Review by David Zetland “Our Man in Havana”
I am probably the only one on Angry Bear who has spent time in Cuba at GITMO Naval Base and with 8th Marines. Talked to a few Cubans there. At 21, there was not too much I could say to them over a beer. Just listen to what they had to say. Long time ago.
“Our Man in Havana”
I’ve heard of this 1958 novel by Graham Greene for many years. On the most recent mention, I decided to read it. The story [no spoilers] is of a Brit in Havana who needs money to care for his beautiful and impulsive daughter. Through a series of deceptions, he turns into a spy. Plots are hatched, people die, only the right sort of person is tortured. It’s entertaining, and interesting as a time capsule in the pre-Castro era of Bautista.
Greene is witty. Enjoy these excerpts:
We live in an atomic age, Mr Wormold. Push a button piff bang where are we? Another Scotch, please.’
‘And that’s another thing. You know what the firm has done now? They’ve sent me an Atomic Pile Cleaner.’
‘Really? I didn’t know science had got that far.’
‘Oh, of course, there’s nothing atomic about it it’s only a name. Last year there was the Turbo Jet; this year it’s the Atomic. It works off the light-plug just the same as the other.’
Schools were said to construct character by chipping off the edges. His edges had been chipped, but the result had not, he thought, been character — only shapelessness, like an exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art.
Lovely faces looked out of dim interiors, brown eyes, dark hair, Spanish and high yellow: beautiful buttocks leant against the bars, waiting for any life to come along the seawet street. To live in Havana was to live in a factory that turned out human beauty on a conveyor-belt.
I have a secret defence, Mr Wormold. I am interested in life.’
‘So am I, but…’
‘You are interested in a person, not in life, and people die or leave us. I’m sorry; I wasn’t referring to your wife. But if you are interested in life it never lets you down. I am interested in the blueness of the cheese. You don’t do crosswords, do you, Mr Wormold? I do, and they are like people: one reaches an end. I can finish any crossword within an hour, but I have a discovery concerned with the blueness of cheese that will never come to a conclusion although of course one dreams that perhaps a time might come… One day I must show you my laboratory.’
‘I must be going, Hasselbacher.’
‘You should dream more, Mr Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.’
‘Is there anything in Cuba important enough to interest a Secret Service?’
‘Of course we are only a small country, but we lie very close to the American coast. And we point at your own Jamaica base. If a country is surrounded, as Russia is, it will try to punch a hole through from inside.’
‘Dr Hasselbacher does not belong to the torturable class.’
‘Who does?’
‘The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable. In Cuba the police can deal as harshly as they like with emigrés from Latin America and the Baltic States, but not with visitors from your country or Scandinavia. It is an instinctive matter on both sides. Catholics are more torturable than Protestants, just as they are more criminal.’
‘One reason why the West hates the great Communist states is that they don’t recognize class-distinctions. Sometimes they torture the wrong people. So too of course did Hitler and shocked the world. Nobody cares what goes on in our prisons, or the prisons of Lisbon or Caracas, but Hitler was too promiscuous. It was rather as though in your country a chauffeur had slept with a peeress.’
‘We’re not shocked by that any longer.’
‘It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.’
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. It was time, Wormold thought, to pack up and go and leave the ruins of Havana.
‘Haven’t you any more loyalty than I have?’
‘You are loyal.’
‘Who to?’
‘To Milly. I don’t care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations…. I don’t think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren’t there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?’
FIVE STARS