Unlike the head of the American Department in the Foreign Office, who had ‘very little reason’ to suppose that Fidel Castro would ‘come to power in the foreseeable future’, and approved continuing arms sales, Greene judged the opposite. Within two hours of returning to London, Greene wrote to the Labour Party MP Hugh Delargy to ask him to table a parliamentary question about British arms sales to Cuba’s dictatorship. The British arms embargo only came about thanks to Greene.Īs screenwriter for a cinematic version of Our Man in Havana, he had visited the city again in October 1958 with the director Carol Reed to reconnoitre filming locations. Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government embargoed British arms sales to Batista just two weeks before the Cuban Revolution, a full nine months after Washington had halted its military exports to the increasingly repressive dictator. His visit to Cuba would actually make a modest contribution to Batista’s downfall on 1 January 1959. This trip had a possible secondary focus, keeping his eyes and ears open to Fidel Castro’s year-old insurrection against Fulgencia Batista’s military regime on behalf of his wartime employer, MI6. He made multiple visits, including a key one in November 1957, when he began writing Our Man in Havana. Greene discovered Havana in 1954, enthralled by its cocktail of capitalist vice, casinos, burlesque cabarets, drug peddling and prostitution. These trips provided the background to what critics have termed Greeneland: ‘The seedy, politically unstable, and dangerous world said to be the typical setting in the novels of Graham Greene.’ In the 1950s, he sought distraction from his manic depression through multiple foreign trips to turbulent spots around the world. In adolescence, Graham Greene found relief from ‘boredom’ by playing Russian roulette.

Man in havana