Chris Hull's New Research on "Our Man in Havana"

In an innovation at the Graham Greene International Festival the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust sponsored a conference paper on New Research on Graham Greene. In Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School (UK) on the morning of Saturday 3rd October 2009 Dr. Chris Hull (Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, Nottingham University) delivered the first talk in what the festival director Dermot Gilvary hopes will become a regular feature at the Festival.

In a paper titled “Prophecy and Comedy in Havana: Greene’s entertainment and the reality of British diplomacy in Cuba” Chris told a large and fascinated audience that Our Man in Havana, which was published just four years before the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, contained a fine example of Greene's renowned prescience of real events with its comic portrayal of an invented missile site based on designs for an Atomic Pile vacuum cleaner.

The novelist's research and writing of his satirical spy-fiction was simultaneous with the guerrilla campaign led by Fidel Castro in Cuba from 1956. In fact, Greene involved himself directly in real events, when he indirectly pressured the British government in late 1958 to curtail its sales of arms to the rebels' nemesis, the right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista. Following the triumph of the Cuban revolution on 1st January 1959, in the press Greene castigated the Foreign Office for its “extraordinary ignorance of Cuban affairs”. Later, after the island's absorption into the Soviet orbit, British intelligence reports from Cuba read remarkably like excerpts from Greene's novel. Chris suggested that any ordinary visitor to that place might have provided more reliable information than the British government possessed, that newspapers were more informative and that diplomats in Havana were ineffective. He wondered if Greene’s prescience was “a sheer fluke” --- as the writer later claimed --- or if he did indeed possess a talent for prophecy.

The next talk in the New Research series will be given at the Festival 2010 by the Daily Telegraph journalist, BBC broadcaster and best-selling author Tim Butcher, who will focus on Greene’s time as a traveller in Liberia and Sierra Leone in 1935 and as a spy in Sierra Leone in 1942-43. His provisional title is “Chasing the Devil: How Greene lost his heart to West Africa”. More details will be announced later.