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Our Man Down in Havana: The Story Behind Graham Greene's Cold War Spy Novel
Exploring the backstory that led to the writing of Graham Greene's beloved satirical spy novel, Our Man Down in Havana evokes a pivotal time and place in the author's life.
When U.S. immigration authorities deported Graham Greene from Puerto Rico in 1954, the British author made an unplanned visit to Havana and stumbled upon the ideal setting for a comic espionage story. Three years later, he returned in the midst of Castro’s guerrilla insurgency against a U.S.-backed dictator to begin writing his iconic novel Our Man in Havana. Twelve weeks after its publication, the Cuban Revolution triumphed in January 1959, soon transforming a capitalist playground into a communist stronghold.
Combining biography, history, politics, and a measure of psychoanalysis, Our Man Down in Havana investigates the real story behind Greene’s fictional story. It includes his many visits to a pleasure island that became a revolutionary island, turning his chance involvement into a political commitment. His Cuban novel describes an amateur agent who dupes his intelligence chiefs with invented reports about “concrete platforms and unidentifiable pieces of giant machinery.” With eerie prescience, Greene’s satirical tale had foretold the Cold War’s most perilous episode, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Exploiting a wealth of archival material and interviews with key protagonists, Our Man Down in Havana delves into the story behind and beyond the author’s prophetic Cuban tale, focusing on one slice of Greene’s manic life: a single novel and its complex history.
When U.S. immigration authorities deported Graham Greene from Puerto Rico in 1954, the British author made an unplanned visit to Havana and stumbled upon the ideal setting for a comic espionage story. Three years later, he returned in the midst of Castro’s guerrilla insurgency against a U.S.-backed dictator to begin writing his iconic novel Our Man in Havana. Twelve weeks after its publication, the Cuban Revolution triumphed in January 1959, soon transforming a capitalist playground into a communist stronghold.
Combining biography, history, politics, and a measure of psychoanalysis, Our Man Down in Havana investigates the real story behind Greene’s fictional story. It includes his many visits to a pleasure island that became a revolutionary island, turning his chance involvement into a political commitment. His Cuban novel describes an amateur agent who dupes his intelligence chiefs with invented reports about “concrete platforms and unidentifiable pieces of giant machinery.” With eerie prescience, Greene’s satirical tale had foretold the Cold War’s most perilous episode, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Exploiting a wealth of archival material and interviews with key protagonists, Our Man Down in Havana delves into the story behind and beyond the author’s prophetic Cuban tale, focusing on one slice of Greene’s manic life: a single novel and its complex history.
368 pages, Hardcover
First published March 5, 2019
35 people are currently reading
304 people want to read
About the author
Christopher Hull
3 books5 followersChristopher Hull was born in London. He has supported Hartlepool United since first watching them in 1978. He studied his undergraduate and masters degrees at Newcastle University from 1995 to 2000, and a PhD at the University of Nottingham from 2004. He currently lives and works in Chester.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
May 16, 2021
I read Our Man Down in Havana because I had just had re-read Greene's Our Man in Havana, saw a rave review of this book and so listened to it on audiobook. Makes it clear why, if you see yourself as a leftist and an advocate of democracy that you will choose Greene's view of espionage (and of imperialism) over Ian Fleming's escapist fantasies.
Many of you will recall the series of supposedly espionage-based lies used to justify the war in Iraq and the now endless destruction of that country and the multi-trillion dollar (and counting) bill they left our grandchildren. But of course you are smart enough to know that using spy "intelligence" fiction (i.e., lies) to justify political actions for various reasons has been common throughout history. Greene himself had in mind when he was writing Our Man in Havana the British involvement in the Suez Canal, his experience as a journalist in Vietnam that led to his critique of the US involvement leading up to that war (I'm watching Ken Burns's Vietnam documentary now, so you can see where some of my anger might be coming from). And Greene was in Cuba many times before creating his satire turned melodrama about a British vacuum salesman hired by MI5 to spy on Cuba, inventing "intelligence" by photographing vacuum cleaner parts seen as possible missile parts. Oh, ludicrous, you say? Do you remember WMDs and yellowcake, doctored photographs and claims that Iraq could create a nuclear bomb within hours? See my review of Greene's novel and others such as The Quiet American and The Third Man, too.
Greene, a novelist that deserved the Nobel Prize (The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, Brighton Beach), had worked all over the world as a journalist. He had also worked for MI6 as a low level spy, though Christopher Hull suggests he may never have completely given up the work for the British Empire. We are left with this thought at the very end of the book, that he may have continued spying until the very end of his life. But one thing is sure from this well-written book is that his comedy turned prescient as manufactured "evidence" helped create a near-disaster at the Bay of Pigs, also known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, in the early sixties, involving a stand-off between Kruschev and JFK. Just amazing that he would write this book, even make a popular movie based on the book, and then have the USA nearly replicate the (gladly not as tragic as Iraq) tragi-comedy.
The book explores aspects of Greene's leftist support of Castro over the repressive capitalist Batista whom the US and Brits had backed, as they generally did last century, with some useful history of Cuba and background on Greene's spy novels (including The Third Man) and his questionable support for denounced spy Kim Philby, his former boss. Hull doesn't deify Greene, a drunken serial adulterer (Greene's--a devout Roman Catholic--own word for it), so there's just enough salacious details to keep you interested if you are not particularly down with all the politics.
And there's plenty of literary swordsmanship between Greene and two other famous white western rich novelists, Ian Fleming and Ernest Hemingway, to make literary scholars happy (Hull prefers Greene to both Papa and Fleming). So it's a good and well-written book. I hope to go to Havana soon, so I will be reading a bunch about Cuba in the coming year. I especially liked the focus in a later chapter on the National Education program (which both Greene and Hull see as one of Castro's crowning achievements), but not neglecting Castro's (especially early on) shameful (partly machismo) record on gay rights.
https://ida.mtholyoke.edu/xmlui/handl...
