However, the novella does reflect a universal pattern of socioeconomic change familiar even today among developing nations. In rural Cuba of the 1930s and 1940s, the traditional fishing culture (insulated and isolated from the industrialized world, closely connected to nature, bereft of modern technology, and bound to extended families and tightly knit communities) began shifting to the material progress of a fishing industry (dependent on the industrialized world for its livelihood, environmentally oblivious or negligent, increasingly reliant on mechanized methods to ensure profit, and much less bound to extended families and local communities). In The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway depicts Santiago as a dedicated fisherman whose craft is integral to his own identity, his code of behavior, and nature's order. On the other hand, Hemingway portrays the pragmatic younger fishermen as those who supply shark livers for the cod liver oil industry in the United States, use their profits to purchase motorized boats and other mechanized equipment, and approach their fishing strictly as a means to improve their material circumstances.
Similarly, Santiago's personal history represents something of universal journey, as critics such as Angel Capellán and Bickford Sylvester have pointed out. Santiago is culturally a Spaniard and therefore a European. As a native of the Canary Islands, who made frequent trips to the coast of Africa, he also embodies something of Africa. And as an émigré to Cuba, a journey made by many Spaniards from Europe, he is both a Cuban (symbolized by the image on his wall of the patroness of Cuba, the Virgin of Cobre) and an American. Santiago has brought with him to the New World some Old World European and African values of dedication to craft and acceptance of one's role in the natural order and joined those to a decidedly American preoccupation with living one's life according to an independent and individual code of behavior that redeems the individual's existence.
