Who is Online

We have 43 guests and no members online

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

No comments

Travel

Southern Africa

 

 

In April 2023 we took a package tour to South Africa with our friends Craig and Sonia. We flew via Singapore to Cape Town.

 



Cape Town is the country's legislative capital and location of the South African Parliament.
It's long been renowned for Table Mountain, that dominates the city.

Read more: Southern Africa

Fiction, Recollections & News

DUNE

 

Last week I went to see ‘DUNE’, the movie.

It’s the second big-screen attempt to make a movie of the book, if you don’t count the first ‘Star Wars’, that borrows shamelessly from Frank Herbert’s Si-Fi classic.

Read more: DUNE

Opinions and Philosophy

Death

 

 

Death is one of the great themes of existence that interests almost everyone but about which many people avoid discussion.  It is also discussed in my essay to my children: The Meaning of Life on this website; written more than ten years ago; where I touch on personal issues not included below; such as risk taking and the option of suicide.

Read more: Death

Terms of Use

Terms of Use                                                                    Copyright