The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  46

  BOMBS AND DAIQUIRIS

  ‘Two days ago in NY the story began to grow & I even thought it might grow into something good & funny & sad & exciting, but now the feeling has slipped away.’1 It was the morning of 8 November 1957, and Greene was in Cuba for a three-week visit.2 Having written out some of his discouragement in a letter to Catherine, he took a sheet of foolscap, wrote the first sentence, then the first paragraph, and was satisfied.3 He gave his main character the name Wormold, based on that of the Cambridge historian Brian Wormald, an Anglican clergyman who converted to Catholicism, and along the way had had an affair with Catherine.4 This was to be a novella, an entertainment, just something to make up for the money he had lent to Sherman Stonor.5 Our Man in Havana would turn out to be much more than that.

  On the flight south the day before, he had sat beside an engineer who showed him an issue of Gun Digest; seeing the huge prices, Greene, after three whiskies, fantasized about buying up antique guns in France and selling them in the United States. That would settle his money problems. Once he had checked in at the Seville-Biltmore, which had a mobbed-up casino, he went for a walk; prostitutes whistled at him, but he was not interested, as the city seemed to stifle his desires. In the morning he went into an American bank to cash a cheque from Viking Press, and stood around waiting for a clerk to finish his matey conversation with an executive who had it in mind to borrow $150,000; in a passage written shortly after, Jim Wormold would stand in just such a queue.

  Greene then visited the hapless British ambassador, Stanley Fordham, who described for him an attack on Batista’s palace on 13 March 1957 by the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil, one of several groups fighting against Batista; they had come close to killing the dictator. Fordham had watched part of the attack from the typists’ room in the embassy, before drawing a burst of machine-gun fire and having to take cover. For matters which he did not witness with his own eyes, Fordham was a far less reliable source of information, as he would continue to report to London that Batista was defeating the rebels, and on the basis of what he said the British government proceeded with arm sales to Batista, even after the United States had turned its back on him.6

  Havana was a dangerous place. While Greene, hoping to revive his appetites, attended a sex show at the Shanghai Theatre on 8 November, sixty bombs had gone off around the city in just fifteen minutes – they had been positioned to create a disturbance rather than a bloodbath, but even so eight people were hurt.7 Greene walked the streets, and suffered nothing worse than pursuit by bootblacks wanting to find him a girl. He generally ate at the old Floridita restaurant, which he loved for its crab, crawfish, and daiquiris.

  With just a few hundred words written, he was not certain whether his new book was actually a comedy. He may have thought of the wartime case of Heinz Lüning, a spy for the Abwehr in Havana so incompetent that he could not construct his radio or even attach its antenna, so he sent reports to his superiors in invisible ink, which the British intercepted. The Americans and Cubans thought they were on to a master spy, who was directing U-boats to their kills. Lüning’s capture and execution by firing squad were trumpeted as a great victory for the intelligence services, but, in fact, he was a nobody.8 On Sunday morning Greene went to Mass and his attention fell on ‘a honey coloured girl with a pony tail’, and the next day he experienced a breakthrough in his writing: he could see Milly.9

  There was still a good deal that he had not seen. In his earlier visits, Greene had not ventured outside the city, and he had met few ordinary Cubans. He tracked down a taxi driver named Rocky10 who, on an earlier visit, had obtained suspiciously cheap cocaine which turned out to be boracic powder. The man apologized for the earlier swindle, blamed the newsagent from whom he had procured it, and offered a refund. Untroubled by all this, Greene asked Rocky to find some opium, and then arranged for him to drive him to Cienfuegos and Trinidad on the south coast.11

