Our Man in Havana

The novel depicts a world in which it is hard to tell what is real and what is fiction, and where life has become strangely impersonal. Wormold is recruited by the Secret Service in a secretive, underhanded way, in a bar. He hardly knows what is happening before he suddenly finds himself a spy. So impersonal is the nature of the job that Wormold is able to send regular reports to the Secret Service without their realizing that they are completely bogus. In a sense, he mimics their methods by choosing random names from a list to be his agents.

Wormold thinks he is playing an innocent game with the Secret Service; but then his best friend’s house is ruined, and his fictional stories start coming true in bizarre ways. Thus, the distinction between reality and fiction is increasingly blurred. Wormold must then go out and “rescue” people whose relationship to him was no more than fictional to begin with. Wormold is caught up in a world where things happen behind the scenes and seemingly at random, controlled by unseen forces. It is as if he is living in a fictional spy novel, because life seems increasingly as strange as fiction.

One of the reasons Wormold finds Beatrice appealing is because she seems authentic. She says what she means, in contrast to the evasiveness of people like Hawthorne. For Wormold and Beatrice, what is real is what happens after work, among one’s loved ones and friends: “[Y]our daughter is real and her seventeenth birthday is real” (105). Beatrice herself speaks of her personal life as mired in unreality, because her husband “was acting all the time” (103) and because his own personality disappeared behind the façade of the political organizations he worked for.

Late in the book, Wormold notices himself adopting Hawthorne’s insincere manner of speech and remarks that “falsity is an occupational disease” (203). In the new world, professional considerations increasingly take precedence over home and family—the things in life that are most “real” to us. In order to manipulate people into doing what the “system” demands, its representatives must adopt an insincere manner and sugarcoat what they are doing, as when Hawthorne casually mentions that Wormold will be poisoned at the luncheon. In the end, Wormold rebels against the system he works for and acts to protect the people who are closest to him.