Our Man in Havana

Greene's Havana is the tourist capital of Batista's Cuba, all cocktail bars, floodlit cabarets and the sea breaking over the Malecon, where a downtrodden vacuum-cleaner salesman is recruited as a British agent and invents his network out of thin air. The map anchors in Old Havana, runs out to the seafront and the Tropicana, and slips east to Santiago as the revolution gathers.

Jim Wormold

Wormold's vacuum shop, Lamparilla Street

Part One

The story opens behind the counter of a failing vacuum-cleaner business in Old Havana, where a mild English widower frets over money and his teenage daughter. Lamparilla is a real street in Habana Vieja, and the shop stands for the ordinary life the intelligence service persuades him to leave behind.

Part One

inferred Greene places Wormold's shop on Lamparilla Street in Old Havana but gives no street number, so this marks a representative point mid-street on the real Lamparilla.

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Jim Wormold

Sloppy Joe's Bar

Part One

In the washroom of this famous tourist bar a stranger from British intelligence corners the salesman and signs him up as an agent. Sloppy Joe's was a genuine Havana landmark that drew American visitors through the 1950s, closed for decades, and later reopened in the same building.

Part One

explicit Greene names the bar; it is a real establishment on the corner of Zulueta and Animas, and this marks the historic building.

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