There is a classic Graham Greene story, Our Man in Havana, set in Cuba in the late 1950's, that seems to foreshadow the Cuban missile crisis. Set in the Batista era, well before the missile crisis (of 1962), the novel is inadvertently prescient as Jim Wormold, a hapless British vacuum cleaner salesman and accidental spy, uses vacuum cleaner parts to support completely fake intelligence reports suggesting secret rocket installations in Cuba.
The book, published in 1958, is hilarious and was an instant success. It was quickly adapted into a movie, staring the cream of British acting. But perhaps the most interesting aspect is that it depicts a corrupt Havana prior to the revolution.
As YouTube has the movie in full I've appended it here so you can see it in part or in full:
|
Our Man in Havana (1959) A 1959 British spy comedy/drama film shot in CinemaScope, directed and produced by Carol Reed, and starring Alec Guinness, Burl Ives, Maureen O'Hara, Ralph Richardson, Noël Coward and Ernie Kovacs. The film is adapted from the 1958 novel Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene. In pre-revolutionary Cuba, James Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman, is recruited by Hawthorne of the British Secret Intelligence Service to be their Havana operative. Instead of recruiting his own agents, Wormold invents agents from men he knows only by sight and sketches "plans" for a rocket-launching pad based on vacuum cleaner parts to increase his value to the service and to procure more money for himself and his expensive daughter Milly. |
