But, Rick picked it up while we were in Havana. It’s a short book, so I expected to read the whole book during our trip. Thoughts: I first mentioned Our Man in Havana in the British Isles Friday piece that I pre-scheduled to post while I was in Cuba. You’ll want to encounter it fresh in context. Rick and I both laughed out loud at that one so I won’t quote that here. 21Ī later passage presages the Cuban Missile Crisis. ‘Five hundred dollars gone just like that.’ p.
‘Ripped right through the camera,’ one of them said. Wormold had heard them talking afterwards in the bar of the Nacional. The victim’s Leica had been smashed as well, and that had impressed his companions more than anything with the destructive power of a bullet. There had always been unpleasant doings out of sight, in the inner rooms of the Jefatura, which had not disturbed the tourists in the Nacional and the Seville-Biltmore, but one tourist had recently been killed by a stray bullet while he was taking a photograph of a picturesque beggar under a balcony near the palace, and the death had sounded the knell of the all-in tour ‘including a trip to Varadero beach and the night-life of Havana’. No Havana resident ever went to Sloppy Joe’s because it was the rendezvous of tourists but tourists were sadly reduced nowadays in number, for the President’s régime was creaking dangerously towards its end. Here is one passage that seemed particularly prescient:
But, they aren’t hints at all because Greene had no idea when he wrote the book what would come to pass. Our Man in Havana was published in 1958, before what Cubans call the “triumph of the Revolution.” Modern-day readers detect hints about the end of the Batista regime. Summary: Graham Greene’s black comedy, Our Man in Havana, follows the bumbling efforts of a British-born vacuum salesman recruited as a spy by MI6 in the late 1950s. Graham Greene’s black comedy set in pre-revolutionary Cuba
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