Havana: every vice was permissible and every trade possible

Graham Greene, the former MI6 officer had stumbled upon the ideal setting for a comic espionage story. Cuba was a paradise especially for those with time and money to burn in search of a story. The British novelist and former spy Graham Greene chose Cuba’s capital as the setting of his 1958 spy novel Our Man In Havana. His Cuban novel describes an amateur agent who dupes his intelligence chiefs with invented reports about “concrete platforms and unidentifiable pieces of giant machinery”, and told the Cold War’s most perilous episode, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

His novel on British post-imperial self-delusion and the way cockups Progeny cover-ups, is true even today as when it was written.

James Wormhold, a hapless cash-strapped British agent resorts to invention using diagrams for his day job selling vacuum cleaners to suggest to his spymasters in London that the regime is building a devilish new weapon in a mountain hideaway. On the basis of this information Cuban spycatchers start murdering people who they believe to be his agents. Wormold returns home swhere the spooks cover it all up and reward him with a sinecure.

Greene visited Cuba frequently, before, during and after the Communist seized power, with ambiguous motives. The visit that inspired the novel came by pure chance in 1954, after he got deported from Puerto Rico for admitting to US immigration officers that he had been a member of the Communist party. His 12 visits   resulted in the greatest spy satire ever written beyond the espionage, love affair, travel, anticommunism, anti-Americanism, the cold war, civil war, manic depression, drugs, dry martinis, torture , arms sales, revolution puritanism and communism.

Those who like every detail of Greene’s life will find Hull’s book rewarding.

A high point is the filming of Greene’s novel in Havana in 1959, by Alec Guinness and Noel Coward. Hull identifies Greene’s distinctive personal characteristics as being seedy, moody and selfish. Greene di work for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) during the war.

Till Greene’s death in 1991, Hull notes that the author had a penchant for ”provocative, contradictory and diversionary statements.”

Our Man Down in Havana: The Story Behind Graham Greene’s Cold War Spy Novel by Christopher Hull, Pegasus Books £19.99, 325 pages.