  ‘There was one place in Cuba to which we were unable to drive – Santiago, the second city of the island.’12 Located in the south-east, this was the centre of Batista’s operations against Castro’s 26 de Julio organization, whose stronghold was in the mountains of the region. It was necessary to fly there, as a foreigner approaching by car would be stopped at a roadblock and face an ugly interrogation. Once in the city, he would need to contact the Fidelistas, and this required a fairly long chain of intermediaries. Through Stonor, he had met the Cuban ambassador to the Court of St James’s, Roberto González de Mendoza, who provided an introduction to his brother Nicolas, a lawyer in Havana, as someone to drink with.13 There is no strong evidence that Nicolas was deeply involved with the opposition to Batista, but he did connect the novelist with one of his relatives,14 Natalia Bolívar, who became a distinguished cultural anthropologist after the revolution; she had participated in the Directoria’s storming of the presidential palace, and specialized in smuggling people and arms. Soon after meeting Greene, she had all her ribs broken and lost the hearing in one ear as the result of interrogation – she was even shown the bag of cement that would be used to make her overshoes, but was spared because her family did business with Batista.

  Bolívar wanted to send Greene to meet the Directoria in the Escambray Mountains in the central part of the island, but found that some new leaders were not receptive to the idea, so she put him in contact with a courier for the 26 de Julio, Nydia Sarabia, whom Greene knew only by her nom de guerre, Lidia Hernández. Subsequently a historian, Sarabia recalled Greene saying at the time that he intended to write two books, one set in Havana and the other in Santiago, and that he would like to interview Castro.

  Greene and Sarabia took a commercial flight to Santiago, the novelist carrying a suitcase full of warm clothes for fighters in the mountains – an Englishman was unlikely to be searched. He checked into the Casa Granda Hotel in Santiago on a humid night after the unofficial curfew and found that the desk clerk made no pretence of welcoming a foreigner. Anyone walking the streets after dark was liable to be arrested, and, as Greene put it, the lucky ones were found in the morning hanging from lamp-posts. By day, the city reminded him of Villahermosa in Tabasco during the persecution: ‘I was back in what my critics imagine to be Greeneland.’15

  In Santiago, he witnessed an uprising of schoolchildren. In the middle of the night soldiers took as hostages the three young daughters of a man fighting in the mountains for Castro: ‘The news reached the schools. In the secondary schools the children made their own decision – they left their schools and went on the streets. The news spread. To the infants’ schools came the parents and took away their children. The streets were full of them. The shops began to put up their shutters in expectation of the worst. The army gave way and released the three little girls. They could not turn fire-hoses on the children in the streets as they had turned them on their mothers or hang them from lamp-posts as they would have hanged their fathers.’16

  Having been warned against phone taps and impostors, Greene became uneasy about his friend the Time journalist Jay Mallin, who had flown to Santiago on the same plane, with a plan to help Greene arrange his meetings and perhaps get a few paragraphs for the magazine.17 His presence made it necessary for Greene and Sarabia to sit apart and not make eye contact on the flight. He came to Greene’s hotel room with a man in a gabardine suit claiming to be Fidel’s public relations man – he has since been identified as Fernando Ojeda, a businessman allied with Fidel.18 The phone then rang: it was Sarabia, who told Greene to go to an address in Calle San Francisco. She thought Mallin and the other man were spies, just as Ojeda insisted that whoever was on the phone was a spy. Greene made the two men leave, but was now very worried about being detected by Batista’s agents.

  Clutching the suitcase full of sweaters and leather jackets, he dared not give the address to a taxi driver so gambled on there being an Iglesia de San Francisco on a street with the saint’s name and was right – he told the driver he wanted to pray. Once he got out of the taxi h
e found that it was a long street, and while searching for the house he was overtaken by a car containing Mallin and Ojeda, who said that he had confirmed that the call in the hotel room was from their organization. As Bernard Diederich points out, almost the entire American press corps opposed Batista, and a number of journalists, such as Mallin, had highly placed contacts in the rebel groups.19 Sarabia and Ojeda were on the same side without knowing it. Afterwards, Greene trusted Mallin fully, and a year later told his brother Hugh, just appointed Director of News and Current Affairs at the BBC, that Mallin had the right contacts to get a film crew into Santiago.20

