Our Man In Havana Read Online Free
Author: Graham Greene
representatives: the mutilation and torture practised by leading police officers … the killing of hostages.
By one of those right-place-right-time occurrences that swelled his reputation both as journalist and novelist, Greene had stumbled into contact with rebels and lawyers – Armando Hart, Haydee Santamaria, Melba Hernandez – whose names are still totemic in the Cuban revolution and some of whom are admired even by those who later underwent a painful rupture with Castro. Whether it is deliberate or not I cannot say, but Greene’s description of the Havana Seville-Biltmore’s upper rooms as being ‘built as prison cells round a rectangular balcony’ is a near-analogy to the ‘Panopticon’ jail in which Castro was held by Batista on the isle of Pines after his legendary attack on the Moncada barracks in 1953. Greene was well ahead of the story, before he fell well behind it. His secular and personal religion, which always stressed ‘the side of the victim’ and which ostensibly forbade him to ‘see no evil’, did not safeguard him from letting both his Communism and his Catholicism get in the way of truth-telling about the rebel-turned-
caudillo
as the years went on.
By an irony of his beloved Cuban revolution, which has left the island stranded in time and isolated from many recent currents of history and political economy (with its still-bearded leader now paunchy and grey and the only remaining Latin American head of government always to be seen in a uniform), the city of Havana has been compelled to remain very much as Greene described it. 1 The more flamboyant and amoral nightclubs did undergo a period of eclipse, but the sex trade has rebounded with a vengeance as the regime has become more dependent on tourism than Batista ever was. Communism, though – ‘the highest stage of underdevelopment’, as Hans Magnus Enzensberger once tautly summarized the case – has preserved (some might like to say ‘spared’) the old harbour-front and its hinterland. Ernest Hemingway’s old haunts at the
Floridita
and the
Bodeguita del Medio
, the Calle Obispo and the ‘pock-marked pillars on Avenida de Maceo’; all the little landmarks of Wormold’s life, are still rather seedily there. Greene’s ability to evoke a sense of place and time, as in his clever mention of Havana’s ‘blistering October’ are encoded in this book as in no other, and remain redolent and real. In some ways, indeed, the existence of an antique rather than a modern Havana, until the day when the dam breaks and the full tide of Americanization flows in, is a part of his literary and political bestowal. As is, of course, the silhouette of the anomic and rumpled and disillusioned Englishman in a torrid zone, nursing a bottle of Scotch and musing ineptly on Pascal while caught somewhere between the status of émigré and internal exile. The human condition seen through the bottom of a glass, darkly.
Writing to his mistress Catherine Walston in 1956, Greene told her that
Our Man In Havana
was potentially a ‘very funny plot which if it comes off will make a footnote to history.’ I feel almost as if I owe an apology for having taken so long to illustrate his elementary point.
Christopher Hitchens, 2006
1 I completed this essay on the day before Fidel Cstro fell ill and handed over power to the Cuban armed forces, in the shape of his brother Raul, in August 2006.
Part One
CHAPTER 1
1
‘THAT NIGGER GOING down the street,’ said Dr Hasselbacher standing in the Wonder Bar, ‘he reminds me of you, Mr Wormold.’ It was typical of Dr Hasselbacher that after fifteen years of friendship he still used the prefix Mr – friendship proceeded with the slowness and assurance of a careful diagnosis. On Wormold’s death-bed, when Dr Hasselbacher came to feel his failing pulse, he would perhaps become Jim.
The Negro was blind in one eye and one leg was shorter than the other; he wore an ancient felt hat and his ribs showed through his torn
By one of those right-place-right-time occurrences that swelled his reputation both as journalist and novelist, Greene had stumbled into contact with rebels and lawyers – Armando Hart, Haydee Santamaria, Melba Hernandez – whose names are still totemic in the Cuban revolution and some of whom are admired even by those who later underwent a painful rupture with Castro. Whether it is deliberate or not I cannot say, but Greene’s description of the Havana Seville-Biltmore’s upper rooms as being ‘built as prison cells round a rectangular balcony’ is a near-analogy to the ‘Panopticon’ jail in which Castro was held by Batista on the isle of Pines after his legendary attack on the Moncada barracks in 1953. Greene was well ahead of the story, before he fell well behind it. His secular and personal religion, which always stressed ‘the side of the victim’ and which ostensibly forbade him to ‘see no evil’, did not safeguard him from letting both his Communism and his Catholicism get in the way of truth-telling about the rebel-turned-
caudillo
as the years went on.
By an irony of his beloved Cuban revolution, which has left the island stranded in time and isolated from many recent currents of history and political economy (with its still-bearded leader now paunchy and grey and the only remaining Latin American head of government always to be seen in a uniform), the city of Havana has been compelled to remain very much as Greene described it. 1 The more flamboyant and amoral nightclubs did undergo a period of eclipse, but the sex trade has rebounded with a vengeance as the regime has become more dependent on tourism than Batista ever was. Communism, though – ‘the highest stage of underdevelopment’, as Hans Magnus Enzensberger once tautly summarized the case – has preserved (some might like to say ‘spared’) the old harbour-front and its hinterland. Ernest Hemingway’s old haunts at the
Floridita
and the
Bodeguita del Medio
, the Calle Obispo and the ‘pock-marked pillars on Avenida de Maceo’; all the little landmarks of Wormold’s life, are still rather seedily there. Greene’s ability to evoke a sense of place and time, as in his clever mention of Havana’s ‘blistering October’ are encoded in this book as in no other, and remain redolent and real. In some ways, indeed, the existence of an antique rather than a modern Havana, until the day when the dam breaks and the full tide of Americanization flows in, is a part of his literary and political bestowal. As is, of course, the silhouette of the anomic and rumpled and disillusioned Englishman in a torrid zone, nursing a bottle of Scotch and musing ineptly on Pascal while caught somewhere between the status of émigré and internal exile. The human condition seen through the bottom of a glass, darkly.
Writing to his mistress Catherine Walston in 1956, Greene told her that
Our Man In Havana
was potentially a ‘very funny plot which if it comes off will make a footnote to history.’ I feel almost as if I owe an apology for having taken so long to illustrate his elementary point.
Christopher Hitchens, 2006
1 I completed this essay on the day before Fidel Cstro fell ill and handed over power to the Cuban armed forces, in the shape of his brother Raul, in August 2006.
Part One
CHAPTER 1
1
‘THAT NIGGER GOING down the street,’ said Dr Hasselbacher standing in the Wonder Bar, ‘he reminds me of you, Mr Wormold.’ It was typical of Dr Hasselbacher that after fifteen years of friendship he still used the prefix Mr – friendship proceeded with the slowness and assurance of a careful diagnosis. On Wormold’s death-bed, when Dr Hasselbacher came to feel his failing pulse, he would perhaps become Jim.
The Negro was blind in one eye and one leg was shorter than the other; he wore an ancient felt hat and his ribs showed through his torn
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