Graham Greene's Getting to Know the General

I read Graham Green’s Getting to the Know the General: The Story of an Involvement. It is a highly laudatory and quite quirky view of Panama under Omar Torrijos, who invited Greene (then in his 70s) to visit several times and brought him along to the Panama Canal Treaty signing ceremony in DC. One thing I appreciate about reading Greene’s various treatments of Latin America is that a non-Western Hemisphere viewpoint is not so common.* I would put it on my sidebar, but apparently Amazon doesn’t even have an official image for it.

He spends most of his time with a trusted Torrijos aide named Chuchu, and essentially they careen across the country, with short forays into Belize (Greene is not even entirely sure why Torrijos sent him there), Nicaragua and Cuba, meeting a wide variety of people. What he finds is a moderate leftist populism, though he doesn’t like calling it that.

Some of the populism seems almost mean spirited, as Torrijos listens to the demands of yucca farmers for better wages. He had already decided to raise their wages, “All the same, he added, he would keep the peasants guessing for a while—for his amusement and theirs” (p. 75). That is not the “social democracy” Greene keeps claiming Torrijos practices, which he also calls “direct democracy.”

“To me it seemed that the General was practicing a direct form of democracy, though the General’s enemies would have called him a populist, a word which is now commonly misemployed and used as a sneer” (p. 106). He bases this on the fact that his Oxford Dictionary’s definitions don’t jibe with what in fact everyone else agrees is populism. Nonetheless, someone who at one point labeled himself the “Maximum Leader” and was never elected can hardly be called democratic. It is, however, certainly preferable to Manuel Noriega.

If there is one thing we learn about Graham Greene, it’s that he loves his cocktails. He writes repeatedly about sucking down rum punches, and complains when he finds himself at lunches where only water is served. After any teetotaling lunch he then must go find some rum punch. On one of his later trips, he is distressed to find that the bar where he got the best rum punches had become a bank. No alcohol at lunch was simply uncivilized.


*Along these lines, not long ago I started reading Spanish author Manuel Vázquez Montalban’s The Buenos Aires Quintet, a novel centered on the effects of Argentina’s Dirty War, but found it too wandering and uninteresting to finish.