  Once inside the house on Calle San Francisco, Greene found Sarabia, her mother, a priest, and a young man disguising himself by having his hair dyed21 – this was Armando Hart, a lawyer who had just made a daring escape from police custody at the law courts in Havana; he later became Fidel’s minister of education and then minister of culture and served on the Cuban politburo. His wife, Haydée Santamaria, was also there; an important figure in the revolution, this tragic woman had participated in the attack on Moncada Barracks in 1953, been captured, and shown the castrated corpse of her then-fiancé. Together they discussed whether Greene should come into the Sierra Maestra to meet Fidel, but with the fighting growing more intense, the rebels were not allowing outsiders into their camps.22 For his part, Greene saw that he was running short of time and that he was not equipped for such a trek as he didn’t even have boots. With evident regret, he decided against it. However, the rebels still wanted his help on an important matter. Even though most countries saw Batista as entirely discredited, Britain was still selling him fighter planes. They explained what was going on and asked Greene to put pressure on the government.

  He left Cuba on 21 November 1957, and after short stays in New York and Montreal went to Greene-Park Ranch for Christmas with Caroline. He was making terrific progress with the book, and less than a month later he could report to Gillian Sutro that he had completed twenty-one thousand words. He kept up the pace, and by late February had written forty-one thousand; what had begun as a novella was turning into one of his longest books.

  However, he was headed into a period that was tumultuous even by his standards. After Christmas, he had a sharp disagreement with Vivien. Then, in London for rehearsals of The Potting Shed, he received a phone call from Catherine that caused him to weep in the bath over the loss of her. He sent her a letter saying that he expected he would next fail Anita, and concluded, ‘The death wish is very strong.’23

  In Stockholm, he and Anita suddenly agreed in mid-February that they were finished. He told Catherine, assuming she would want to start again, but she hesitated. After six weeks, Anita sent him a conciliatory letter and he flew back to Stockholm straight away. Over the years, Catherine had sent her share of mixed messages, but now she was confused, and she put Marie Biche on the spot by asking whether somehow she now bored Graham, and had he been play-acting? After a long delay, Biche wrote that while Dorothy did bore him, he had said that could never be the case with Catherine. Biche also said she had put it to him that in life you just can’t make returns, but he had said ‘one knows one could, like that, with Catherine’.24

  Our Man in Havana, delivered to the publisher on 2 June 1958,25 ends with Wormold and Beatrice finding private happiness in a mad world. Graham went to Sweden, only to see that there was nothing of the sort in store for himself and Anita. After a miserable holiday on an island in the Stockholm archipelago, they agreed in early July to make a final break, as he remarked to Catherine: ‘This should have been an affair – just as ours should have been marriage.’26 He judged that it was partly his fault and ‘a lot just Sweden & circumstances’. In a characteristic gesture, he bought a house for Anita: ‘I do want her to come out of this episode better than she went in.’27

  47

  THE WHOLE TROUBLE

  Graham Greene came close to being tried at the Old Bailey. A young MI5 officer named David Cornwell was drinking coffee with a ‘benign’ lawyer who worked for the service, and the lawyer was unhappy. Halfway through an advance copy of Our Man in Havana, he was convinced that Graham Greene must go to prison as he had given a precise account of the dealings of a head of station with an agent in the field: ‘ “And it’s a good book,” he complained. “It’s a damned good book. And that’s the whole trouble.” ’1

  Of course, Wormold is not prosecuted for his crimes – rather he gets an OBE and is made an instructor in spycraft. ‘C’ – Sir Dick White, the chief of MI6 – was not such a fool as to let anyone lay charges against Greene; a little later, the novelist heard that when the head of MI5 proposed a prosecution under the Official Secrets Act, White just laughed.2 The service hired many writers, and an indiscretion from time to time was merely the cost of doing business. If nothing else, a charge would be an admission that Our Man in Havana had some truth in it.

  When the book was released around the beginning of October, some critics chided Greene for the unreality of his portrayal of intelligence work. Ian Fleming, for example, loved the novel but thought the ‘Wodehousian’ presentation of the service its single fault.3 Reviewers had no idea how clearly Greene had read the situation in Cuba, and in the midst of the Cold War few were willing to think of spies as bunglers and fantasists. However, it would soon become clear that he had, at a stroke, remade the genre of the spy novel.

