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10 wHy no one in Havana sPeaks of graHam greene Among the unique features of Cuban culture over the centuries is the readiness with which people of the island have taken to their hearts and honored in historical memory the various writers, painters, and composers of other nationalities who have come there and embraced the life of the nation, frequently memorializing their associations in works of great beauty and power in their own right. Even a small but representative list suggests the diversity of such recognitions: the great nineteenth-century explorer and natural philosopher Alexander von Humboldt; the Swedish feminist and social reformer Frederike Bremer; North American literary travelers such as William Cullen Bryant, Richard Henry Dana, Julia Ward Howe, and John Muir; the painter Winslow Homer; the journalist, short-story writer, and novelist Stephen Crane; the photographer Walker Evans, the composer George Gershwin; the African American poet and translator Langston Hughes; and, not least, two major literary figures of international twentieth-century modernism, Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene. For readers of the modernist canon in English, it is the latter two who come immediately to mind as making well-known fictional representations of mid-twentieth-century Cuba. Most prominent, to be sure, as discussed in the foregoing chapter, is the celebrated American adventurercelebrity Hemingway, who made his home there for two decades and wrote a number of works during the period depicting life on the island, most notably his spare 1953 fable of struggle against nature, The Old Man and the Sea. Fifty years later, he remains revered by the nation, with memorials rife in the Havana environs particularly where he lived and wrote. Of comparable popular notoriety would be his expatriate British counterpart Graham Greene, author of Our Man in Havana—a late 1950s spoof of Cold War espionage fiction that probably remains the best known popular political novel of the century in English to deal with Cuba and Cubans Why No One Speaks of Graham Greene 127 just on the edge of the defining moment of revolutionary liberation. By contrast, one seeks vainly in Havana or in Cuba at large for a single form of public remembrance. Both Hemingway and Greene may be said to have literarily capitalized on the island, its people, and its long, rich, and complex history. Socializing mainly with the wealthy and the well placed, though affecting public warmth for everyday Cubans, Hemingway in many ways promoted an image of local identity as a kind of honorary citizen. In his art, he tended to use Cuba itself as a mythic backdrop for adventure featuring avatars of the Hemingway hero ranging from Harry Morgan in To Have and Have Not to Thomas Hudson in the posthumous Islands in the Stream. As is well known, he seems to have been awarded the Nobel Prize—with the moment marked in a contemporary interview still famous on the island where he returned credit to the Cuban people—largely on the basis of his late depiction of the simple, courageous Cuban fisherman Santiago and his battle for the great marlin in The Old Man and the Sea. All three Cuban books, it might be noted, are remembered as sources for well-known Hollywood movies, featuring such major actors as Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, and George C. Scott, and for various reasons have had continuing appeal to Cubans then and now. To Have and Have Not replaces 1930s Cuba in favor of World War II–era Martinique as a Caribbean Casablanca. The Machado police are replaced by the Vichy French, with Cubans in wartime thus remaining unsullied. The Old Man and the Sea, while of the Batista era, is markedly devoid of political statement, with the fisherman Santiago and his battle with the great fish evoking a purity of elemental struggle and manhood. Islands in the Stream, following the posthumously assembled novel, casts Cuba in the light of World War II heroics; Havana is replete with a gaudy nostalgia— of a piece with the glamour and adventure of Hemingway’s Cuba years, themselves a kind of epic movie scenario of life imitating art. Accordingly, for such depictions of the island and its inhabitants in literature and film, Hemingway remains Cuba’s favorite twentieth-century international literary citizen, a kind of prerevolutionary gringo icon of a glamorous, if mythologized, past. Though traveling to the island somewhere between eight to ten times, both pre- and postrevolution, Greene, in contrast, experienced Cuba mainly in the form of pleasure trips and journalistic visits...

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