In the American imagination, Columbus’s so-called discovery of America in 1492 represents a watershed second only to the birth of Christ. In the eyes of Columbus and his royal sponsors, the mission to the Orient was merely a logical extension of the reconquista, the centuries-old (and vastly expensive) effort to drive the Moors (and Jews) from Spain. Only in hindsight can the expulsion of the Moors in 1492 be taken for granted. At the time Columbus was charting his journey west, the success of that battle could hardly be assumed, and Spain’s newly consolidated kingdom of Aragon and Castile wanted nothing so much as funds sufficient to finish the job. Promise of access to lucrative Oriental markets induced Castile’s queen Isabella to sponsor an audacious navigator from Genoa.11
On the Iberian Peninsula, the rise of Aragon and Castile was achieved by the creation of what were in effect colonies established in the wake of the retreating Moors. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella granted rights to their most trusted and valued lieutenants to rule over these new colonies in their names. But there were only so many such grants to be won at home, and after 1492 the Orbe Novo beckoned to a cohort of second-tier conquistadors flush from the heat of battle, no less ambitious for fame and fortune, and no less committed to the project of making the world safe for Christianity than the royal favorites themselves. Columbus was more sailor than warrior, but warriors accompanied him on his several voyages to the Americas, where violence became the Spaniards’ stock-in-trade.12
Columbus’s brief sojourn at Guantánamo signaled the beginning of a cataclysmic social and economic revolution that permanently transformed not only Cuba and Hispaniola but North and South America, Europe, and Africa besides. The islands and continents that Columbus and his successors “discovered” at the end of the fifteenth century were worthless without a labor force. Spain was merely the first in a series of aspiring European and North American empires that defended the enslavement and annihilation of millions of indigenous inhabitants and imported Africans on the basis of putative cultural and racial differences. The contradiction between the universalism latent in Western theology and philosophy and the West’s historic treatment of Indians, slaves, and countless “others” inspired a long argument about just who was fit to be counted as a “human being,” an argument that continues to this day (women? indigenous Americans? African slaves? stateless enemy combatants?). But all of this was unimaginable upon that first encounter at Guantánamo Bay.13
No doubt Columbus’s impatience at Guantánamo Bay suited the Taíno hunters just fine. With the admiral on his way to China, they were free to complete the task that had brought them to the bay. Compared with their cousins on Hispaniola, they had gotten off easily that day. At Isabella, Columbus’s headquarters across the Windward Passage, the psychological and physical demands of conquest had begun to take a toll on the Europeans, with one of the first formal incidents of Spanish-on-Taíno violence recorded earlier that same month.14 A local Indian had allegedly stolen a Spaniard’s clothes; as punishment, one of Columbus’s lieutenants cut off the ear of a Taíno vassal, taking into custody the responsible cacique and several members of his family. Columbus wanted to teach the Indians a lesson by cutting off all his prisoners’ arms, but a Taíno ally dissuaded him. Nevertheless, a precedent had been set, and over the course of the next twenty years, the Spanish so brutalized Hispaniola that within a single generation there remained scarcely any Taíno left.
