limiting visits to Cuba by cultural and academic groups, as well as Cuban-Americans.

On Tuesday, the Hemingway group visited the rambling hacienda of Finca Vigia just east of Havana where the author lived from 1939 to 1960, a year before he committed suicide in Ketchum, Idaho.

They toured the inside of Hemingway's home, preserved much as he left it and filled with thousands of books by authors including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, J.D. Salinger and himself. Posters of Spanish bullfights and stuffed animal heads cover the walls, and a leopard animal skin stretches across a wide couch in front of Hemingway's massive mahogany desk.

Anti-dandruff rinse still sits next to the sink in the bathroom, where Hemingway penciled in his weight - which dropped from about 240 pounds to 190 over five years - on the wall next to the scale.

The group stopped to listen to a group of Cuban men in their 70s who recounted tales of playing baseball as children on Hemingway's hacienda. They were allowed to run all around the grounds and eat as much fruit as they wanted.

The neighborhood boys played alongside Hemingway's children, and were eventually given uniforms by the author, who served as the team's pitcher. The children also often piled in Hemingway's car to go to a baseball field next to the hunting club he frequented.

"We were just poor kids, but he never discriminated against us," said 74-year-old Oscar Blas Fernandez, who was 10 when he first met Hemingway. "We never asked for anything, he just gave to us spontaneously. He treated us like his own children."

Indeed, "he was like a second father to all of us," said Jose Rodriguez, 76, another of the former baseball players.

The Americans said they loved experiencing such living history.

"If we don't talk to them now, we'll lose their stories," said Myron Lubin, 64, of Phoenix.

"It's about Hemingway the man, not Hemingway the writer," said David Martens, of Anacortes, Wash. "It's about the humanitarian side of Hemingway, and his connection with the Cuban community."

The group also met Hemingway's former cook, Alberto "Fico" Ramos, and planned to visit the seaside fishing village of Cojimar, where Hemingway docked the Pilar, his 40-foot fishing boat.