The rapprochement between Washington and Havana is expanding to cultural issues as U.S. and local authorities are embarking on a joint effort to restore and preserve Ernest Hemingway's house near the Cuban capital, United Press International reported. Experts will also tend to thousands of the late author's documents, the newswire added.

The house, known as Finca Vigía, is where Hemingway spent the last 22 years of his life and where he wrote his Nobel Prize-winning book, "The Old Man and the Sea"; the Boston-based Finca Vigía Foundation will now export $860,000 worth of U.S. supplies as part of restoration efforts, UPI said.

Mary-Jo Adams, the nonprofit's executive director, told the news service that her foundation has tried since 2005 to begin restoring the home, an effort long halted by the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba; she referred the opportunities arising from the thaw in U.S.-Cuba ties as "historic."

"Not since the 1950s has a building with American materials been built here," Adams detailed.

The Finca Vigía Foundation has already signed an agreement with the Cuban government, and the new project will include a workshop adjacent to the house to restore and maintain the famed writer's documents, rough drafts and letters, CNN noted.

The villa had been Hemingway's "base for marathon stretches of writing, drinking and fishing," the news channel recalled.

"From the hillside residence, he entertained fellow writers, diplomats and Hollywood stars," CNN added.

The writer had already left the island nation when Washington and Havana severed diplomatic ties in 1961; he committed suicide in Idaho the same year.

On the Cuban side, the National Council of Cultural Heritage will be in charge of the restoration project, the official Cuban News Agency reported. State media spoke of "thousands of documents, between letters, notes, handbills, books (and) magazines" that needed to be preserved.

Ada Rosa Alfonso, the director of the Finca Vigía Museum, told the newswire that the new workshop building would be located near the entrance of the property and would not alter the property's traditional layout.