Our Man In Havana (3 page)

He stood on the frontier of violence, a strange land he had never visited before; he had his passport in his hand. ‘Profession: Spy.’ ‘Characteristic Features: Friendlessness.’ ‘Purpose of Visit: Murder.’ No visa was required. His papers were in order.

At such a critical moment, no Greene character would refrain from at least some reflection on faith, however terse and bitter:

Vengeance was unnecessary when you believed in a heaven. But he had no such belief. Mercy and forgiveness were scarcely virtues in a Christian; they came too easily.

Even so, when it comes to the moment of truth – or ‘reality’ – Wormold is almost unable to destroy another human being and has to rationalize his actions even as he is undertaking them. He is thankful that the decision is taken out of his hands by Carter’s vile conduct, and indeed is still rationalizing busily when the shock moment of actual crisis occurs, and the question of will or volition is snatched (unlike the fortunately purloined gun) out of his hands.

This stroke of impulsive decision does not succeed in dispelling the mist of moral ambiguity. Wormold still has to live in the world that he has – with his own lies and practical jokes – helped to make. Once again, a rationale is required of him, and he chooses (as does Beatrice) a version of E.M. Forster’s celebrated moral calculus. If one had the choice of betraying one’s country or one’s friends, said the author of
Howard’s End
and of that momentous phrase ‘the world of telegrams and anger’, one should hope for the courage to betray one’s country. Wormold’s confected cables to London have some of the absurdity of William Boot’s telegrams to Lord Copper’s
Daily Beast
, but his anger takes a Forsterian form:

‘I don’t give a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations … I don’t think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren’t there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?’

Many years later, in his rash introduction to Kim Philby’s KGB-vetted autobiography
My Silent War
, Greene was to write, again with a question mark that asked rather a lot:

He betrayed his country – yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?

With or without its ‘perhaps’ this is bound to strike many readers as a bit too glib and convenient (as indeed it is). And how many times, after all, does a choice between country and friends really come up? But, safely back in London, where admittedly there are no torturers or executioners, Wormold and Beatrice discover that their secret employers, too, are immersed in moral ambiguity and expert in the means of manipulating it. In essence, and in return for his silence about the whole fiasco, Wormold is offered a sinecure and an official decoration. In one of the weaker sections of the book, Beatrice then repeats at greater and less probable length everything that Wormold has just declaimed above. In retrospect, we can see that this Greene ‘entertainment’ was in many ways the curtain-raiser for the bleak universe of Le Carré’s George Smiley, and of the shadowland where any appeal to loyalty and the old decencies was little more than a rhetorical prelude to a stab in the back.

The conclusive end of the Cold War, and the implosion of one party to it, now make some of Greene’s own rhetoric seem even more facile. The revolution did indeed come to Cuba, and the Captain Seguras did indeed take themselves off to Miami, and for a while Greene himself was an honored guest of – and ardent apologist for – the Fidel Castro regime. (His admiring chronicler Norman Sherry gives some disquieting instances in Volume III of his immense biography.) Greene was not in fact neutral in the Cold War, nor a sincere practitioner of moral equivalence. He was by inclination a supporter of the ‘other’ side, and above all culturally and political hostile to the United States. In 1969 he delivered a lecture entitled ‘The Virtue of Disloyalty’ in Hamburg, in which (never mind Lamb’s
Tales
) he accused Shakespeare himself of having been too patriotic, and too reticent about Catholic dissidents sent to the gibbet. He was delighted when a Soviet cosmonaut took
Our Man In Havana
into outer space. But his audience and readership were in the ‘West’, so the ‘shades of Greene’ were adjusted accordingly. And this needful ambivalence was often useful in his novels, since it compelled him to phrase his ethical dilemmas in liberal and individual, rather than Marxist or collective, terms.

Having already touched on Greene’s debt to Waugh, and most especially to
Brideshead Revisited
, I ought to try and return the compliment, even if obliquely. Writing in praise of
Brideshead
many years after its first publication, Greene said that he had remembered the novel’s beautiful opening chapter as very long, and was thus astonished to find, upon rereading, that it was as brief as it was. This he certainly intended as a compliment. One should say the same for his own swiftly-drawn but contemptuous portrait of the British ambassador to Cuba, whose appearance in the novel occupies no more than a page and a half. The dessicated and frigid envoy repeatedly insists that he knows nothing of what has been going on, and wishes for nothing more than to remain in this blessed state of unawareness. It is Greene, not the provincial and suburban Wormold, who is able to assemble a whole diplomatic biography from the
objets d’art
on view while he is being kept waiting by this dignitary:

Wormold thought he could detect a past in Tehran (an odd-shaped pipe, a tile), Athens (an icon or two), but he was momentarily puzzled by an African mask – perhaps Monrovia?

