WikiLeaks: Coast Guard officer is key US man in Havana
MIAMI — The most effective official in the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana may well be a U.S. Coast Guard officer who's technically a counter-drug specialist but is sometimes approached by the Cuban government for some back-channel diplomacy.
Cuban officials have contacted the Coast Guard officer on sensitive issues such as migration negotiations and Washington offers of aid in the wake of hurricanes, according to U.S. diplomatic dispatches that WikiLeaks obtained and shared with McClatchy.
Contact between the drug interdiction specialist and Cuba's Interior Ministry is "generally viewed as one of the more fruitful and positive between the U.S. and Cuban governments," one of the dispatches noted.
That doesn't surprise retired Coast Guard Cmdr. Randy Beardsworth, who first proposed basing a drug interdiction specialist in Havana and negotiated the terms with Cuba in 1998, when he was the chief law enforcement officer for the Coast Guard's Miami-based 7th District.
"Both sides have discreetly and quietly used this relationship to communicate. ... It's in our national interest to understand their bureaucracy. In chaos, who do we talk to?" Beardsworth said.
Five decades of U.S.-Cuba tensions have led both countries to impose tight controls on each other's diplomats. The countries don't have diplomatic relations and maintain only "interests sections" in each other's capitals, formally as attachments to other countries' embassies.
In the United States, Cuban officials aren't allowed to travel more than 25 miles from their bases in Washington or at the United Nations in New York without prior approval. U.S. officials in Havana are banned from leaving the city, and can meet only with Cuban Foreign Ministry officials.
But the Coast Guard drug interdiction specialist often travels outside Havana on drug and migration-related trips accompanying officials from the Foreign Ministry, known as MINREX, and the Interior Ministry (MININT), which is in charge of counter-narcotics, migration and domestic and foreign intelligence operations.
"They certainly had unique access, insights into people that we could not even see," said James Cason, a career diplomat who was the top U.S. diplomat in Cuba from 2002 to 2005. Now retired, he recently was elected mayor of Coral Gables, Fla.
During a 2009 visit to a Cuban port for the repatriation of several would-be refugees whom the Coast Guard had intercepted at sea, a Foreign Ministry official gave the drug interdiction specialist "subtle insights" into Cuba's approach to bilateral migration talks, which the Obama administration was about to restart after a break of several years, according to one dispatch.
Our Man In Havana - News
It's in our national interest to understand their bureaucracy. In chaos, who do we talk to?" Beardsworth said. Five decades of US-Cuba tensions have led both countries to impose tight controls on each other's diplomats. The countries don't have
Cuban officials also use the Coast Guard's man in Havana to voice complaints about US policies and practices. One cable noted that a top Interior Ministry counterdrug official had complained that US cooperation on drug interdictions was "often
It took us past the cinema, looking as moribund as the description of it in Our Man in Havana, past the school where Castro studied and the little house in which he lived, past roofs of semi-tubular Spanish tiles and flat French ones,
In Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana, his fictional Cuban police chief Captain Segura distinguishes between two classes of people, the torturable and the untorturable. It is not a distinction that has made much impression on the Bahraini security
(I'd argue that the classic tell-all, Hollywood Babylon, sets the bar for what I want nestled in between my sunscreen and swim goggles.) Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana, and Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger would all make my
Our Man in Havana « Tales from the Reading Room
Graham Greene is one of those authors I’ve avoided for most of my life, thinking that he would be too issue-driven, too dark, too steeped in whisky-drinking disillusioned priests and complicated political problems in obscure parts of the world for my taste. When it comes to reading, there’s nothing I like more than having my assumptions shown up for the partial and unjust prejudices they are. Authors survive through time for a reason. Graham Greene is called a modern classic today because (even if there weren’t other pressing reasons) he is a remarkably good writer. Reading his novels, I have the feeling of finally being held in safe hands, of having a story unfold at exactly the right speed, with glimpsed vistas of great depth of meaning, with an economy of expression that says everything it needs to.
And then there’s Greene’s strange prescience; his novels frequently pre-empted some of the more unexpected political developments in the world (in this case the Cuban missile crisis), which means that his perspective hasn’t dated. In real life, his politics weren’t always admirable, but since he was true primarily to the rules of fiction, which demand full ambiguity rather than partisan propaganda, the novels remain wise and slyly insightful. After all, questions of faith and loyalty, of having the courage to do what one wants to do as opposed to what one is paid to do, of judging the character of those we serve and those we love, well, those questions never go away.
Our Man in Havana is the story of James Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman and a lost cause to the human race. He spends his days drinking in seedy local bars with the retired doctor, Dr Hasselbacher and worrying about what his teenage daughter, Milly, will spend his inadequate income on next. Wormold is living a half-life since his wife ran off, taking with her his pride in himself, his sense of capability, and leaving him in semi-exile in Havana:
‘It was a city to visit, not a city to live in, but it was the city where Wormold had first fallen in love and he was held to it as though to the scene of a disaster. Time gives poetry to a battlefield, and perhaps Milly resembled a little the flower on an old rampart where an attack had been repulsed with heavy loss many years ago.’
Milly is a wonderful character, ostensibly committed to the Catholic religion that Wormold promised her mother he’d bring her up in, but with a broad subversive streak that finds her solemnly reciting ‘Hail Mary, Quite Contrary’ as a child, and then setting fire to the school bully, Thomas Earl Parkham. Given that bullies, or at least abuses of power, figure heavily and negatively in Greene’s work, this immediately puts Milly on the side of the angels, regardless of the novenas she offers up in the hope that her father will buy her a horse. It’s not surprising that Wormold will go along with her, whatever she wants, when she seems to have absorbed all the vitality and promise that he has long since abandoned. When an Englishman, Hawthorne, turns up out of the blue and recruits Wormold to the secret service, it’s less the fact that Hawthorne gives him almost no chance to refuse, than the thought of actually liberating himself from the debts Milly has racked up that lead him to accept the role.
Our Man in Havana (Csa Word Classic): 
@ Brighton rock is most depressing book ever. Our man in Havana good. Others just dull catholic guilt trips. All u need to kno
im either going to watch "naqoyqatsi" or "our man in havana" tonight hmmm 
I shall now read Our Man In Havana.
After the marathon that was Freedom, I'm finally getting round to reading Our man in Havana, really enjoying it so far.Our Man In Havana - Bookshelf
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Our Man in Havana - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Our Man In Havana (1958) is a novel by British author Graham Greene. ... Garbo was the inspiration for Wormold, the protagonist of Our Man In Havana.[4] ...
Our Man in Havana (1959) - IMDb
Directed by Carol Reed. With Alec Guinness, Maureen O'Hara, Burl Ives, Ernie Kovacs. Jim Wormold is an expatriate Englishman living in pre-revolutionary Havana with ...
Our Man in Havana (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Our Man in Havana is a 1959 film directed by Carol Reed and starring Alec Guinness, Burl ... Our Man in Havana was positively received by film critics; it has a "fresh" ...
Our Man In Havana
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Our Man in Havana: Information from Answers.com
Our Man in Havana . Plot: Graham Greene wrote this witty comedy inspired by Cold War paranoia. Jim Wormald (Alec Guiness) is an Englishman selling ...
