{"id":142,"date":"2014-09-28T18:28:28","date_gmt":"2014-09-28T18:28:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the-perfect-library.zonkdev.uk\/?p=142"},"modified":"2016-11-26T21:22:41","modified_gmt":"2016-11-26T21:22:41","slug":"our-man-in-havana","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/?p=142","title":{"rendered":"Our Man in Havana"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our Man in Havana \u2013 Graham Greene. Cover by Derek Birdsall, 1975.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Our<\/a>Graham Greene divided his books into \u201cserious fiction\u201d and “entertainments”. Our Man in Havana<\/em> is one of the entertainments, and is probably the funniest.<\/p>\n

Greene served with MI6 during the Second World War and worked in the department dealing with the Iberian Peninsula. One of the German\u2019s agents in Portugal, \u201cGarbo\u201d, was a double agent who pretended to control a ring of agents all over England. To support his story he invented troop movements and operations from maps and standard military references. It seems that Garbo became the inspiration for Greene\u2019s protagonist, the reluctant secret agent James Wormold.<\/p>\n

The novel was published before the Cuban Missile Crisis\u00a0of 1962 but aspects of the plot anticipate the crisis in which the US and the Soviet Union came alarmingly close to nuclear war.<\/p>\n

I visited Cuba in 2007 with my eldest son who was then 17. Will was keen to see the Bay of Pigs, scene of the failed invasion of \u00a0Cuba\u00a0by a CIA-sponsored paramilitary group, and to smoke the largest cigar he could get his hands on. Our plan was to travel independently, avoiding the big, \u201call-in\u201d resorts. We wanted\u00a0to use the network of\u00a0cases\u00a0particulates,\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0rooms in private homes that the government had recently allowed Cubans to rent to tourists.<\/p>\n

\"Cuban<\/a>

Cuban Bliss<\/p><\/div>\n

Raised on stories from the Cold War we both believed that most of what characterized Cuba in the first decade of the 21st<\/sup> century – crumbling buildings, old American cars, food shortages – was \u00a0the result of the US trade embargo that\u00a0followed the 1962 Crisis. We were unaware\u00a0that much of what we would experience – including the casas particulares<\/em> – stemmed from a much more recent event in world history. The\u00a0dissolution of the Soviet Union led to the per\u00edodo especial, <\/em>the\u00a0economic crisis\u00a0that followed the withdrawal of Soviet \u00a0subsidies. We didn’t realise how bad the\u00a0\u00a0resultant hardship had been until we met the Cuban people who welcomed us into their homes.<\/p>\n

Although most ordinary Cubans avoided\u00a0starvation, persistent hunger\u00a0was a daily experience. People ate anything they could find.\u00a0\u00a0Someone told us that many of the animals in the Havana zoo \u201cdisappeared\u201d and domestic cats became sources of protein rather than affection. A taxi driver enquired how old Will was. He had a daughter the same age \u201cbut\u201d, he asked me, \u201chow could we bring any more children into the world when there was no food to give them?\u201d<\/p>\n

Malnutrition caused epidemics, but it had positive effects too. The per\u00edodo especial<\/em> radically transformed the Cuban economy and led to the introduction of sustainable agriculture,\u00a0\u00a0less reliance on motor transport and the strengthening of the National Health System; Cuba\u2019s average life expectancy is now close to that of the US.<\/p>\n

However, in 2007, Will and I discovered that it was still much easier to buy an expensive cigar than fresh vegetables in Havana\u2019s markets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our Man in Havana \u2013 Graham Greene. Cover by Derek Birdsall, 1975. Graham Greene divided his books into \u201cserious fiction\u201d and “entertainments”. Our Man in Havana is one of the entertainments, and is probably the funniest. Greene served with MI6 during the Second World War and worked in the department dealing with the Iberian Peninsula. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-novels"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=142"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":290,"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions\/290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}