Cuba, meanwhile, enjoyed what can only be called a grace period, its inhabitants going about their lives as if they could avoid their neighbors’fate simply by ignoring it.15 When Spain finally turned its attention to Cuba in 1511, it did so with brutal efficiency. To pacify Cuba, the Crown selected Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, author of spectacular atrocities in the Spanish conquest of Hispaniola, including the burning alive of eighty-four Taíno caciques assembled at the village of Xara-gua in autumn 1503.16 Velázquez arrived in Cuba with a vengeance, indeed, in hot pursuit of a cacique named Hatuey, who had fled across the Windward Passage rather than submit to Spanish authority—a capital offense.17
By 1511 the Crown had introduced in Hispaniola a scheme of land and labor distribution called encomienda, a feudal system for the New World. By the terms of encomienda, Spanish colonists received land along with right to the labor of the Indians who dwelt upon it. Technically, the Indians owned the lots on which they lived, and if less than independent, they were not formally slaves. Until they ran away, that is, thus depriving the Spanish encomendero the means of making a living (and the Crown itself its reason for being in the New World). A Taíno in flight from encomienda was for all intents and purposes a runaway slave, and no amount of hand-wringing by Bartolomé de las Casas and a whole order of Dominican monks could alter his or her fate.18
Hatuey landed in Cuba at Punta de Maisí, just across the Windward Passage from today’s northwest Haiti. Punta de Maisí lacks a harbor, so Velázquez headed for Guantánamo Bay, hoping to corner Hatuey in the eastern end of the island and thereby stop the rebellion from spreading. For three months, Velázquez combed the mountains east of Guantánamo in search of a leader who knew his pursuer too well, and who aimed to avoid a face-to-face showdown at all cost. Cuban history is full of guerillas; Hatuey simply wanted to be left alone. But with eastern Cuba rallying around the Taíno chief, Velázquez treated the region to a barn burning, razing villages, terrorizing women and children, and torturing local residents for information.19
Before burning Hatuey at the stake, Velázquez offered him the opportunity of redemption. When a Catholic father asked Hatuey if he wanted to be baptized into the Christian faith, Hatuey wondered why he should want to become a Christian when Christians were the source of his undoing. Because Christians go to heaven and remain in the company of God, came the reply. Are you going to heaven? Hatuey asked. Of course, replied the father, like all who are holy. Then no thanks, said Hatuey, who had had quite enough of Christian company already. A match was struck, and the Taíno resistance went up in smoke.20
Guantánamo’s centrality in these early cultural encounters will be surprising only to readers who have forgotten their natural history. The genesis of this “Great Port” (Puerto Grande), as Columbus named it, dates back to the geological upheaval that splintered the supercontinent Pangaea some 180 million years ago, when, driven by upwelling magma along a rift that would become the mid-Atlantic ridge, “North America” pulled away from “Africa” and “South America.” At first the rupture left only a teardrop, an intimation of the Gulf of Mexico. But the drop became an ocean whose relentless expansion sundered Pangaea into bits.
Tectonic activity of this magnitude produces considerable flotsam. Off the western coast of the Americas sat chunks of the continental margin, as if patiently awaiting conveyance. Conveyance arrived, for some at least, in the form of the Caribbean plate. Originating in the Pacific Ocean, the plate moved north and east like a saucer. Along its starboard rim, like running lights, perched a volcanic island arc. This arc would become the islands of the Lesser Antilles. Nearby, on the leading edge of the saucer, rode pieces of future Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico, not yet in recognizable form. Hispaniola and Puerto Rico clung to Cuba’s southern coast as the saucer shot the gap between the Americas, scraping off Jamaica from the Yucatán along the way. For several thousand miles, the saucer sped unimpeded toward the northeast. It slammed to a halt at the Bahama Banks, southern boundary of North America, where a combination of oceanic and upper mantle crust, continental margin, and island arc stacked up to produce the foundation of today’s Cuba, one of the most complex geological conglomerations on earth.21
Toward the end of this monumental migration, Cuba sat along the southern rim of the North American plate, originally little more than a chain of islands. Meanwhile, southeast Cuba, future home to Guantánamo, constituted a world of its own. In the immediate aftermath of the collision, it straddled the boundary of the North American and Caribbean plates, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico still firmly attached. But the forces prope
lling the saucer were unassuaged. With its passage northward blocked by the Bahamas, the saucer veered sharply east in a wrenching motion that nearly carried southeast Cuba out to sea. Southeast Cuba held as Hispaniola and Puerto Rico tore away, exposing a gap along the Cuban coastline that would become the setting of Guantánamo Bay.
Guantánamo Bay is located at W 75°9’ longitude and N 19°54’ latitude, about three quarters of the way along Cuba’s southeast coast, running west to east. Southeast Cuba is extraordinarily rugged. Comprising roughly one fifth of Cuba’s territory, it boasts more mountains than the rest of Cuba combined. The Guantánamo Basin is the notable exception in the region. Its 250-odd square miles lie at or close to sea level. Backed by the sea and surrounded by mountains, the basin resembles a vast amphitheater, with the bay itself at center stage.