Many of you will recall the series of supposedly espionage-based lies used to justify the war in Iraq and the now endless destruction of that country and the multi-trillion dollar (and counting) bill they left our grandchildren. But of course you are smart enough to know that using spy "intelligence" fiction (i.e., lies) to justify political actions for various reasons has been common throughout history. Greene himself had in mind when he was writing Our Man in Havana the British involvement in the Suez Canal, his experience as a journalist in Vietnam that led to his critique of the US involvement leading up to that war (I'm watching Ken Burns's Vietnam documentary now, so you can see where some of my anger might be coming from). And Greene was in Cuba many times before creating his satire turned melodrama about a British vacuum salesman hired by MI5 to spy on Cuba, inventing "intelligence" by photographing vacuum cleaner parts seen as possible missile parts. Oh, ludicrous, you say? Do you remember WMDs and yellowcake, doctored photographs and claims that Iraq could create a nuclear bomb within hours? See my review of Greene's novel and others such as The Quiet American and The Third Man, too.
Greene, a novelist that deserved the Nobel Prize (The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, Brighton Beach), had worked all over the world as a journalist. He had also worked for MI6 as a low level spy, though Christopher Hull suggests he may never have completely given up the work for the British Empire. We are left with this thought at the very end of the book, that he may have continued spying until the very end of his life. But one thing is sure from this well-written book is that his comedy turned prescient as manufactured "evidence" helped create a near-disaster at the Bay of Pigs, also known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, in the early sixties, involving a stand-off between Kruschev and JFK. Just amazing that he would write this book, even make a popular movie based on the book, and then have the USA nearly replicate the (gladly not as tragic as Iraq) tragi-comedy.
The book explores aspects of Greene's leftist support of Castro over the repressive capitalist Batista whom the US and Brits had backed, as they generally did last century, with some useful history of Cuba and background on Greene's spy novels (including The Third Man) and his questionable support for denounced spy Kim Philby, his former boss. Hull doesn't deify Greene, a drunken serial adulterer (Greene's--a devout Roman Catholic--own word for it), so there's just enough salacious details to keep you interested if you are not particularly down with all the politics.
And there's plenty of literary swordsmanship between Greene and two other famous white western rich novelists, Ian Fleming and Ernest Hemingway, to make literary scholars happy (Hull prefers Greene to both Papa and Fleming). So it's a good and well-written book. I hope to go to Havana soon, so I will be reading a bunch about Cuba in the coming year. I especially liked the focus in a later chapter on the National Education program (which both Greene and Hull see as one of Castro's crowning achievements), but not neglecting Castro's (especially early on) shameful (partly machismo) record on gay rights.
https://ida.mtholyoke.edu/xmlui/handl...
September 24, 2024
Our Man Down in Havana: The Story Behind Graham Greene’s Cold War Spy Novel by Christopher Hull was not only entertaining but enlightening as we learn how Greene, a former spy with MI5 and MI6 as well as Secret Intelligence Services (SIS). In 1954, Greene made an unplanned visit to Havana realizing that he had stumbled upon the ideal setting for a comic espionage story. In the words of Christopher Hull:
Christopher Hull does a magnificent job of integrating the plot lines of Our Man in Havana not only with the history of Cuba and the waning days of Batista’s dictatorship and the rise of Fidel Castro but also the life of Graham Greene. What evolves is a mesmerizing piece about a vacuum cleaner salesman, James Wormold, an amateur recruit who manages to dupe his intelligence chiefs with invented reports about with drawings of “concrete platforms and unidentifiable giant machinery.” But with eerie prescience, Graham Greene’s fictional tale presaged one of the most perilous epidodes of the Cold War, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis during the administration of John F. Kennedy. This book focuses on the portion of Graham Greene’s life and one of his books, as well as the movie portraying the fictional tale directed and produced by Carol Reed. The photographs are priceless as well. For fans of Graham Greene, this book is a treasure.
“What follows then is the story behind a story, and the story that follows the story: about how Graham Greene arrived on holiday in Havana by mistake and stumbled upon the ideal background for a spy satire. The story within and beyond ‘Our Man in Havana’ involves espionage, a love affair, travel, anticommunism, anti-Americanism, the Cold War, capitalism, gambling and prostitution, civil war, manic depression, drugs (prescription and non), dry martinis, torture, arms sales, revolution, puritanism, and communism, roughly in that order. It is the story of how Greene became politically involved in Cuba and how his fictional story mimicked his own intelligence work in Sierra Leone and London. Most of all, the story reveals how his iconic novel proved more prophetic than even its author could imagine.”
Christopher Hull does a magnificent job of integrating the plot lines of Our Man in Havana not only with the history of Cuba and the waning days of Batista’s dictatorship and the rise of Fidel Castro but also the life of Graham Greene. What evolves is a mesmerizing piece about a vacuum cleaner salesman, James Wormold, an amateur recruit who manages to dupe his intelligence chiefs with invented reports about with drawings of “concrete platforms and unidentifiable giant machinery.” But with eerie prescience, Graham Greene’s fictional tale presaged one of the most perilous epidodes of the Cold War, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis during the administration of John F. Kennedy. This book focuses on the portion of Graham Greene’s life and one of his books, as well as the movie portraying the fictional tale directed and produced by Carol Reed. The photographs are priceless as well. For fans of Graham Greene, this book is a treasure.
“‘Our Man in Havana’ mirrors the paranoia of the period and expresses a universal truth about mistakes committed by decision makers when irrationality dominates their thinking.”
August 16, 2019
Cuba meant a lot to Graham Greene. Behind his writing desk in his flat in Antibes he had a painting by the Cuban artist René Portocarrero, presented to him by Fidel Castro, who had signed his name on the back, so that Greene didn’t know which way to hang it.
Another prize possession was a tatty Penguin copy of Our Man in Havana, kept together by Sellotape, which the Russian cosmonaut Georgy Grechko had read in outer space, and in which, while circumnavigating our planet, Grechko had underlined the places in Havana that he had visited. ‘I’ve been reading it all my life, both on earth and in space,’ he wrote in his inscription when presenting the paperback to Greene in 1985. ‘I’ve learned it by heart.’
Greene’s 1958 novel, filmed soon afterwards by Carol Reed, was a satire of British foreign policy in the wake of our national humiliation over Suez — so not a world away from the situation we face today. The antithesis of the suave, womanising James Bond, who had made his debut five years earlier, James Wormold is an expatriate vacuum- cleaner salesman with a limp and an extravagant teenage daughter, whose American wife has left him.