  He had not forgotten the request of Armando Hart’s group that he should pressure the British government about arms sales. With its fragile post-war economy, Britain was desperate for export markets, while the Cubans were trying to sell sugar, cigars, and rum, so the two countries entered into a trade agreement in 1953, granting the British tariff concessions; after much negotiation it was extended in late 1958. Although military allies, the British and the Americans were trade rivals in Cuba, and on three occasions British Leyland outbid General Motors for large contracts to sell buses to the island. With American sales of arms to Batista drying up – Congress passed a formal embargo in March 1958 – the British government saw another opportunity.4

  Greene passed information about the sales to his friend Hugh Delargy, a Catholic from Antrim and the Labour MP for Thurrock, who rose in the House of Commons on 17 March 1958 and asked whether Britain was selling arms or aeroplanes to the government of Cuba. Ian Harvey, a junior minister in the Foreign Office, issued a categorical denial and so lied to the House.5 In Ways of Escape Greene recalled incorrectly that the denial was made by the Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd.6

  Greene returned to Cuba for two weeks in October 1958 to scout film locations. He could see that the rebels were gaining recruits and territory, so urged Delargy to keep after the government. On 19 November, Delargy asked Lloyd whether the government had supplied jets and tanks to the Cuban government, eliciting an admission that the government had some months ago approved a sale by a private firm of seventeen piston-engine planes and fifteen Comet tanks from surplus stocks. On 15 December, Delargy got rough, asking another junior minister, Allan Noble, whether the government had licensed the sale of rockets, and the slippery Noble took refuge in the ministerial passive voice as he confirmed that ‘the sale of seventeen Sea Fury aircraft to the Cuban government was authorised some months ago. These aircraft are equipped to carry rockets and a normal complement for each aircraft was authorised in the usual way.’ Delargy then asked whether he was aware that a ship named the Sarmiento carrying a cargo of more than a hundred tons of rockets was waiting to set sail from a British port. He asked for an assurance that this ship would not sail and called it a ‘a dirty deal done behind the backs of the British people and of Parliament’. With the support of Nye Bevan as Shadow Foreign Secretary, he demanded that the Speaker allow an adjournment debate and, in a splendid piece of unparliamentary behaviour, challenged the impartiality of the Speaker, William Shepherd Morrison, and called him ‘frivolous’ for choosing to hold a debate on ‘Scottish horticulture’ over one on the killing of Cubans.7 He had made his point, and the re
d-faced British government stopped selling weapons to Batista.

  The historian Christopher Hull believes that Greene and Delargy may have contributed modestly to Batista’s downfall by adding, at the last moment, to his international isolation – a straw for the camel’s back.8 With his regime simply falling apart and Fidel’s forces marching on both Havana and Santiago, the dictator decided that it was time to flee to the Dominican Republic, where he would have to scrape by on a few hundred million dollars. He boarded a plane early on 1 January 1959, taking his family and some supporters, but not, initially, Colonel Ventura, who forced his way onto the plane at gunpoint. According to Greene, Ventura became a fixture at the fruit machines in Ciudad Trujillo.9 The man in the linen suit eventually set up a private security firm in Miami, and he died there in 2001.10 Unwelcome in the United States, Batista moved on to Portugal and then Spain. He hired bodyguards to keep assassins at bay and died of a heart attack in 1973 – he was, of course, a wealthy man, so death by natural causes was within his means.

  On 3 January 1959 Greene wrote to The Times about the ‘welcome’ victory of Fidel Castro’s forces: Greene understood, correctly at the time, that Castro was not a communist but a nationalist. Greene castigated the British government and, without naming him, the ambassador Stanley Fordham, for remaining unaware of ubiquitous atrocities and not recognizing that Cuba was in the midst of a civil war before the weapons were sold – something obvious to a private traveller such as himself. He lamented that the bombing of the old city of Trinidad had probably been done with British planes. He followed this letter with another three days later expressing wonder that the British government had not known that by the autumn three-quarters of Cuba was out of Batista’s control. There is another irony here. Whereas Jim Wormold had convinced his superiors of an imaginary threat of war, Fordham had failed to notice a real one.