Our Man Down in Havana
Mar 2019 · Simon and Schuster
Ebook
384
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About this ebook
When U.S. immigration authorities deported Graham Greene from Puerto Rico in 1954, the British author made an unplanned visit to Havana and the former MI6 officer had 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, in January 1959, the Cuban Revolution triumphed, 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 fiction. 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.
About the author
Christopher Hull, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in Spanish & Latin American Studies at the University of Chester. His research focuses on British interactions with Latin America. He first visited Cuba in 1997 and has traveled extensively around the island during seventeen further visits, often in the footsteps of Graham Greene. He lives in England.
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