Wormold's wife had left him and now, he lives with his beautiful 17-year-old daughter, Milly, who is devoutly Catholic, but also materialistic and manipulative. James Wormold, a vacuum cleaner retailer, is approached by Hawthorne, who tries to recruit him for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). The novel, a black comedy, is set in Havana during the Fulgencio Batista regime. The film was never made, and Greene soon realised that Havana, which he had visited several times in the early 1950s, would be a much better setting, with the absurdities of the Cold War being more appropriate for a comedy.
Remembering the German agents in Portugal, Greene wrote the first version of the story in 1946, as an outline for a film script, with the story set in Estonia in 1938. Garbo was the main inspiration for Wormold, the protagonist of Our Man in Havana. In fact, he invented armed forces movements and operations from maps, guides and standard military references. One of the agents was " Garbo", a Spanish double agent in Lisbon, who gave his German handlers disinformation, by pretending to control a ring of agents all over England. In London, Greene had been appointed to the subsection dealing with counter-espionage in the Iberian Peninsula, where he had learnt about German agents in Portugal sending the Germans fictitious reports, which garnered them expenses and bonuses to add to their basic salary. In 2007, it was adapted into a play by Clive Francis, which has toured the UK several times and been performed in various parts of the world. In 1963, it was adapted into an opera by Malcolm Williamson to a libretto by Sidney Gilliat, who had worked on the film.
The novel was adapted into a film of the same name in 1959, directed by Carol Reed and starring Alec Guinness. The book predates the Cuban Missile Crisis, but certain aspects of the plot, notably the role of missile installations, appear to anticipate the events of 1962. Greene uses the novel to mock intelligence services, especially the British MI6, and their willingness to believe reports from their local informants. Our Man in Havana (1958) is a novel set in Cuba by the British author Graham Greene.
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