Our Man in Havana

“He thought sadly, But I am a stranger. He was unable to follow her into her strange world of candles and lace and holy water and genuflections.”

Wormold, an atheist, feels that his daughter Milly’s Catholic faith is a barrier between them. His feeling of isolation from his daughter compounds his sense of isolation generally. Other examples include his separation from his estranged wife and his status as an outsider in Havana society.

“You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.”

Dr. Hasselbacher tells Wormold that he should worry less about his job and about people, because they are ephemeral. Instead, he should pursue a dream, whether it will ever come true or not—like the experiment Hasselbacher is conducting. The quote conveys the anxiety of the Cold War era, when many people feared nuclear annihilation. It also prefigures Wormold’s “dreaming up” stories to report to the Secret Service, an action that will get both him and Hasselbacher in serious trouble.

“In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.”

Wormold thinks this as the mysterious stranger Hawthorne tells him to go to the men’s room of the bar so he can give him secret information. The quote sums up the Cold War climate of suspicion and confusion, when global political concerns invade the private lives of ordinary citizens.

“Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.”

Mistrust is one of the fundamental emotions in the modern world depicted in the novel. The characters are caught in a world of secrecy and ambiguity and never quite sure what is going on. Wormold muses that this climate of suspicion starts in childhood. The quote relates to Milly’s bullying a boy in her class as well as to Greene’s own experiences with bullying in a boys’ school run by his father.

“It’s wonderful, isn’t it, how you always get what you pray for.”

Milly has a simple faith in the efficacy of prayer that is innocent, although immature. She thinks of prayer as an automatic process that gets you exactly what you want—in her case, a horse—without demanding spiritual growth or sacrifice.

“East or West of what? Oh, you mean that. A plague on both.”

Dr. Hasselbacher’s flippant reply to the question of whether his sympathies lie with the East or the West in the Cold War. This quote may reflect a fundamentally apolitical attitude on the part of Greene, who tried not to take definite political sides in the conflicts of his day.

“A drunk man talked endlessly in the drab bar, as though he were saying in the style of Gertrude Stein ‘Cuba is Cuba is Cuba.’”

A comic quote that reflects the hopeless political situation in Cuba, in which one dictatorship was succeeded by another. The American avant-garde writer Gertrude Stein was known for her deliberately childlike, stream-of-consciousness prose.

“How long it takes to realize in one’s life the intricate patterns of which everything—even a picture-postcard—can form a part, and the rashness of dismissing anything as unimportant.”

Wormold has this reflection after his run-in with the police in Santiago, in which the officers seize on his postcard to Dr. Hasselbacher as a suspicious item. The quote speaks to the intricacy of the novel’s plot and the fact that it is filled with contingent details that all contribute to the end result.

“Somebody always leaves a banana-skin on the scene of a tragedy.”

The tragic scene in question is that of Dr. Hasselbacher’s ruined home, to which he has invited Wormold. To add insult to injury, Hasselbacher sits down in a chair and it collapses under his weight. The quote is typical of the way Greene often mixes humor with seriousness and tragedy.

“Vacuum cleaner again. Hawthorne, I believe we may be on to something so big that the H-bomb will become a conventional weapon.”

The Secret Service Chief notices that the weaponry drawings submitted by Wormold bear a curious resemblance to vacuum cleaners. Green’s comic juxtaposition of the vacuum cleaner with the notoriously destructive hydrogen bomb typifies the sharp political satire of the novel.

“Captain Segura squeezed out a smile. It seemed to come from the wrong place like toothpaste when the tube splits.”

Another darkly humorous description from Greene. Captain Segura tries to save face after Beatrice squirts him with soda water at Milly’s birthday party. The quote paints the sinister qualities of Segura, who is the closest the novel comes to a villain.

“It was as though her birthday had been constructed again out of its broken pieces.”

Milly’s birthday party at the Tropicana nightclub veers close to disaster with the entrance of Captain Segura, but a new hopefulness appears with the entrance on the scene of Beatrice, who will turn out to be heroine of the novel and Wormold’s love interest. The quote hints at the happy, comic ending of the novel and the presence of a providential force at work in the characters’ lives.

“It astonished Wormold how quickly he could reply to any questions about his characters; they seemed to live on the threshold of consciousness—he had only to turn a light on and there they were, frozen in some characteristic action.”