To fund his daughter Milly’s horse-riding during the fag-end of Batista’s dictatorship, Wormold allows himself to be recruited by British Intelligence for their Caribbean network as Agent 59200 — the same number given to Greene in 1941 when SIS posted him to Sierra Leone. Frantic to impress, the austere Wormold is driven to concoct sub-agents and intelligence, finally inventing ‘big military installations under construction’ in the mountains of eastern Cuba. Back in Whitehall, the plans that he submits as proof of these, and modelled on his Atomic Pile vacuum cleaners, are hoovered up with the same gusto as Tony Blair in 2001 swallowed colour sketches of supposed biological trucks drawn by an Iraqi ‘sub-source’ codenamed Curveball.
Christopher Hull is a footslogging, down-to-earth lecturer in Spanish and Latin American studies at the University of Chester, who has written what he calls ‘the story behind a story and the story that follows the story’. It is the kind of obsessive book I like best — a full-body immersion into Greeneland, which may overwhelm the uninitiated but delight his most committed readers, in the tradition of Tim Butcher’s Chasing the Devil, which retraced Greene’s five-week walk with his cousin Barbara through West Africa. No detail for Hull is too small, from the room numbers of Greene’s various hotels, to the cost of his daiquiris at Floridita, his favourite restaurant, to the models of the aircraft that landed him in Havana on 12 visits (double the previous estimate) between 1938 and 1983, in the protean guises of holidaymaker, novelist, screenwriter, journalist and — ultimately — intelligence gatherer. It is one of several satisfying symmetries that Hull teases out: how the author of an iconic spy novel that prophesied the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 may himself have ended up spying on post-revolutionary Cuba for SIS.
Like its author, Greene’s novel, too, underwent a few incarnations, beginning life as a film treatment set in Estonia, after a journey that Greene made in 1934. British ex-pat Richard Tripp, who sold sewing machines in Tallinin, while inventing agents and conducting arms sales, was inspired by a former Anglican priest, Peter Leslie, but the character of Wormold borrowed much from Greene’s feckless elder brother Herbert. An impressively ineffectual spook who became an agent for the Japanese (they paid him £2,000 a month, despite being ‘rather disappointed with the results’), Herbert then offered his dubious services to the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, whereupon he was swiftly captured. In one improbable story, Hemingway was all set to execute him as a spy, but Claud Cockburn allegedly interceded: ‘Don’t shoot him, he’s my headmaster’s son.’
Greene drew on Herbert for the bounder Anthony Farrant, a formervacuum-cleaner salesman, in England Made Me (1935), and so was somewhat startled when his bohemian friend Julian Maclaren-Ross told him three years later how he dabbled in door-to-door vacuum cleaner sales in Bognor Regis, ‘carryingthe unassembled parts of the appliance in a golf bag’.
In the creation of fictitious intelligence, Greene had personal experience. When in Sierra Leone, he had tried to set up a roving brothel in Portuguese Bissau, ‘where prostitutes could pick up loose bar- and pillow-talk’. Posted back to London, he compiled a card index of operatives in Portugal, including Paul Fidrmuc, codenamed Ostro, who invented agents ‘simply to make money’, and the better known Juan Puyol García, codenamed Garbo, who fabricated an entire network from a library in Lisbon, one of his 27 agents in Britain being ‘an itinerant Gibraltarian waiter who spied on a subterranean munitions depot in the Chislehurst caves’.
These loose strands came together, writes Hull, during an unplanned visit to Havana in 1954, where Greene was deported after admitting to US immigration that he had briefly been a member of the Communist party.
Havana, in those days, was still a city of vice, with sex artists like Superman, possessor of a penis of legendary dimensions, who performed nightly at the Shanghai Theatre. Something in Havana’s air, reckoned an article in Esquire, ‘has a curious chemical effect on Anglo-Saxons, dissolving their inhibitions and intensifying their libidos’. Greene was enthralled by its seediness, ‘its looseness and its strangeness’. The ‘seawet’ Malécon was a tropical twin of the promenade in Brighton, a city he loved as well for ‘the sea, a sense of fun & the unexpected’. He later holed up in Brighton’s Hotel Metropole to write the screenplay.
Batista was still in power when Greene began writing Our Man in Havana in the Hotel Seville-Biltmore. (Norman Lewis was also staying. ‘I used to be in the bar,’ Lewis told me, ‘a ghastly American blue-lit bar, and [Greene] used to sit in the corner under this blue refulgence, and say the people reminded him of parachutists about to take off.’)
On Greene’s subsequent visits, Cuba was in Castro’s hands; bureaucracy had replaced corruption and the people queued for food. At the Floridita, cradle of the daiquiri, there were no limes to make the national cocktail and a bad bottle of rum cost $122 and was nicknamed ‘rat poison’.
Vice was in shorter supply still. Kenneth Tynan complained of the clean-up that ‘the Amish had taken over Las Vegas’. Unable to locate Superman, an otherwise sympathetic Greene observed: ‘Revolutions are so puritanical.’ To the end of his days he admitted to being ‘very much of two minds’: whether to put on open display his admiration for Castro’s ‘courage and efficiency’ or condemn his ‘authoritarianism’, which had imprisoned homosexuals such as Portocarrero.
There are perils in following Greene’s footsteps too closely: his biographer Norman Sherry went mad. Hull treads the windy side of sanity. He is capable of veering between the dizzily literal and the wildly speculative (‘surely we can assume, ‘it is logical’, ‘it is possible’), but for the most part he keeps on track.
As a huge admirer of Greene, I cherish two encounters in particular that Hull describes. The first is with Hemingway, a perfunctory meeting in Sloppy Joe’s reduced to the single word ‘Howdy’. Restrained from the chance once upon a time of shooting Greene’s brother and perhaps adding his head to the big-game trophies on the walls of the Finca Vigia, Hemingway regarded Greene as ‘a whore with a crucifix above his bed’ who was trampling on his patch — while Greene nursed contempt for the American writer’s ‘hairy-chested romanticism’.
The other imperishable encounter is with Castro, ‘a Chestertonian man’, after a comical chase worthy of Wormold. In the course of two long meetings, Fidel questioned Greene closely on the topic of Russian roulette, his knowledge of Spanish wines and his regimen — ‘he did not exercise and ate and drank whatever he liked’ — before making Greene this offer, along with the painting by Portocarrero: “If you have to leave France come and live here.”’
