OUR MAN IN HAVANA
"The long city lay spread along the open Atlantic; waves broke over the Avenida de Maceo and misted the windscreens of cars. The pink, grey, yellow pillars of what had once been the aristocratic quarter were eroded like rocks; an ancient coat of arms, smudged and featureless, was set over the doorway of a shabby hotel, and the shutters of a night-club were varnished in bright crude colours to protect them from the wet and salt of the sea. In the west the steel skyscrapers of the new town rose higher than the lighthouses into the clear February sky. It was a city to visit, not a city to live in..."
From Graham Greene's 1958 novel, Our Man in Havana, which foreshadowed the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. |