Guantánamo Bay is very young geologically. It assumed its present shape as recently as 6000 BCE. The principal agent in Guantánamo’s creation was water. Since first arriving at the Bahama Banks forty million years ago, Cuba has been repeatedly inundated by and drained of seawater, a result of fluctuating global temperatures and the rise and fall of the Cuban landmass. Flooding seas littered coastal Cuba with marine terraces, inland lakes, and seabeds. Ebbing seas produced erosion, the source of river valleys, basins, and bays. Guantánamo is the sum of these geological processes, of the wearing away of old terraces and seabeds by erosion and the subsequent drowning of the hollows and cavities the erosion left behind.
Officially Guantánamo Bay extends ten miles long by six miles wide and measures between thirty and sixty feet deep. But practically speaking, it consists of two discrete bodies of water, an inner and outer harbor, connected by a narrow strait. The inner harbor is large and shallow. It has a smooth, billowing shoreline and resembles a good-size lake. The outer harbor is ragged and irregular. Smooth to the west, it is rough to the east, and its north is strewn with cays. The contrast between the two harbors derives from their different physical composition. The inner harbor rests atop an old tidal flat that yielded easily and evenly to erosion. The outer harbor is lined by fossilized coral terraces, harder and more defiant of erosion. Where there is fossilized coral at Guantánamo, there will be found the cays, coves, and promontories that comprise the outer harbor (home of the U.S. base); where coral is absent, the shoreline will be smooth and uniform, as along the lower western shore of the outer harbor and throughout the whole of the inner bay.22
Individually distinctive, the two harbors combine to create a coastal environment of wondrous diversity. From the sea, Guantánamo stands out among the world’s great bays for its accessibility. Some bays are so camouflaged by the surrounding countryside that it is possible to sail right past them without noticing. The harbor entrance at Santiago de Cuba, for instance, is so tortuous and cluttered that it has confounded sailors for centuries. By contrast, Guantánamo’s entrance is deep, uncluttered, and virtually impossible to miss. Now nearly two miles wide, it sits within a wide gap in the mountain rampart of southeast Cuba detectable far out to sea.
The narrower a harbor entrance, the more vulnerable approaching vessels to the whims of those who call the harbor home. The mouths of many Cuban harbors are not only narrow but sheer, affording hosts the advantage of significantly higher ground. Again, Santiago de Cuba comes to mind, where Morro Castle commands the harbor from high atop an imposing bluff; again, Guantánamo presents a striking contrast. Windward Point, the southeast corner of the bay, rises four hundred feet above sea level, but not until a half mile from the coast. Meanwhile, Leeward Point remains flat for several miles, barely reaching thirty feet above sea level. Guantánamo’s broad mouth would make it a challenge to defend in the years before modern weaponry. Conversely, ships that dared not test the welcome at Havana or Santiago would find Guantánamo Bay an open and inviting place.
On approach, Guantánamo Bay appears not only welcoming but vast. Beyond the entrance to the bay, the Guantánamo Basin seems to stretch out indefinitely, making the bay feel much larger than its sixty square miles. Once inside the bay, visitors confront a wealth of possible destinations, further adding to the sense of scale. Immediately inside Leeward Point, moving clockwise around the bay, is a channel two hundred feet wide and a mile long that is both the estuary of the Guantánamo River and the passage to secluded Mahomilla Bay. The Guantánamo River is brackish well before it meets the bay, but it is navigable far upstream, thus connecting the outer harbor to the Cuban hinterland and providing its only access to freshwater.
Just past the estuary lies Hicacal Beach, three miles of coarse sand carved from the delta of the Guantánamo River. Most of Guantánamo Bay is sheltered from the prevailing southeast wind by the hills of Windward Point. Hicacal Beach is decidedly not. It meets the prevailing southeast wind, brisk by early afternoon most days, squarely on the nose, taming its often boisterous waves and deflecting them harmlessly up the channel. The most exposed territory in Guantánamo Bay, Hicacal is also the most dynamic. Reshaped by tides and passing storms, its fertile and abundant seabeds suggest the benefits of its buffeting by wind and sea.