Another prize possession was a tatty Penguin copy of Our Man in Havana, kept together by Sellotape, which the Russian cosmonaut Georgy Grechko had read in outer space, and in which, while circumnavigating our planet, Grechko had underlined the places in Havana that he had visited. ‘I’ve been reading it all my life, both on earth and in space,’ he wrote in his inscription when presenting the paperback to Greene in 1985. ‘I’ve learned it by heart.’
Greene’s 1958 novel, filmed soon afterwards by Carol Reed, was a satire of British foreign policy in the wake of our national humiliation over Suez — so not a world away from the situation we face today. The antithesis of the suave, womanising James Bond, who had made his debut five years earlier, James Wormold is an expatriate vacuum- cleaner salesman with a limp and an extravagant teenage daughter, whose American wife has left him.
To fund his daughter Milly’s horse-riding during the fag-end of Batista’s dictatorship, Wormold allows himself to be recruited by British Intelligence for their Caribbean network as Agent 59200 — the same number given to Greene in 1941 when SIS posted him to Sierra Leone. Frantic to impress, the austere Wormold is driven to concoct sub-agents and intelligence, finally inventing ‘big military installations under construction’ in the mountains of eastern Cuba. Back in Whitehall, the plans that he submits as proof of these, and modelled on his Atomic Pile vacuum cleaners, are hoovered up with the same gusto as Tony Blair in 2001 swallowed colour sketches of supposed biological trucks drawn by an Iraqi ‘sub-source’ codenamed Curveball.
Christopher Hull is a footslogging, down-to-earth lecturer in Spanish and Latin American studies at the University of Chester, who has written what he calls ‘the story behind a story and the story that follows the story’. It is the kind of obsessive book I like best — a full-body immersion into Greeneland, which may overwhelm the uninitiated but delight his most committed readers, in the tradition of Tim Butcher’s Chasing the Devil, which retraced Greene’s five-week walk with his cousin Barbara through West Africa. No detail for Hull is too small, from the room numbers of Greene’s various hotels, to the cost of his daiquiris at Floridita, his favourite restaurant, to the models of the aircraft that landed him in Havana on 12 visits (double the previous estimate) between 1938 and 1983, in the protean guises of holidaymaker, novelist, screenwriter, journalist and — ultimately — intelligence gatherer. It is one of several satisfying symmetries that Hull teases out: how the author of an iconic spy novel that prophesied the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 may himself have ended up spying on post-revolutionary Cuba for SIS.
Like its author, Greene’s novel, too, underwent a few incarnations, beginning life as a film treatment set in Estonia, after a journey that Greene made in 1934. British ex-pat Richard Tripp, who sold sewing machines in Tallinin, while inventing agents and conducting arms sales, was inspired by a former Anglican priest, Peter Leslie, but the character of Wormold borrowed much from Greene’s feckless elder brother Herbert. An impressively ineffectual spook who became an agent for the Japanese (they paid him £2,000 a month, despite being ‘rather disappointed with the results’), Herbert then offered his dubious services to the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, whereupon he was swiftly captured. In one improbable story, Hemingway was all set to execute him as a spy, but Claud Cockburn allegedly interceded: ‘Don’t shoot him, he’s my headmaster’s son.’
Greene drew on Herbert for the bounder Anthony Farrant, a formervacuum-cleaner salesman, in England Made Me (1935), and so was somewhat startled when his bohemian friend Julian Maclaren-Ross told him three years later how he dabbled in door-to-door vacuum cleaner sales in Bognor Regis, ‘carryingthe unassembled parts of the appliance in a golf bag’.
In the creation of fictitious intelligence, Greene had personal experience. When in Sierra Leone, he had tried to set up a roving brothel in Portuguese Bissau, ‘where prostitutes could pick up loose bar- and pillow-talk’. Posted back to London, he compiled a card index of operatives in Portugal, including Paul Fidrmuc, codenamed Ostro, who invented agents ‘simply to make money’, and the better known Juan Puyol García, codenamed Garbo, who fabricated an entire network from a library in Lisbon, one of his 27 agents in Britain being ‘an itinerant Gibraltarian waiter who spied on a subterranean munitions depot in the Chislehurst caves’.
These loose strands came together, writes Hull, during an unplanned visit to Havana in 1954, where Greene was deported after admitting to US immigration that he had briefly been a member of the Communist party.
Havana, in those days, was still a city of vice, with sex artists like Superman, possessor of a penis of legendary dimensions, who performed nightly at the Shanghai Theatre. Something in Havana’s air, reckoned an article in Esquire, ‘has a curious chemical effect on Anglo-Saxons, dissolving their inhibitions and intensifying their libidos’. Greene was enthralled by its seediness, ‘its looseness and its strangeness’. The ‘seawet’ Malécon was a tropical twin of the promenade in Brighton, a city he loved as well for ‘the sea, a sense of fun & the unexpected’. He later holed up in Brighton’s Hotel Metropole to write the screenplay.
Batista was still in power when Greene began writing Our Man in Havana in the Hotel Seville-Biltmore. (Norman Lewis was also staying. ‘I used to be in the bar,’ Lewis told me, ‘a ghastly American blue-lit bar, and [Greene] used to sit in the corner under this blue refulgence, and say the people reminded him of parachutists about to take off.’)
On Greene’s subsequent visits, Cuba was in Castro’s hands; bureaucracy had replaced corruption and the people queued for food. At the Floridita, cradle of the daiquiri, there were no limes to make the national cocktail and a bad bottle of rum cost $122 and was nicknamed ‘rat poison’.
Vice was in shorter supply still. Kenneth Tynan complained of the clean-up that ‘the Amish had taken over Las Vegas’. Unable to locate Superman, an otherwise sympathetic Greene observed: ‘Revolutions are so puritanical.’ To the end of his days he admitted to being ‘very much of two minds’: whether to put on open display his admiration for Castro’s ‘courage and efficiency’ or condemn his ‘authoritarianism’, which had imprisoned homosexuals such as Portocarrero.
