Our Man in Havana

Our Man in Havana is a novel by the English writer Graham Greene, published in 1958. It is set in Cuba, and it is written as a comedy about the intelligence services.

Wormold is an Englishman who sells vacuum cleaners in Havana. His daughter has reached an age at which she costs a great deal, so when a stranger offers him an income for running agents and filing reports, he takes it. The man who makes the offer is English, and the work he describes is a matter of filing reports and keeping up appearances.

The agents do not exist and the reports are made up, which is why it is awkward when events begin to catch up with what he has invented. Greene wrote the book out of his own experience of working for MI6, where he had learned about agents in Portugal who were sending their handlers fabricated reports and being paid for them.

The novel was adapted into a film in 1959, directed by Carol Reed and with Alec Guinness in the leading part, and it has since been adapted as an opera and as a play.