Mr. Wormold: I ran a vacuum cleaner shop, sir. We carry the finest, most modern machines such as the Atomic Pile Suction Cleaner, the Midget Make-Easy Air Powered Suction Small Home Cleaner and the Turbo, which is the no. 1 brand in Cuba for four years running. We are Phastkleaners’ sole agent for the whole of Cuba.

But the story doesn’t descend into a farce of the Spies Like Us type, thanks to occasional sharp reminders like this one as Captain Segura reminds Wormold of his power as head of the secret police: Wormold gets an offer to be recruited by a British agent to spy for the British Intelligence and after some initial reluctance he agrees because he needed the money for Milly's education. So he invents a false spy ring and starts feeding rubbish to British Secret Service. Mr. Wormold: I was drinking with my old friend Dr. Hassellbacher at Sloppy Joe’s. Agent Hawthorne was there. He corralled me into the Gents and suggested to me that I should join the Secret Service. Greene had a victim of bullying in his childhood and this exerted no little influence on his works. His pro-Communist sympathies, dependence on alcohol, his rejection of the notion of patriotism, anti-American sentiments all are present in his books.

Our Man in Havana, written by Graham Greene and published in 1958, is one of the funniest and best spy novels ever written. Our Man in Havana: Title Jim Wormold, divorcé, lives in Havana with his pretty teenage daughter, Milly. He has one friend, Dr. Hasselbacher and struggles to make ends meet as a none-too-successful vacuum cleaner salesman. Then an unexpected person walks into his life—with what you might call an ‘opportunity too good to refuse’. He can become the undercover British Agent in Havana, watch for/report on suspicious activity, recruit his own agents, set up an expense account, and start earning that second income he so desperately needs. I had so much fun reading this book … it is an espionage tale told with a deliciously witty British humor … laugh out loud funny … Wormold is a lot like Henry Scobie in Greene's The Heart of the Matter. He is a middle aged man who does not know what he is to do with the rest of his life. How will he go on? How will he fund the exorbitant lifestyle of his Catholic daughter Milly? He drifts through life, drinking daiquiris with another dejected British expatriate Dr. Hasselbacher at Havana's numerous bars. But when he is assigned the job of a spy by Hawthorne ( the British intelligence agent who arrives as a customer at Wormold's shop), there is something to do. He begins to make money. He makes up fake events and people in his dispatches to the intelligence agency. But then his dispatches begin to come true. They both laughed, drinking daiquiris. It is easy to laugh at the idea of torture on a sunny day. Fabrication

Our Man in Havana is a satirical spy novel set in Havana during the cold war. British influence over the rest of the world is on the wane. An alcoholic British expatriate Jim Wormold - who owns a shop that sells vacuum cleaners is hired by a British intelligence agency as their man ( spy) in Havana. I think Wormold and Hasselbacher represent post-war Britain - tired and without any motive or passion to go on, conceding hegemony to America. But I doubt whether Greene was a patriot. His attitude could be reflected in these lines by Wormold - “ I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?” Mr. Wormold: It was because of my daughter, Milly. She was just sixteen at that time. Convent schoolgirl, very good girl. She wanted to buy a horse and rode in the Country Club. The horse alone costed 300 pounds, sir, and the Country Club was even more expensive. Not to say of the bridles, saddles and riding lessons. And I wanted to have enough money to retire in England and take her with me. There was this native person called Capt. Segura who had designs on her. Graham Greene loosely based Our Man in Havana on his experiences as an MI6 officer in Portugal during World War Two, where Britain ran many agents sending the Germans disinformation. As the double-agents invented more and more sub-agents to enable them to send a wider range of disinformation, the Germans seemed to become more trusting.Greene joined MI6 in August 1941. [2] [3] [4] In London, Greene had been appointed to the subsection dealing with counter-espionage in the Iberian Peninsula, where he had learnt about German agents in Portugal sending the Germans fictitious reports, which garnered them expenses and bonuses to add to their basic salary. [5] Okay, this may not be one of the very best of Graham Greene novels, but in re-reading it after all these years I appreciated so much what a great writer can do with a lesser/lighter story. Greene made distinctions between his books that some of us might contend with; he divides his fiction writing between novels (serious stuff) and “entertainments,” and this book he puts in the latter category, but I’d say it was better written than most novels anywhere. Why be a snob about your own spy thrillers and mysteries?! This is really good! The edition I got from my library contained an introduction by Christopher Hitchens. Reading this introduction I got some insights about the author and how his childhood and beliefs influenced his works. Hitchens also says that John Le Carre had been influenced by Greene. The title uses a classic title archetype, the Protagonist, being a reference to Wormold, who MI6 think is ‘their man in Havana’. The willingness of MI6 to believe reports from their local informants becomes more and more astonishing - and more and more deadly.

Mrs. Wormold: Where were we? Oh yes, I was not suspicious at first. I thought that he was kind of bumbling, but what a sweet man! And then someone shot at Cifuentes and everything started to unravel. He took me to the Shanghai Theater to warn Teresa ---The solution found by the author is extremely clever, and funny in that classic Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton way: with a tear rolling down your cheek. It really makes the reader think about the sort of things we are laughing at. And ask ourselves where do we go from here, what have we learned from the experience? Well pleased with their man in Havana, these rajahs decide to expand his operation and to send over a secretary and a radio operator to Wormold, threatening his carefully build yet teetering house of cards. Our Man in Havana is one such entertainment, which means it won't have you sobbing into the creases of your book like you might do in The End of the Affair, or swooning over incredibly insightful sentences describing human failings and observations. The tone of this book is not serious, it's comedic. Our "hero" is a man named Wormold (say no more), a vacuum cleaner salesman who's been left by his wife to raise his manipulative and haughtily Catholic daughter all on his own. Guidance on Content: The performance contains themes of gambling and suicide. A prop gun and cigarette are used in the show as well as haze.