Our Man in Havana

Graham Greene wrote Our Man in Havana at the height of the Cold War, a decades-long global conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, and during a period of political unrest in Cuba. The book refers to this larger political context on a number of occasions. Greene tells us that tourists in Havana are greatly reduced because “the President’s regime was creaking dangerously toward its end” (21). The president in question is Fulgencio Batista, whose repressive dictatorship was indeed nearing its end when the novel was written; in October 1959 the communist rebel Fidel Castro would overthrow his government. (In Part 2, Chapter 2, Greene refers to rebels hiding out in the mountains and being watched by government troops.) The broader Cold War is alluded to when Wormold asks Dr. Hasselbacher whether his sympathies lie with the West or the East (i.e., the democratic or the communist world), and he answers, “a plague on them both” (31).

The novel is written in an impersonal third-person voice, but much of the narration reflects the thoughts and point of view of the main character, Jim Wormold. In the opening chapters Greene suggests important background about the setting and characters indirectly, through description and dialogue. The book opens with a seemingly offhand remark of Dr. Hasselbacher comparing Wormold to a black-market merchant selling pornographic photos who limps through the old section of Havana. Hasselbacher says that like the seller Wormold is “reliable, you can depend on him” (40), thus revealing an important character trait of Wormold. Previously, Greene had said that Wormold’s face is “anxious and crisscrossed” with “anxieties which are beyond the reach of a tranquillizer” (4). In fact, Greene plants a suggestion of a dire end for Wormold: “a stranger might have felt certain it would be extinguished sooner” (4). The reader is led to wonder whether Wormold will meet a fatal end.

The opening conversation establishes the late-1950s Cold War setting through mention of the Atomic Age. This subject is treated in a comic context. Wormold sells a mundane product—vacuum cleaners—that bears the overblown brand name of Atomic Pile Cleaner, taking advantage of the vogue for atomic weapons. Wormold is not in control of the product he sells but is at the mercy of the company’s CEOs who live thousands of miles away and probably sent him to work in Havana in the first place. They don’t understand that the name, which seems fashionable in the US, might not go over so well in a place like Cuba where the people live with the daily threat of violence.

The conversation also establishes the importance of moral and religious questions—specifically those of Roman Catholicism, which Milly practices in the book (Greene himself was also Catholic). Wormold mentions that the local priest preaches against atomic weapons. Unlike the more progressive US, the people of Cuba are traditional and are suspicious of a dangerous technology intruding into their lives. This implies that Wormold’s business is in peril, setting up one of the major motivations for Wormold’s actions.

Greene’s writing evokes the physical environment of Havana, as in this passage: “A shutter across the way creaked open and then regularly blew to in the slight breeze from the sea, click clack like an ancient clock” (4). Descriptions also depict a tense atmosphere. At the end of the chapter, Hasselbacher sums up the anxiety that characterizes this period, when imminent war and destruction are on many people’s minds: “Reality in our century is not something to be faced” (6). He points out that our personal lives are ephemeral—“people die or leave us”—and so we should concentrate on examining nature in an objective way (6).

Chapter 2 introduces the complicated relationship between Wormold and his daughter, Milly. Wormold loves Milly and wants the best for her. Yet he feels separated from her by differences of religion. Equally, Wormold feels out of place, like a “permanent tourist,” in Havana (30). Milly’s Catholicism makes her more at home in Cuban society. As he sees Milly return from school, Wormold reminisces about her more troublesome earlier school days in what amounts to a flashback (11-13). The depiction of Milly’s spiritual life is full of references to Catholic devotions and practices, such as the novena, a series of prayers said over nine successive days. At the same time, her faith is somewhat immature, and she uses it in a self-justifying way—as when she tells her father that she is praying for him to get her a horse.

With Milly’s appearance, the reader understands fully the troubles Wormold faces: his loneliness and isolation, economic struggles, and the difficulty of bringing up a teenage daughter on his own after his wife left him. As Milly makes plans for her new horse, Wormold reflects on the irony that the things Milly says have “a quality of sense” while Hawthorne belongs “who belonged to the cruel and inexplicable world of childhood” (40). Throughout the novel, the world of spies and international affairs is shown to be inept, foolish, and pointless, while personal life involving family and friends is meaningful and enriching.

In Chapter 3, Wormold’s status as an outsider is emphasized when he goes to an American bank to cash a check. The bank teller keeps him waiting while he talks on the phone to customers, naming enormous sums of money that make Wormold feel inferior. We learn that Wormold wants to earn enough money to retire and return to England with Milly, “where there will be no Captain Seguras and no wolf-whistles” (19). Later in the same chapter, Greene foreshadows Wormold’s use of deception in his spy work. Wormold reflects on how people learn to act cruelly by being bullied as children: “You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked” (27). Wormold, though, never fell into this trap. Yet later in the book, he will “joke” with the Secret Service in a way that will cause serious harm to other people.

Also in Chapter 3, Greene suggests the violence and indifference to human life that characterize contemporary Havana. An American tourist is killed by a stray bullet fired near a hotel, and his companions merely talk about the fact that his camera was destroyed (21). Not long after Chapter 2, which introduced religion and spirituality, we have a scene involving pimps and brothels (30), emphasizing the seamy side of life in Havana. This juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane is typical of Greene’s depictions of human nature.

Bars are the main meeting places in the novel; it is at a bar that Wormold meets with his best friend Hasselbacher and where he makes his fateful meeting with Hawthorne resulting in his signing up as a spy. Alcohol plays an important role in the story, especially much later in the denouement. In one moment, Hasselbacher suggests offhandedly playing checkers with liquor bottles (31), a suggestion with important consequences later on.

Later that night, a drunk Hasselbacher obtains a lottery ticket, then has a surreal conversation with an American tourist in a bar about the money he expects to win. Hasselbacher playfully suggests that he imagined the tourist and the details of his life like a novelist creating a character (34-35). This episode foreshadows Wormold’s imaginative “fabrications” as a spy.

The book contains several interludes set in London. These provide a change of scene and bring us to the “other world” of the novel: the headquarters of the Secret Service, showing us how the leadership of the spy organization reacts to the actions of Wormold. In the first Interlude, Greene suggests the remote, out-of-touch lives of the Secret Service staff: “Hawthorne rose in the elevator floor by floor from the basement: a rocket’s-eye view of the world. Western Europe sank below him; the Near East; Latin America” (47). What is meant, of course, is not the actual countries but merely the M16 departments that deal with them. The novel will strongly criticize efforts to manipulate people through remote, centralized control.

The book Hawthorne gives Wormold to create the secret code for his messages, Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, was a 19th-century prose adaptation for children of the plots of Shakespeare’s plays. As Milly says, the book “cuts out […] the poetry” (88). Hawthorne’s use of this book suggests the simplemindedness of the Secret Service and the prosaic, unimaginative nature of their worldview.

By the end of Part 1, the central conflict of the story is set: Wormold is forced by circumstances to become caught up in the spy world. Our Man in Havana is the story of a decent man struggling to get by, whose life spins out of control. Throughout the course of the book, we will see how he makes his way out of this chaos.