`Author:` Graham Greene `Availability:` ## Summary **Our Man in Havana** (1958) is Graham Greene’s darkly comic novel about **James Wormold**, a mild-mannered English vacuum-cleaner salesman living in pre-revolutionary Cuba. Approached by MI6 and desperate for money to support his daughter’s expensive tastes, Wormold agrees to become a spy—despite having no information to offer. He invents agents, fabricates intelligence reports, and even submits sketches of vacuum-cleaner parts as “military installations.” The British intelligence establishment, driven by [[bureaucratic]] self-importance and ideological projection, eagerly believes him. As his fictitious espionage network begins to take on a life of its own, real [[Politics|political]] [[violence]] erupts. Innocent people are killed because MI6 treats Wormold’s inventions as strategic fact. The novel moves from satire to tragedy, revealing how **intelligence systems can create the reality they claim merely to observe**. --- ## **Liberalism in the Novel** Greene portrays a British liberal establishment defined by: - **Faith in procedural rationality** even when it is plainly absurd. - **A self-image of moral restraint** masking complicity in authoritarian regimes. - **An unexamined paternalism**, assuming Britain’s right to intervene in other nations. Wormold, the reluctant liberal subject, lies not out of ideological zeal but out of **pragmatic survival**. His deceptions expose how liberal institutions can drift into fantasy when they rely on reports detached from lived experience. Greene’s satire suggests that **liberal bureaucracy, insulated from consequences, becomes ethically weightless**, more concerned with internal credibility than with truth. --- ## **Foreshadowing Neo-Conservatism** Although written before the rise of neo-conservatism, the novel uncannily anticipates its core tendencies: ### **1. Intelligence as Narrative Construction** Neo-conservatism’s willingness to _shape_ reality—most dramatically visible in the Iraq War’s manufactured intelligence—echoes Wormold’s fictional reports. Greene shows how bureaucratic desire for threat can produce the threat itself. ### **2. Ideological Projection on Foreign Soil** The security services in the novel assume that Cuban politics must mirror British anxieties. This anticipates the neo-conservative habit of **exporting Western ideological frameworks**, interpreting other societies through a lens of paranoia and moral crusade. ### **3. Action Based on Suspicion Rather than Evidence** Greene reveals the danger of a mindset in which **belief precedes data**—a hallmark of neo-conservative foreign policy. In the novel, imaginary conspiracies justify real violence, mirroring how speculative threats later justified interventions. ### **4. Moral Absolutism Without Moral Knowledge** Neo-conservatism presents itself as morally assertive. Greene exposes the hollowness of such claims: Wormold’s superiors speak in moral language but act in ways entirely detached from human consequences. --- ## **Bringing Liberalism and Neo-Conservatism Together** _Our Man in Havana_ can be read as a commentary on the **transition from high-liberal bureaucratic paternalism to the assertive, ideological foreign policy style that would become neo-conservatism**. Greene suggests that: - Liberal institutions, when unmoored from reality, create the fertile ground for more aggressive and fantastical ideologies. - Neo-conservative certainty is simply **liberal bureaucracy armed with conviction rather than caution**. - Both share a deep belief in the right of powerful states to intervene abroad, even when acting on fiction. In this sense, Greene’s farce foreshadows a later political tragedy: the power of Western intelligence and policy systems to **believe themselves into war**. ## Key Takeaways ## Quotes - ## Notes > [!info] > ![[Our Man in Havana.jpg.webp]] ## Highlights `Concepts:` `Knowledge Base:`