Our Man in Havana

Our Man in Havana was written during a time of great fear that the individual was being crushed by vast impersonal forces in society. Wormold’s experiences as a spy drive home the primary importance of the individual. He finds himself being used as a pawn in global political games, and he finds himself in turn doing the same with his invented “agents.” Speaking out at a Secret Service meeting, Beatrice says, “There’s something greater than one’s country” and that international organizations like NATO don’t mean anything different from the nations they claim to transcend. Secret Service employees do not care for “peace and justice and freedom” (225) but only for their careers.

Even outside of the spy world, Wormold experiences instances where the individual is degraded and sacrificed as means to an end. The heads of his company, Phastcleaners, decide to change the name of their main product regardless of how this might affect sales in places like Havana. They send him to work in Cuba, a place that is foreign to his sensibilities and needs. Spies break into Dr. Hasselbacher’s house and destroy his possessions to intimidate him. Hasselbacher speaks of human beings being reduced to names on index cards (72).