There are perils in following Greene’s footsteps too closely: his biographer Norman Sherry went mad. Hull treads the windy side of sanity. He is capable of veering between the dizzily literal and the wildly speculative (‘surely we can assume, ‘it is logical’, ‘it is possible’), but for the most part he keeps on track.
As a huge admirer of Greene, I cherish two encounters in particular that Hull describes. The first is with Hemingway, a perfunctory meeting in Sloppy Joe’s reduced to the single word ‘Howdy’. Restrained from the chance once upon a time of shooting Greene’s brother and perhaps adding his head to the big-game trophies on the walls of the Finca Vigia, Hemingway regarded Greene as ‘a whore with a crucifix above his bed’ who was trampling on his patch — while Greene nursed contempt for the American writer’s ‘hairy-chested romanticism’.
The other imperishable encounter is with Castro, ‘a Chestertonian man’, after a comical chase worthy of Wormold. In the course of two long meetings, Fidel questioned Greene closely on the topic of Russian roulette, his knowledge of Spanish wines and his regimen — ‘he did not exercise and ate and drank whatever he liked’ — before making Greene this offer, along with the painting by Portocarrero: “If you have to leave France come and live here.”’
February 23, 2019
I have always enjoyed the writing of Graham Greene and several of his books have stayed with me even though I first read them some 40 years ago.
Our man in Havana is a different type of novel and like The Third Man has grown beyond the written page due to the subsequent movie releases.
This compelling and quite captivating biography of Greene unites the writing of the book and making of the film. It focuses on Greene’s political and governmental roles especially his experience of espionage. It is a story filled with external literary sources so that anyone reading Our man down in Havana will not feel short changed.
How Greene came to visit Cuba pre Revolution and perhaps why he continued to visit the island?
What is fascinating is that Cuba and Havana is the peg on which this work into Greene’s life can be hung and measured. How he came to meet Castro; why and what motivated him to return. His articles; his association with other writers and poets. His disquiet with US policy as seen in later books. How this book was planned some years before and how chance brought it to Havana. How subsequently it was prophetic in terms of the missile crisis, defections in the secret service and also a foreshadowing of the Iraq invasion and WMD.
The writer understands Greene and it is a work well researched and never misses the literary connections. So the prom at Brighton is linked with Havana’s wonderful curved promenade and the two novels further talked about.
Beyond all these reasons for reading this book. Here is a work that helps you understand the writing process, how a novel like Our Man in Havana comes to be written and generates a film. For fans of movies and novels these are precious insights but the main topic covered is Graham Greene himself and as stated it provides a critical but warm biography of one of our best authors. It can only promote Greene’s writing and temper our judgement on our heroes. In today’s age of social media we seem to know everything of a modern writer’s life. A glimpse into a former generation shows faults and failings but hopefully an integrity that allows our increased knowledge to be enhancing rather than upsetting.
Graham Greene was an imperfect man but in such an open and widely source account such as this we gain far more than just wanting to place such figures on a pedestal. I have found out more about the man but it is the author and his creative writing that I treasure and this book for me cements his reputation and gives one cause to read still more widely.
Our man in Havana is a different type of novel and like The Third Man has grown beyond the written page due to the subsequent movie releases.
This compelling and quite captivating biography of Greene unites the writing of the book and making of the film. It focuses on Greene’s political and governmental roles especially his experience of espionage. It is a story filled with external literary sources so that anyone reading Our man down in Havana will not feel short changed.
How Greene came to visit Cuba pre Revolution and perhaps why he continued to visit the island?
What is fascinating is that Cuba and Havana is the peg on which this work into Greene’s life can be hung and measured. How he came to meet Castro; why and what motivated him to return. His articles; his association with other writers and poets. His disquiet with US policy as seen in later books. How this book was planned some years before and how chance brought it to Havana. How subsequently it was prophetic in terms of the missile crisis, defections in the secret service and also a foreshadowing of the Iraq invasion and WMD.
The writer understands Greene and it is a work well researched and never misses the literary connections. So the prom at Brighton is linked with Havana’s wonderful curved promenade and the two novels further talked about.
Beyond all these reasons for reading this book. Here is a work that helps you understand the writing process, how a novel like Our Man in Havana comes to be written and generates a film. For fans of movies and novels these are precious insights but the main topic covered is Graham Greene himself and as stated it provides a critical but warm biography of one of our best authors. It can only promote Greene’s writing and temper our judgement on our heroes. In today’s age of social media we seem to know everything of a modern writer’s life. A glimpse into a former generation shows faults and failings but hopefully an integrity that allows our increased knowledge to be enhancing rather than upsetting.
Graham Greene was an imperfect man but in such an open and widely source account such as this we gain far more than just wanting to place such figures on a pedestal. I have found out more about the man but it is the author and his creative writing that I treasure and this book for me cements his reputation and gives one cause to read still more widely.
February 21, 2019
I love books about books and I love Graham Greene, so I was excited to find Christopher Hull’s Our Man Down in Havana, the story behind the inspiration and writing of Greene’s spy satire Our Man in Havana. Hull has clearly done his research, and he is obviously well-versed in Cuban history. This, however, was the problem with the book for me: there was just so much information presented that it often got bogged down in tiny details from Greene’s childhood, his years in Britain’s intelligence service during WWII, the history of Cuba—even what Greene ate on each of his visits to the island. I understand that some of this is necessary for an understanding of how Our Man in Havana reflected Greene’s experiences and the era in which he was writing, but I just thought tighter editing would have made the story clearer and elevated this book to the status of Lesley Blume’s Everybody Behaves Badly, about the writing of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Still, the book was enjoyable for me as a fan of Greene and Our Man in Havana—which I would highly recommend reading before sitting down with this book.
February 16, 2019
Having recently read both Our and Hitler's Man in Havana, this book made a good piece to the trilogy. It examines Graham Greene's writing of his book and contemporary Cuban history - a pretty amazing story.
April 22, 2019
This is a clever and entertaining way to write a biography for, in reality, it is one. In fact, it is two. The subject is Havana, Cuba almost as much as it is Greene. This makes for an interesting and informative perspective of both the author and the city (the country plays only a supporting role to the star, Havana).
Tracing the development and transformation of both author and subject, we see Greene in all his perversity and contradiction exposed just as we experience seedy Havana under Batista and the post revolutionary authoritarianism under Castro. The common thread is the book and movie "Our Man in Havana" though Christopher Hull extends the story as needed in copiously researched, well-written and readable prose.