From its foot inside Leeward Point, Hicacal Beach arches sharply north and east, directing incoming traffic toward the opposite shore. The eastern shore of the outer harbor is a peninsula roughly six miles long and tapering from five to three miles wide as it frames the southeast corner of the bay. Down the spine of the peninsula is a range of hills, nearly five hundred feet tall, that dominate the outer harbor and the nearby Cuban coastline. At the base of the hills, along the outer shore of the peninsula, lies a broad, flat terrace, current site of the U.S. prison camp. Along the inner shore of the peninsula, old coral terraces protrude like fingers into the bay. Roughly thirty feet high, these terraces range from several hundred yards to half a mile long, creating a succession of natural coves and jetties. The terraces proliferate across the top of the outer harbor, too, where some take the form of islands. Here the terraces tend to be long and the coves deep; a few reach inland for nearly a mile. The net effect of this diverse seascape is a prized refuge and an explorer’s paradise: behind every promontory a little cove, within every cove a beguiling shoreline.
Past the old coral terraces at the top of the outer harbor lies the opening to the inner harbor, a broad, uncluttered expanse notable less for its topographical interest than for its geographical orientation. If the outer harbor belongs inexorably to the sea, the inner harbor is indisputably Cuba’s own. It sits at the foot of the Guantánamo Basin, an ancient drainage system laced with rivers and streams and tied to the rest of Cuba by a ribbon of fertile plain. In contrast to the inhospitable terrain that surrounds the outer harbor, the land framing the inner harbor is irrigated, arable, and hence suited to human habitation. Rich salt deposits line the shoreline; the harbor itself fairly boils with fish. But it is as a link to the outside world that the inner harbor is most significant. Communication is cumbersome in this rugged corner of southeast Cuba, making access to the sea a condition of its economic and cultural vitality.
In sum, the two harbors are complementary, their differences felicitous, at least so long as traffic between them remained open and unfettered. Together, they sustain distinct yet interdependent worlds. Divided, their value depreciates, as, landlocked the one and exposed the other, each becomes merely the sum of its individual parts. Since 1898, when the United States first occupied the outer harbor in the Cuban Spanish-American War, the U.S. naval base has effectively cut the bay in two.23
Magnificent in its own right, Guantánamo Bay occupies a strategic geographical position in Cuba, the Caribbean Basin, and the Western Hemisphere. Paradoxically, Guantánamo’s significance within Cuba derives from its isolation from the center of Cuban social and political life. Six hundred miles distant from the capital, Havana, and surrounded by mountains, Guantánamo has functioned historically as Cuba’s safety valve—a land of exile and refuge accommodating marginalized people from within Cuba and across the Caribbean basin.
Guant
ánamo’s role in Cuba is a function of the island’s natural history. Tectonic boundaries tend to be mountainous. Plate collisions cause tectonic folding, and volcanoes are common along plate seams. Scientists call the process of mountain formation orogeny, and southeast Cuba is a case in point. The region consists essentially of two large mountain chains, the fabled Sierra Maestra and the no less formidable Nipe-Sagua-Baracoa Massif. The Sierra Maestra rises just west of Guantánamo Bay and runs 180 miles down the coastline to Cabo Cruz, southeast Cuba’s westernmost tip. Pico Turquino (6,476 feet), Cuba’s tallest peak, commands the middle of the range. Slightly lower than its rivals in Jamaica and Hispaniola, Pico Turquino is comparable in height to New Hampshire’s Mount Washington (6,288 feet) and North Carolina’s Mount Mitchell (6,684 feet), the highest elevations in the eastern United States. For much of its span the Sierra Maestra climbs straight out of the sea, which lends it extraordinary grandeur. Its status is enhanced by the celebrated people who have sought the sanctuary of its caves and copses over the centuries, starting, it is said, with Hatuey, and continuing through the runaway slaves, insurgents, revolutionaries, and counterrevolutionaries of more recent days.
To the east of Guantánamo Bay rise the foothills of the Nipe-Sagua-Baracoa Massif. The great massif sprawls in a sideways V shape one hundred or so miles from Guantánamo Bay to Punta de Maisí, then back to the high plains over Bahía de Nipe. Less magnificent than the Sierra Maestra, its effect on Guantánamo is more constant. Green, luxuriant, expansive, the Nipe-Sagua-Baracoa Massif is a jealous sentinel, at once protecting the bay from wind and weather while simultaneously cheating it of meaningful rainfall. Few roads connect the great massif to the rest of Cuba. Relatively few people live there. Among these few are said to be the final remnants of Cuba’s Taíno people.24
Guantánamo Page 2