Some suggestions were offered by Greene himself although, since he was a master of indirection, they should not be taken as gospel. One of Hull’s main concerns is to trace the people and incidents that went into the making of Greene’s novel about James Wormold, an English vacuum-cleaner salesman in Havana who is recruited into SIS (the British Security Services) and invents a whole series of fictitious agents as well as a supposed missile site. Greene and his new friend, Gabriel García Márquez, rubbed shoulders with-or more likely tried to avoid-Jorge Videla and Augusto Pinochet.
Late in life, he developed a close relationship with Panamanian President Omar Torrijos, and was awarded a temporary diplomatic passport that allowed him to attend the ceremony in Washington DC to mark the eventual transfer of control over the Panama Canal.
He eventually met Fidel Castro twice, as well as other important Cuban figures such as Armando Hart, Haydée Santamaría, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Lisandro Otero, Pablo Armando Fernández, Alejo Carpentier, Miguel Barnet, and Virgilio Piñera. Greene’s involvement with Cuba and the wider Caribbean was substantial. There is little attempt at literary or filmic analysis, and there are occasional stylistic infelicities, but the research behind the book is impressively thorough. As well as Greene’s own published accounts, Hull draws on unpublished diaries, extensive letters that Greene wrote to friends and lovers, and interviews with Cubans whom Greene had met, notably Nydia Sarabia. In their memoirs British diplomats and spies-categories not always easily separated-are fond of calling themselves “our man in …,” apparently unaware of the satirical origin of the phrase in Graham Greene’s 1958 comic novel, Our Man In Havana, the center-piece of Christopher Hull’s exhaustive investigation of Greene’s visits to the Cuban capital between 19. Christopher Hull, Our Man Down in Havana: The Story Behind Graham Greene’s Cold War Spy Novel.
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