I enjoyed this book almost as much as Greene's classic novel. In fact, armed with what I learned here, I am rereading with new eyes one of the most satirical spy novels of the twentieth century.
Tracing the development and transformation of both author and subject, we see Greene in all his perversity and contradiction exposed just as we experience seedy Havana under Batista and the post revolutionary authoritarianism under Castro. The common thread is the book and movie "Our Man in Havana" though Christopher Hull extends the story as needed in copiously researched, well-written and readable prose.
I enjoyed this book almost as much as Greene's classic novel. In fact, armed with what I learned here, I am rereading with new eyes one of the most satirical spy novels of the twentieth century.
June 11, 2023
An interesting read, but a little all over the place - I'd expected something a little more focussed on the novel, its inspiration and writing process, that this is supposedly about rather than a biography that gets bogged down in excessive detail (Do we really need to know what Greene ate every day on one particular trip?) or went a little too far off on tangents at times.
September 28, 2021
Excellent biography not only of Graham Greene but also of his era which provided the perfect backdrop to an excellent story. My only criticism is that sometimes it did drag unnecessarily but could be because I know so little about that era and the region.
November 28, 2025
In Our Man Down in Havana: The Story Behind Graham Greene's Cold War Spy Novel,
Christopher Hull has written a good biography, story behind the novel. Oh Look squirrel! Being part biography, and part speculation on what brought this author to write what might be the single best satire of espionage. Writing at a time when the spy novel meant James Bond, never quite a fast and sexy as the James Bond Movie franchise, Our Man in Havana stands out as the model for how to have fun with the too serious business of too much spy fiction.
Coincidentally or not, the British Secret Service was seriously compromised The compromise to be a slow rolling disclosure of ever one more in the infamous soviet penetration conducted by the Cambridge 3, then 4 then 5. Greene had been inside British intelligence, maybe had met at least Kim Philby and could claim as much of an insider’s view as the much more cerebral John Le Carre.
In fact all three authors had experience with English Secret Intel. Flemming as an Officer in the British Navy, and both Le Carre and Greene as operatives. I suspect Greene was never an insider so much as a stringer, with legitimate clams to having had some official postings. To close this point, it is possible that much of his interest in, and positive thoughts about Castro’s Cuba may have been a mix of genuine left leaning personal feelings, and his ability to parlay pro-Castro statements with access to Cuba, turned into, to date, unreleased reports back to the British Intelligence community.
For the rest we have a very mixed picture of the author. G. Greene was a man with several physical /mental issues. He was involved in affairs with several woman, while married. With some knowing about others. He had a fondness for tawdry bars, especially those with nakedness and better yet live sex floor shows. Several of his women would accompany his into these dens. When the Cuban Revolution summarily ended them in Havana, they did so without Greene’s approval.
Greens is also presented as a hard working writer, an aggressive world traveler, especially on someone else’s money and well:
Anti American (reasons never made clear)
Anti Colonialism (before everyone was)
Fond of going into dangerous place (Vet Nam, before the Americanization of that war, and any number of African and South American unstable areas.)
This last one further fueling speculation and some evidence that he was there On Her Majestiy’s Secret Service.
In-between, Hull allows himself too much time on too many topics . Do we need to know the color of various automobiles. Who drank what at which party matters because? Exactly how many drinks Green had, before and during what were much longer flights than the same travel 50 odd years later. Why the sudden mention of Teddy Roosevelt’s action at San Juan Hill (Actually not SJ Hill, but nevermind). Some friendly editing would have helped.
Christopher Hull has written a good biography, story behind the novel. Oh Look squirrel! Being part biography, and part speculation on what brought this author to write what might be the single best satire of espionage. Writing at a time when the spy novel meant James Bond, never quite a fast and sexy as the James Bond Movie franchise, Our Man in Havana stands out as the model for how to have fun with the too serious business of too much spy fiction.
Coincidentally or not, the British Secret Service was seriously compromised The compromise to be a slow rolling disclosure of ever one more in the infamous soviet penetration conducted by the Cambridge 3, then 4 then 5. Greene had been inside British intelligence, maybe had met at least Kim Philby and could claim as much of an insider’s view as the much more cerebral John Le Carre.
In fact all three authors had experience with English Secret Intel. Flemming as an Officer in the British Navy, and both Le Carre and Greene as operatives. I suspect Greene was never an insider so much as a stringer, with legitimate clams to having had some official postings. To close this point, it is possible that much of his interest in, and positive thoughts about Castro’s Cuba may have been a mix of genuine left leaning personal feelings, and his ability to parlay pro-Castro statements with access to Cuba, turned into, to date, unreleased reports back to the British Intelligence community.
For the rest we have a very mixed picture of the author. G. Greene was a man with several physical /mental issues. He was involved in affairs with several woman, while married. With some knowing about others. He had a fondness for tawdry bars, especially those with nakedness and better yet live sex floor shows. Several of his women would accompany his into these dens. When the Cuban Revolution summarily ended them in Havana, they did so without Greene’s approval.
Greens is also presented as a hard working writer, an aggressive world traveler, especially on someone else’s money and well:
Anti American (reasons never made clear)
Anti Colonialism (before everyone was)
Fond of going into dangerous place (Vet Nam, before the Americanization of that war, and any number of African and South American unstable areas.)
This last one further fueling speculation and some evidence that he was there On Her Majestiy’s Secret Service.
In-between, Hull allows himself too much time on too many topics . Do we need to know the color of various automobiles. Who drank what at which party matters because? Exactly how many drinks Green had, before and during what were much longer flights than the same travel 50 odd years later. Why the sudden mention of Teddy Roosevelt’s action at San Juan Hill (Actually not SJ Hill, but nevermind). Some friendly editing would have helped.
August 11, 2019
I thought this book was OK, but I think I would have liked this book better if I had read
Our Man in Havana
first, because even though Hull does an admirable job explaining the plot, he was still explaining what contributed to the plot of a book that I didn't read and as such I found it a bit hard to care about from whence he drew his inspiration. Still, overall this book was more of an oblique biography of Graham Greene than it is a biography of Our Man in Havana anyway.
