Our Man in Havana

by Graham Greene

‘You should dream more, Mr Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.’

Draped Maja.

Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.

The cruel come and go like cities and thrones and powers, leaving their ruins behind them. They had no permanence. But the clown whom he had seen last year with Milly at the circus—that clown was permanent, for his act never changed. That was the way to live; the clown was unaffected by the vagaries of public men and the enormous discoveries of the great.

God doesn’t learn from experience, does He, or how could He hope anything of man?

It always seemed strange to Wormold that he continued to exist for others when he was not there.

Perhaps I rather over-emphasized the need of security.’ ‘You can’t. No use having a live wire if it fuses.’

‘A man who has always learnt to count the pennies and to risk the pounds.

‘I said Spanish.’ ‘It’s much the same. They’re both Latin tongues.’

Avenida de Maceo

Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare—

‘Dionysia, the wicked wife of Cleon,’ he read, ‘met with an end proportionable to her deserts.’ He began to decode from ‘deserts’.

raison d’être

‘A youth needs variety,’ Lopez said, ‘but so too does a man of a certain age. For the youth it is the curiosity of ignorance, for the old it is the appetite which needs to be refreshed.

Dr Hasselbacher never talked in terms of morality; it was outside the province of a doctor.

May that which follows be happy’)

Juan Belmonte.

Last night at Matanzas the lights all went out three times—the first time I was in my bath.

Gertrude Stein

‘Cuba is Cuba is Cuba’.

A picture-postcard is a symptom of loneliness.

A cinema cast a little light, but no customer went in; by law it had to remain open, but no one except a soldier or a policeman was likely to visit it after dark.

Havana—Lamparilla 37. My age forty-five,

Old Granddad,

He began to realize what the criminal class knows so well, the impossibility of explaining anything to a man with power.

How long it takes to realize in one’s life the intricate patterns of which everything—even a picture-postcard—can form a part, and the rashness of dismissing anything as unimportant.

outsoared and outshone it.

tubular chair

sanguine

cauterizing the pain with alcohol and laughter and irresistible hope.

I heard reports from several sources of big military installations under construction in mountains of Oriente Province stop these constructions too extensive to be aimed at small rebel bands holding out there stop stories of widespread forest clearance under cover of forest fires stop peasants from several villages impressed to carry loads of stone paragraph B begins in bar of Santiago hotel met Spanish pilot of Cubana air line in advanced stage drunkenness stop he spoke of observing on flight Havana-Santiago large concrete platform too extensive for any building paragraph C 59200/5/3 who accompanied me to Santiago undertook dangerous mission near military H.Q. at Bayamo and made drawings of strange machinery in transport to forest stop these drawings will follow by bag paragraph D have I your permission to pay him bonus in view of serious risks of his mission and to suspend work for a time on economic report in view disquieting and vital nature of these reports from Oriente paragraph E have you any traces Raul Dominguez Cubana pilot whom I propose to recruit as 59200/5/4.’ Wormold joyfully encoded. He thought, I never believed I had it in me. He thought with

Forest of Arden,’

‘You speak like a father, Mr Wormold. No father knows his daughter.’

Bols,’

Inglaterra

coup de foudre.’

duenna.

Negresses

en clair

mountains of Oriente (his reports were sometimes confirmed and sometimes contradicted by the Cubana pilot—a contradiction had a flavour of authenticity).

installations in Oriente,

paunch.’

ponch.

pathos.

table—1913, the June manoeuvres, the Kaiser was inspecting us.’

‘Aren’t double agents always a bit—tricky? You never know whether you’re getting the fat or the lean.’

At the Havana Club, which was not a club at all and was owned by Baccardi’s rival, all rum-drinks were free, and this enabled Wormold to increase his savings, for naturally he continued to charge for the drinks in his expenses—the fact that the drinks were free would have been tedious, if not impossible, to explain to London.

émigrés

‘It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.’

What accounted for the squalor of British possessions? The Spanish, the French and the Portuguese built cities where they settled, but the English just allowed cities to grow. The poorest street in Havana had dignity compared with the shanty-life of Kingston—huts built out of old petrol-tins roofed with scrap-metal purloined from some cemetery of abandoned cars.