Cuba has begun to allow electronic access to an archive containing thousands of documents belonging to the late American writer Ernest Hemingway.

Most of the more than 3,000 documents from Hemingway's Cuban hideaway Finca Vigia, where he lived for more than 20 years, have never been published.

Hemingway wrote some of his greatest works on the island and the archive includes the beginning of a rejected epilogue to For Whom the Bell Tolls, and letters from a host of literary luminaries and important figures from the mid-20th century such as Ezra Pound, Max Perkins and Ingrid Bergman.

The documents also include a screenplay for The Old Man and the Sea and draft fragments of his novels and stories as well as coded details of his exploits in the second world war.

Ada Rosa Alfonso Rosales, director of the Museo Ernest Hemingway in Havana, told the BBC that the archive would "shed light on the Cuban period of Hemingway, which was very important and not well known by his biographers".

She added: "For practically the first time, this is being made available to students and researchers."