Greene had originally outlined the material for Brazilian director Alberto Cavalcanti, basing the story, about a spy who fabricates mission reports back to his trusting controllers, on real-life experience. Reed collaborated with Greene for the third time on Our Man in Havana, having rushed to buy the book’s film rights not long after its publication. What begins as another of Reed’s acerbic, ironic, and thoroughly readable tales gives way to a shadowy satire in which nationalism presents the greatest danger and intelligence is a generous term. Director Carol Reed’s version of Greene’s story involves Alec Guinness as a British expatriate in Cuba who takes advantage of his government’s desire for fresh intelligence by fabricating a deadly political conspiracy. He wrote the comic intrigue of Our Man in Havana in 1958, and rather than approaching it with a seriousness befitting the potential global consequences or more attuned to the works of John le Carré and Ken Follett, Greene’s book cut into the potential for absurdity in modern espionage.

In the 1960s, however, spy stories about cloak-and-dagger agents, international conspiracies, foreign secrets, and acts of espionage saturated popular entertainment, from James Bond to The Manchurian Candidate(1962). As ever, author Graham Greene was ahead of the political curve. Hollywood “B” movies perpetuated Soviet, political, and nuclear paranoia with creature features concerned with what Susan Sontag called “the aesthetics of devastation”-warped colossal insects and monsters crawling with atomic anxiety, or pod people taking over our minds and bodies. In Greene’s book, the Prado is home to the Wonder Bar, the watering hole of his protagonist, but the bar no longer exists.In 1950s cinema, filmmakers commented on the Cold War predominantly through allegory and allusion.

The Hotel Sevilla is the northernmost with its Moorish entrance on the Prado and its neoclassical entrance on Trocadero, and it was in this hotel – Room 501 – where Wormold received his instructions from Agent Hawthorne. The Prado (Paseo) is the main street which roughly divides Havana Vieja (Old Havana) from Centro Havana and it’s on this street where most of the city’s elegant hotels are situated. Thanks to a restoration project Sloppy Joe’s has returned to its former glory.

In reality, Sloppy Joe’s was frequented by American tourists, a clientele which ceased when Castro came to power resulting in the bar’s closure. While the Plaza didn’t feature in Greene’s novel, Sloppy Joe’s bar at the rear of the hotel did and was where Agent Hawthorne persuaded vacuum cleaner salesman Jim Wormold, the novel’s protagonist, to reluctantly become M16’s man in Havana. Our Man in Havana has been republished several times CENTRAL HAVANAįirst up was the Hotel Plaza, a two-tone yellow 19 th Century building with a colonnaded ground floor, the front door of which opens onto Parque Central.

Our man in havana book review