HAVANA.-(EFE) The wives, lovers and secretaries of Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) are the focus of one of the exhibitions on view during the 12th International Symposium about the American writer being held in Havana.

The exhibition gathers photos, documents and objects that will be on show all year in the famous Room 511 of the Ambos Mundos Hotel in the Cuban capital where Hemingway lived in the 1930s.

The pictures of Agnes Von Korowsky, the nurse who was his first love and inspired the novel "A Farewell to Arms," shares space with the photos of his wives Hadley Richardson, Marta Gelhorn, Pauline Pfeiffer and Mary Welsh, and some of his lovers including the Cuban Leopoldina.

Gelhorn, who was a writer, journalist and the first wife with whom the Nobel Laureate in Literature lived on the island, is represented by a number of personal objects and books dedicated to Hemingway.

Also displayed are letters from Welsh, his fourth and last wife; a telegram from the Canadian Jane Mason, the writer's mistress in Havana in the 1930s; and a book of poems by the Italian Adriana Ivancich, another of his loves.

One of the most attractive figures in the show is Leopoldina, the Cuban prostitute that Hemingway portrayed in his book "Gulf Islands" and whom he met at the Floridita Bar in Havana.

"It's a very charismatic subject. All the visitors want to know how many women Hemingway had," Esperanza Garcia, curator of the writer's patrimony at the Ambos Mundos Hotel, told Efe.

According to the specialist, tourists who visit the room always "attribute a new romance" to the author of "The Old Man and the Sea."

"If a Japanese comes here, he'll say that Hemingway fell in love in Japan. If it's a Finn, he'll find him girlfriends in Finland," Garcia said.

Completing the exhibition is the patrimony kept at the Hemingway museum at the Finca Vigia farm outside Havana where the writer lived during long periods from 1939 until shortly before his death.

The International Ernest Hemingway Symposium, which got underway on Thursday and will continue through Sunday, also includes a film exhibition with frames from the movies made from the writer's works.

The program also includes visits to sites in Havana associated with Hemingway along with works about his writings, the preservation of his legacy and the influence of Cuba in his life and work. EFE