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4.5
What if Cold War hysteria had reached such a pitch that spymasters would accept the most transparent fictions as truth? That’s the conceptual basis underlying this terrific novel, or “entertainment” as Greene called it, which manages to pull off the trick of being at once highly suspenseful and laugh-out-loud funny.A British vacuum-cleaner salesman based in Havana on the eve of revolution takes advantage of the his country’s intelligence service’s hunger for information and makes up an entire spy ring to finance the demands of his precocious teenage daughter. Such is the premise of Our Man in Havana, in which Greene creates a wonderful cast of living characters: the fictionalizing spy himself, James Wormold, his beautiful and manipulative daughter Milly, his doomed German friend Hasselbacher, the evil Captain Segura—modeled on Fulgenico Batista’s actual right hand henchman, Captain Esteban Ventura Novo—and an assortment of comically bungling British spies and spy-masters.Published in October of 1958, the book is astonishingly prescient in its portrayal of Havana on the eve of the Cuban Revolution, which was fated to descend from the Sierra Maestra mountains and expel Batista from power less than three months later, on New Year’s Day of 1959. But the qualities of this novel extend well beyond its status as an amusingly accurate snapshot of history. There are two additional aspects I found particularly striking. The first is how well Greene captures the physical cityscape of Havana, which I can attest, as someone who’s visited the city frequently since 1999, really hasn’t changed very much. Here’s one of many examples of Greene getting the details exactly right:“The long city lay spread along the open Atlantic; waves broke over the Avenida de Maceo and misted the windscreens of cars. The pink, grey, yellow pillars of what had once been the aristocratic quarter were eroded like rocks; an ancient coat of arms, smudged and featureless, was set over the doorway of a shabby hotel, and the shutters of a night-club were varnished in bright crude colors to protect them from the wet and salt of the sea.”Where else but in Cuba can one can read a passage that was written in 1958 but could have been written yesterday? It really enhances one’s appreciation for the time warp that is contemporary Havana. For this reason and others, if you’ve traveled to Cuba or are planning to, this novel is an essential item on your reading list.Another great thing about this novel is the complexity and insightfulness of its thematic underpinnings, particularly the truth that when it comes to international intelligence, made-up things and fairy tales have a way of taking on a life of their own, as in this passage, where Wormold reflects on what the British spymaster, Hawthorne, has in common with his very Catholic daughter, Milly:“He was glad that she could still accept fair stories: a virgin who bore a child, pictures that wept or spoke words of love in the dark. Hawthorne and his kind were equally credulous, but what they swallowed were nightmares, grotesque stories out of science fiction.”Do you think Dick Cheney or Paul Wolfowitz ever read Our Man in Havana? (I suppose it would be too much to ask whether George W. Bush ever did.) Anyway “grotesque stories” are exactly what Wormold feeds his overlords. With the creative gusto of a novelist on a roll, the vacuum cleaner salesman invents a colorful ring of made-up Cuban spies, along with a massive weapons installation in the Sierra Maestra mountains that is actually based on the parts of a vacuum cleaner.The indictment of the entire Cold War ideological zeitgeist couldn't be clearer, and strikes me as a particularly acute insight when it comes to US policy toward Cuba, which was built on exaggeration and outright fictionalization for more than fifty years.The only thing that mars this edition is a stuffy introduction by Christopher Hitchens, in which he makes a few weakly supported and petulant remarks on parts of the book he sees as less effective, and then attempts to put his own hackneyed right-wing spin on Greene’s insightful and prescient portrayals not only of Cuba in the immediate lead-up to Revolution, but of the sublime ridiculousness of Cold War politics.But the novel itself: yes. This entertaining masterwork is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the fifties, the Cold War, and/or the Cuban Revolution. Highly recommended!If you’re interested in more on Cuba and the growing travel opportunities to the country, check out my website: (...)
