In adolescence, Graham Greene found relief from ‘boredom’ by playing Russian roulette. In the 1950s, he sought distraction from his manic depression through multiple foreign trips to turbulent spots around the world. These trips provided the background to what critics have termed Greeneland: ‘The seedy, politically unstable, and dangerous world said to be the typical setting in the novels of Graham Greene.’
Greene discovered Havana in 1954, enthralled by its cocktail of capitalist vice, casinos, burlesque cabarets, drug peddling and prostitution. He made multiple visits, including a key one in November 1957, when he began writing Our Man in Havana. This trip had a possible secondary focus, keeping his eyes and ears open to Fidel Castro’s year-old insurrection against Fulgencia Batista’s military regime on behalf of his wartime employer, MI6.
His visit to Cuba would actually make a modest contribution to Batista’s downfall on 1 January 1959. Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government embargoed British arms sales to Batista just two weeks before the Cuban Revolution, a full nine months after Washington had halted its military exports to the increasingly repressive dictator. The British arms embargo only came about thanks to Greene.
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