" The pink, grey, yellow pillars of what had once been the aristocratic quarter were eroded like rocks; an ancient coat of arts, 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 lighthouses into the clear February sky. 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 a scene of a disaster. Time gives poetry to a battlefield, and perhaps Milly resembled a little flower on an old rampart where an attack had been repulsed with heavy loss many years ago. "

― , Our Man in Havana