Our Man in Havana (1958) is a novel set in Cuba by the British author Graham Greene. Greene uses the novel to mock intelligence services, especially the British MI6, and their willingness to believe reports from their local informants. The book predates the Cuban Missile Crisis, but certain aspects of the plot, notably the role of missile installations, appear to anticipate the events of 1962.
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Greene joined MI6 in August 1941. In London, Greene had been appointed to the subsection dealing with counter-espionage in the Iberian Peninsula, where he had learnt about German agents in Portugal relaying fictitious reports to their superiors, which garnered them expenses and bonuses to add to their basic salary.
Source: Our Man in Havana (Wikipedia)
Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana tells the tale of a British ex-pat James Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana, who is recruited as a spy. It is set just before the revolution led by Fidel Castro. Rather than actually collecting credible evidence, he instead starts building a fictious network and developing fabricated reports.
“As long as nothing happens anything is possible…”
Source: Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene
To avoid embarrassment and silence him from speaking to the press, MI6 end up offering Wormold a teaching post at headquarters and recommends him for the Order of the British Empire.
The book is another example of “Cartoon descriptions? How else to describe a cartoon world?” Greene’s ‘entertainment’ novel is a black comedy that sits somewhere with Catch 22, Cat’s Cradle and Gravity’s Rainbow.
Marginalia
“As long as nothing happens anything is possible…”
Source: Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene
“They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like the pain of an amputated leg no longer there.”
Source: Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene
“You kill a man – that is so easy,’ Dr Hasselbacher said, ‘it needs no skill. You can be certain of what you’ve done, you can judge death, but to save a man – that takes more than six years of training, and in the end you can never be quite sure that it was you who saved him. Germs are killed by other germs. People just survive.”
Source: Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene
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