As Beatrice asks Wormold questions about his “agents,” he finds that he can spontaneously invent some detail about their activities. The quote alludes to the blurring of reality and fiction in Wormold’s world.

“He wanted to protest that nothing made sense, that Raul didn’t exist, and Teresa didn’t exist, and then he thought of how she would pack up and go away and it would all be like a story without a purpose.”

After Raul’s death, Wormold feels himself way over his head in his job as a spy. He wants to break down and admit his deceptions, but he does not want Beatrice to leave. He sees his life as a story filled with meaning and purpose and is afraid that all meaning will be destroyed if he backs down now.

“I am no secret agent, I’m a fraud, none of these people are my agents, and I don’t know what’s happening. I’m lost. I’m scared.”

These represent thoughts of Wormold as he is about to visit Professor Sanchez, with Beatrice and Teresa waiting in the car. The pathos of the passage creates human sympathy with Wormold, who has gotten himself in deep trouble and is trapped in an absurd situation.

“Take good care of her, Mr. Wormold. You are in a trade where it is unsafe to love anybody or anything. They strike at that.”

Dr. Hasselbacher alerts Wormold that Milly is imperiled by Wormold’s spy work. This is something that Wormold, who deeply loves Milly, probably never considered when taking on the job. The quote depicts the forces behind the modern world as cruel and heartless. Wormold will take the doctor’s words to heart; his attending the luncheon is motivated by a desire to act as a shield to protect Milly. Putting Milly at the center of concerns, this quote effectively ends Part 4 and sets up the conclusion of the novel.

“Please would you mind telling me how they are going to murder me? You see, it interests me personally.”

When Hawthorne in Kingston tells Wormold matter-of-factly that people are planning to murder him, Wormold just as matter-of-factly replies that he would like to know how this will happen. A classic moment of the novel’s dry humor and a classically British understatement.

“The face stared up from the floor without expression. You couldn’t describe that impassivity in terms of peace or anguish. It was as though nothing at all had ever happened to it: an unborn face.”

Wormold views the dead body of Dr. Hasselbacher on the floor of the Wonder Bar, where he was murdered by Carter. The quote adds a serious, existential component to the comic goings-on of the novel. Despite everything he and Hasselbacher have been through, the doctor seems finally to have found peace and freedom from pain in death.

“It was time, Wormold thought, to pack up and go and leave the ruins of Havana.”

During his checkers game with Captain Segura, Wormold has this thought, which conveys the impression of Cuba as a deteriorating society on the verge of collapse or of revolution. Wormold feels that he and Milly belong back in their native country of England where they will have a better future. The quote effectively drives the novel’s denouement.

“He stood on the frontier of violence, a strange land he had never visited before; he had his passport in his hand. ‘Profession: Spy.’ ‘Characteristic Features: Friendlessness.’ ‘Purpose of Visit: Murder.’ No visa was required. His papers were in order.”

After Dr. Hasselbacher’s murder, Wormold feels impelled to avenge his friend’s death by killing the murderer, Carter. Once again, he feels himself thrust into actions that he is not used to. The passage compares violence to something mundane: paperwork for an application to emigrate to a strange country.

“If I love or if I hate, let me love or hate as an individual. I will not be 59200/5 in anyone’s global war.”

Part of the same internal monologue as the previous quote, Wormold takes pains to justify his killing of Carter. He sees the killing as justified because it is connected to a righteous emotion; it is not for the sake of some abstract goal, like winning the Cold War on behalf of an economic or political system.

“Suddenly he felt happy. He might have killed a man. He had proved conclusively to himself that he wasn’t one of the judges; he had no vocation for violence.”

At the last moment, Wormold shrinks back from killing Carter and walks away, the one shot he took having only grazed Carter’s pipe. Wormold shows that he is a decent man at heart and no killer, unlike many of the people he works for. He is not cut out to by a Secret Service spy, a fact that relieves him. This separates him from Carter, who shows that he does have a propensity to follow orders to kill.

“You see, he was a poor man. He belonged to the torturable class.”

Playing checkers with Wormold, Captain Segura expounds his view on social class and violence in a passage that demonstrates the banality of evil. In Segura’s view, some classes of people expect to be tortured and others would be indignant at the idea.