The book felt a bit jumbled up to me like the narrative was jumping around a bit and I don't think I got a great sense of Graham Greene's life, but I think I did come up with a general understanding of what Greene was like. He was somewhat involved in British intelligence work - initially directly during World War II and then possibly peripherally as a source (or possibly directly and the degree to which he was a spy is still not public?). He had a tumultuous and somewhat chaotic personal life, and indulged liberally in both sexual affairs and intoxicants. He seems to have been quite anti-American and at least partially sympathetic to various communist movements. Other than that, I didn't get much.
One note on my rating - I think for me this is a 3 out of 5, but I do feel bad rating it that way given that there are so few Goodreads ratings right now and that the average goodreads rating is something like 3.4. Most books I see on GR that have a 3.4 with hundreds or thousands of ratings are much worse than this book, I would say that this is closer in quality to a book that, after thousands of ratings, gets an average of 3.6-3.7; not great but not bad either.
3 of 5 stars
The book felt a bit jumbled up to me like the narrative was jumping around a bit and I don't think I got a great sense of Graham Greene's life, but I think I did come up with a general understanding of what Greene was like. He was somewhat involved in British intelligence work - initially directly during World War II and then possibly peripherally as a source (or possibly directly and the degree to which he was a spy is still not public?). He had a tumultuous and somewhat chaotic personal life, and indulged liberally in both sexual affairs and intoxicants. He seems to have been quite anti-American and at least partially sympathetic to various communist movements. Other than that, I didn't get much.
One note on my rating - I think for me this is a 3 out of 5, but I do feel bad rating it that way given that there are so few Goodreads ratings right now and that the average goodreads rating is something like 3.4. Most books I see on GR that have a 3.4 with hundreds or thousands of ratings are much worse than this book, I would say that this is closer in quality to a book that, after thousands of ratings, gets an average of 3.6-3.7; not great but not bad either.
3 of 5 stars
September 10, 2023
I tend to overuse the word "excellent" in reviewing my books. I research thoroughly to avoid wasting time.
In the case of C Hull's first effort, I was concerned that this tactic would fail. It did not.
The research Christopher Hull performed was worthy of a MI6 operative.
This is a book I shall read again in the years to come.
In the case of C Hull's first effort, I was concerned that this tactic would fail. It did not.
The research Christopher Hull performed was worthy of a MI6 operative.
This is a book I shall read again in the years to come.
November 19, 2020
The subtitle on the cover reads "The Story Behind Graham Greene's Cold War Spy Novel". Yes, it does deal with "Our Man in Havana". But, especially the second half of the book, is more a Greene biography and gets into a lot of stuff only tangentially related to the novel. It's like the author and publisher couldn't figure out how to pitch the book. It lacks focus. The first half deals with Greene's involvement with SIS during World War II, and several trips he took involving Havana either as a destination or a stop-over. It equates real people he met on these trips, with characters in the novel. All well and good, if the book had ended there it would be a good take on "Our Man in Havana". Now, the book was written in the late 1950s, during the Batista dictatorship in Cuba, and that's the setting for Greene's book. Yet, "Our Man Down in Havana" deals at some length with the Bay of Pigs fiasco, as well as the Cuban missile crisis, both of which happened several years after the Castro revolution that disposed of Batista. Greene made several subsequent trips to Havana which get quite a bit of play. He had several mistresses and they get pages of treatment, only one of which Greene was seeing during writing "Our Man". One seven day trip to Cuba in 1966 during which Greene met Castro, gets 24 pages. This is probably 19 years after the publication of the original "Our Man". A really disorganized chapter at the end of the latter "Our Man" has Greene meeting Omar Torrijos of Panama in 1976 along with a number of film directors, artists, and writers; a discussion of the melding of marxist theory and Christian theology; involvement in peace negotiations in Nicaragua and El Salvador; Greene's take on the forced labor camps in Cuba during the Castro years; well, you get the drift.
July 24, 2021
The author mixes four things into one book, three of them effectively. In part it is partial biography of the great Graham Greene. There's a very long 2-volume and a long 1-volume biography of Greene available, but for many this shorter version will be enough. It covers Greene's early professional career, his later messed up love life, and a bit about his days in espionage.
This is mixed with everything, including the trivial, regarding his visits to Cuba. In Cuba he wrote "Our Man in Havana," both the novel and the screenplay. Later in life Greene wrote two long influential post-revolution articles about Cuba, for which he twice interviewed the evil Fidel Castro.
The book includes an excellent history of the Cuban revolution, with portraits of Cuba pre- and post-revolution. Certainly there are many full books with this as the topic, but for many of this, 30 or 40 pages is much better than a Wikipedia entry, but not so long as to be left on the shelf.
The fourth element, a ton of trivial stuff about Cuba, is not helpful and detracts from the overall effort. Including a few pages about the terribly cast "Havana," is an example of something pulled into the book that I read as unfocused. This book would have got a 4th star if it were 10% shorter.
Excellent narrator!
This is mixed with everything, including the trivial, regarding his visits to Cuba. In Cuba he wrote "Our Man in Havana," both the novel and the screenplay. Later in life Greene wrote two long influential post-revolution articles about Cuba, for which he twice interviewed the evil Fidel Castro.
The book includes an excellent history of the Cuban revolution, with portraits of Cuba pre- and post-revolution. Certainly there are many full books with this as the topic, but for many of this, 30 or 40 pages is much better than a Wikipedia entry, but not so long as to be left on the shelf.
The fourth element, a ton of trivial stuff about Cuba, is not helpful and detracts from the overall effort. Including a few pages about the terribly cast "Havana," is an example of something pulled into the book that I read as unfocused. This book would have got a 4th star if it were 10% shorter.
Excellent narrator!
January 12, 2020
Greene is one of my favorite authors and although I have yet to read his autobiography, this comes mighty close. The thoroughness of Hull is amazing (sometimes to the near point of dullness or "too much") and the reader will be introduced to Cuba and its politics, and all those affected by those politics, in a pre-Castro, concurrent-Castro, and post-Greene manner. As someone who has lived through the 50s and 60s I totally enjoyed the backstories to those familiar times. Additionally, it is fascinating how those same politics, British Secret Services, American Secret Services, and World War II Secret Services all intertwine to produce more literature than just Our Man In Havana. A number of authors and poets from Hemingway to Ian Fleming enter into the book. Actually, there is a tremendous complexity of factional, libidinal, and literary currents from the first to last page that Hull had the ability to grasp and simplify into an enjoyable and enlightening story.