In ‘real’ life, Greene was greatly to annoy the British Foreign Office by writing some devastating letters to the press a few weeks after the publication of
Our Man in Havana
. Announcing a post-revolution cancellation of the sale of weapons to Cuba, the Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd had claimed that, when the weapons contract had been signed, there had been no evidence of strife. Greene wrote at his withering best:

Any visitor to Cuba could have given Her Majesty’s Government more information about conditions in the island than was apparently supplied by our official 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 shirt like a ship’s under demolition. He walked at the edge of the pavement, beyond the yellow and pink pillars of a colonnade, in the hot January sun, and he counted every step as he went. As he passed the Wonder Bar, going up Virdudes, he had reached ‘1,369’. He had to move slowly to give time for so long a numeral. ‘One thousand three hundred and seventy.’ He was a familiar figure near the National Square, where he would sometimes linger and stop his counting long enough to sell a packet of pornographic photographs to a tourist. Then he would take up his count where he had left it. At the end of the day, like an energetic passenger on a trans-Atlantic liner, he must have known to a yard how far he had walked.

‘Joe?’ Wormold asked.’ I don’t see any resemblance. Except the limp, of course,’ but instinctively he took a quick look at himself in the mirror marked Cerveza Tropical, as though he might really
have
been so broken down and darkened during his walk from the store in the old town. But the face which looked back at him was only a little discoloured by the dust from the harbour-works; it was still the same, anxious and crisscrossed and fortyish: much younger than Dr Hasselbacher’s, yet a stranger might have felt certain it would be extinguished sooner – the shadow was there already, the anxieties which are beyond the reach of a tranquillizer. The Negro limped out of sight, round the corner of the Paseo. The day was full of bootblacks.

‘I didn’t mean the limp. You don’t see the likeness?’

‘No.’

‘He’s got two ideas in his head,’ Dr Hasselbacher explained, ‘to do his job and to keep count. And, of course, he’s British.’

‘I still don’t see …’ Wormold cooled his mouth with his morning daiquiri. Seven minutes to get to the Wonder Bar: seven minutes back to the store: six minutes for companionship. He looked at his watch. He remembered that it was one minute slow.

‘He’s reliable, you can depend on him, that’s all I meant,’ said Dr Hasselbacher with impatience. ‘How’s Milly?’

‘Wonderful,’ Wormold said. It was his invariable answer, but he meant it.

‘Seventeen on the seventeenth, eh?’

‘That’s right.’ He looked quickly over his shoulder as though somebody were hunting him and then at his watch again. ‘You’ll be coming to split a bottle with us?’

‘I’ve never failed yet, Mr Wormold. Who else will be there?’

‘Well, I thought just the three of us. You see, Cooper’s gone home, and poor Marlowe’s in hospital still, and Milly doesn’t seem to care for any of this new crowd at the Consulate. So I thought we’d keep it quiet, in the family.’

‘I’m honoured to be one of the family, Mr Wormold.’

‘Perhaps a table at the Nacional – or would you say that wasn’t quite – well, suitable?’

‘This isn’t England or Germany, Mr Wormold. Girls grow up quickly in the tropics.’

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. Wormold said, ‘I must be off.’

‘Phastkleaners will get on without you, Mr Wormold.’ It was a day of uncomfortable truths. ‘Like my patients,’ Dr Hasselbacher added with kindliness.

‘People have to get ill, they don’t have to buy vacuum cleaners.’

‘But you charge them more.’

‘And get only twenty per cent for myself. One can’t save much on twenty per cent.’

‘This is not an age for saving, Mr Wormold.’

‘I must – for Milly. If something happened to me …’

‘We none of us have a great expectation of life nowadays, so why worry?’

‘All these disturbances are very bad for trade. What’s the good of a vacuum cleaner if the power’s cut off?’

‘I could manage a small loan, Mr Wormold.’

‘No, no. It’s not like that. My worry isn’t this year’s or even next year’s, it’s a long-term worry.’

‘Then it’s not worth calling a worry. We live in an atomic age, Mr Wormold. Push a button – piff bang – where are we? Another Scotch, please.’