July 24, 2019
This is very interesting visit to how "Our Man In Havana" by Graham Greene came to life. While the novel might not be particularly enticing it is interesting to see how Greene's life and adventures shaped the book and the book's subsequent popularity matched the interests of the era. This is pre-Castro Cuba a place of indulgence and vice and rampant inequity ripe for being torn apart and replaced. The comedy of errors that infects the various branches of governments around the world are on display and from that display we might learn a lesson or two. Hull says we haven't.
If you're not a Greene fan (and most of us are probably not if only because of age) this probably won't appeal to you but if you are interested sometimes in how certain novels come into existence and how novels get written then this might be more interesting.
If you're not a Greene fan (and most of us are probably not if only because of age) this probably won't appeal to you but if you are interested sometimes in how certain novels come into existence and how novels get written then this might be more interesting.
September 3, 2021
First, I strongly recommend the excellent reviews here prior to reading. I particularly agree with some of the comments - 'lack of focus' and the need for better editing. Read this in parallel with 'Our Man in Havana' and Kinzer's 'The Brothers' on John and Allen Dulles/American foreign policy under Eisenhower. Those two books made it much easier to follow much of Hull's narrative. I'm a fan of 'The Third Man,' 'The Quiet American' and 'The Heart of the Matter.' Hard for me to get excited about all the sordid details of Greene's personal inclinations as well as the pass he and Hull give to the 'leftists' on Eastern Europe, Tibet, etc. Always a little concerned about an author's intentions when he only tells one side of the story.
September 23, 2021
A book about a book, I never realised such alchemy existed.
I took this reading on in the intrest of diversity and intrigue, I mean how can you write a book about a book?
I'd split this book into three parts, part autobiographical about the author, part historical history of Cuba and obviously the notes on the book.
Did anyone clock as many air miles as greene in the late 50s and early 60s?
Well travelled with an intrest for fetish fulfilment I found the read excellently researched and Greene's life intresing.
Towards the end it did become a labour of love and probably sent me to bed early on occasion.
Ironically I've never read a Graham Greene book so that another addition to the to do list.
I took this reading on in the intrest of diversity and intrigue, I mean how can you write a book about a book?
I'd split this book into three parts, part autobiographical about the author, part historical history of Cuba and obviously the notes on the book.
Did anyone clock as many air miles as greene in the late 50s and early 60s?
Well travelled with an intrest for fetish fulfilment I found the read excellently researched and Greene's life intresing.
Towards the end it did become a labour of love and probably sent me to bed early on occasion.
Ironically I've never read a Graham Greene book so that another addition to the to do list.
May 20, 2021
An interesting read. Mostly wider context for the book, detailing Greene's life and events in Cuba and how they tie in with Greene's novel. Only a few anecdotes on Greene's time there. A lot of content will be familiar if you have read other works, such as Greene's Ways of Escape, Collected Essays, Sort of Life and biographies by Sherry etc, but the book is highly readable and brings together these sources well. For a more insightful book with first hand observations of Greene abroad, I'd recommend 'Seeds of Fiction - Graham Greene's Adventures in Haiti and Central America 1954-1983' by Bernard Diederich.
November 30, 2025
3/5
The introduction was long and detailed enough to cover the synopsis of the entire book so once I got into the specific chapters, I felt like I was just rereading things.
Silly British man somehow becomes a spy, cheats on his wife AND his mistress, gets treated like shit by the US Gov for joining the communist party as a joke for 4 weeks as a teenager, hangs out with other writers in Cuba, and then falls in love with Havana. He writes a book about all of it.
The introduction was long and detailed enough to cover the synopsis of the entire book so once I got into the specific chapters, I felt like I was just rereading things.
Silly British man somehow becomes a spy, cheats on his wife AND his mistress, gets treated like shit by the US Gov for joining the communist party as a joke for 4 weeks as a teenager, hangs out with other writers in Cuba, and then falls in love with Havana. He writes a book about all of it.
October 5, 2019
Our Man In Havana is a masterpiece of irony and a Top 5 greatest espionage novel of all time. Hull does an excellent job describing the ironic circumstances the book's gestation and its even more ironic afterlife.
August 27, 2022
I had difficulty with this book and I’m not sure why except that it lacked any kind of argument or through line. The author traces Graham Greene’s time working in British intelligence, his travels, and his contacts with other intelligence operatives, to build a picture of the experiences that he brought to writing ‘Our Man in Havana.’
January 11, 2020
A thoroughly enjoyable and well researched book. It’s been decades since I last read Greene but he has always been one of my favourite authors so when I saw this book I quickly pounced on it, and it did not disappoint... And my fascination with Cuba was also satisfied by this book...
September 18, 2022
I’ve got mixed feelings on this book. It was interesting, but felt biased in many places rather than a document of straight fact. I listened to the audio version, so that could have been a result of the narrator. It was obvious he read some figures with derision.
May 6, 2019
The story behind the story, behind the story.
October 16, 2019
How Graham Greene came to write his satiric comic novel called Our Man in Havana. Bumbling bureaucrats and spies in ore-revolutionary Cuba.
dnf
June 24, 2020I had to abandon this book. I'm very interested in the topic, but there were just too many names-places-dates. I'm interested in the story, not homework.
May 2, 2021
A pretty good review of Graham's total work, not limited to the "Our Man in Havana" novel.
December 29, 2020
This book outlines the back story of Green's book, Our Man in Havana. It's interesting for a look at Green's life, but goes on too long.
April 6, 2020
An entertaining and illuminating narrative about one of the great 20th century writers, an eccentric and mostly admirable man as well as a genius of the novel form. It does go into a few cul-de-sacs and those who aren't diehard GG fans (I am) may find it a bit too comprehensive at times (I did not). Pleasantly surprised to learn quite a bit about the history of early Post-Revolution Cuba as well. This will appeal to Greene fans and also those, like me, who love Havana and the Cuban people. A book that should be on the reading list of any literary-minded traveler planning a trip to Havana.
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