Guantánamo

  By the 1920s, opposition to the Platt Amendment was becoming increasingly widespread among Cubans and Americans alike. For their part, U.S. officials were becoming fed up with Cuban manipulation of an instrument designed to maintain U.S. hegemony, and which threatened to embroil the United States permanently in Cuba’s dysfunctional politics. It was Cuba’s money the United States wanted, not its reins of government. Meanwhile, Cuban nationalists denounced U.S. meddling in Cuban affairs to greater effect, forcing the ruling parties to acknowledge Platt’s cost to their political legitimacy. Finally, Platt had lost its only indigenous support among the Cuban bourgeoisie, who had come to regard it as the principal impediment to agricultural diversification and the promotion of domestic manufacturing. Foreign-owned and exploitative, sugar became—like Platt itself—a focus of nationalist opposition to the United States.

  Just a few years after Herbert Corey’s sojourn at Guantánamo, writer K. C. McIntosh described Caimanera to readers of the popular magazine American Mercury. “A rickety wooden building like a squat barn built on piles over the whispering, greenish water; a long, battered mahogany bar; a hundred white and gold uniforms at white-topped tables that are littered with remnants of salad and fried chicken, and are sloppy with beer-froth and the chill sweat of highball glasses. A hundred grinning black faces at the wide glassless windows on the street side.”42 The walls of the bars of Caimanera, like the fence marking the boundary of the U.S. naval base, separated Americans and Cubans along lines of nationality, class, race, and gender. But the walls had windows, and the windows were “open,” and through those openings U.S. sailors and their Cuban hosts came to know one another in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Like the fence itself, those windows facilitated all manner of border crossings that blurred, while not ultimately obliterating, the differences that distinguished Americans from their Cuban hosts.

  Like Corey’s Guantánamo, McIntosh’s is distinguished first and foremost by race. Besides the “hundred grinning black faces” at the windows of Caimanera, the Guantánamo base was populated by “Chinese coolies” working at the direction of “a brown Cuban foreman.”43 A few of the local bars were owned by whites, but all were staffed by Cubans—by Manuel, Pablo, Pepe, Jim, and Chico. Different grades of officers drank in different places: the higher the grade, the closer to the base. Time was of the essence. At Caimanera, Peanut Mary, a Jamaican, sold peanuts and evidently a little more to the Americans, her gender providing a competitive advantage over her rival, a “thin brown urchin.”44

  U.S. sailors worked as well as drank at Guantánamo Bay. Long before the base became home to the Navy’s Fleet Training Group in 1943, it was used to put the fleet through its paces. Visits to local watering holes followed exhausting days of drilling and target practice at sea. But the same cannot be said for women at the base. When the fleet is out, McIntosh reports, the base falls quiet, and if the heat allows, the navy wives may be found “riding lazy ponies over the hill to call on the ladies of the Marines Corps.” On the base itself, “there is just enough tennis to keep in condition, just enough swimming to keep moderately cool, just enough bridge of an evening to exhaust the conversation of your neighbors, and an occasional ride up the bay for a cocktail on Pablo’s back gallery or a cold bottle of beer in Jimmy Beauzay’s or O’Brien’s.”45

  The arrival of the fleet brings “a broad smile [to] every face in the station,” though the ladies grow “impatient” and “protest violently” when naval business disturbs their plans of “dinners and dances.” When the women complain to the officers—“You haven’t been to see me yet! You’ve forgotten me entirely”—the men mutter fake apologies. “Doesn’t the woman know he’s busy and tired,” McIntosh demands. “Drill today, drill tomorrow. God send Saturday without a casualty.”46

  From the early years, the naval base did not take kindly to criticism. When, a few years after McIntosh’s visit, the wife of naval officer at Guantánamo published an anonymous exposé about sex and drinking on the base, the piece was officially banned. Looking back on the incident twenty-three years later, the base commander, author of the one “official” history of the base, concluded that the article presented “a distorted picture of life at Guantánamo with the Fleet present.” 47 The banning of the article and its dismissal by a respected chronicler suggest, to the contrary, that the author hit her mark.

  “I am strong for naval disarmament,” begins “a Navy Wife,” author of “Guantánamo Blues: A Taste of Tropical Fruits of Prohibition,” published in Liberty Magazine in April 1930. “If they took the arms off our really charming American naval officers, the admirals couldn’t pet, the captains and commanders couldn’t drink, the lieutenants couldn’t ever become cave men, and the pink-cheeked ensigns couldn’t—well, they’d have to keep their hands to themselves for the very good reason they wouldn’t have any hands!” The context of this critique was not only a male-to-female ratio on the base reminiscent of early colonial America (between twenty and forty to one, depending on the whereabouts of the fleet), but also a naval administration striving to stave off a cultural revolution sweeping the United States that threatened conventional gender and racial norms. In the “New Navy” that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, the 1920s-era New Woman met her match. A certain degree of frivolity, even flamboyance, was welcome among the women at Guantánamo Bay, but not so behavior that questioned the established social order.48 At Guantánamo Bay, even the homeliest maiden was fair game, so long as “she was round in the right places. There is no true feminine vanity on a foreign naval station,” the Navy Wife reports.49 And no true feminism.

  Like many in or married to the navy, the author had heard exotic accounts of life at Guantánamo Bay. “Cuba sounded romantic,” she recalls; “it was the fleet’s winter base. There would be dancing, swimming, sailing, horse-back riding, and all the other things I love.” And then there was the allure of “the tropics,” with the “palm trees, white sand, sparkling sunshine, masses of flowers with heavy perfume, funny brown natives, and jungles.” She’d heard the stories: “Perhaps I’d even have a beau! … a romantic young bachelor” with “a past,” a trifle “cynical and grim; soured on life so that he needed sweetening.” Only later did she realize that “a wise government never sends a bachelor to such a post as Guantánamo, which is on the fringes of things”; only later did she learn of the “‘foreign duty suicides’ … tucked away in the secret archives of the Navy Department in Washington.”50

  The writer arrived at the base via train from Havana to nearby Caimanera. By the late 1920s, Caimanera boasted a daytime population of roughly 2,500. It was “a tiny ramshackle town with mostly dirt streets and unpainted tumble-down board hovels in its so-called residential section.” Its nearby commercial quarter comprised “saloons, gambling houses, a red light district, and a few shops that carry both vegetables and native curios.” Caimanera’s economy was driven by the base. Navy stewards procured supplies there. Officers were permitted to visit the town in the afternoons and on weekends. The navy spawned “a large liquor trade,” the author reports, in what seems to have been an understatement. (One authority estimated the annual value of the liquor trade at $500,000 “preprohibition wholesale.”)51

  The red-light district was staffed by “twenty regular prostitutes … officially listed by local authorities.” But, like the alcohol, prostitutes were stocked in anticipation of the fleet. With Santiago and other local towns offering up their sisters and daughters, the number of prostitutes in Caimanera rose into the sixties, with more available at other towns around the bay. Here (and only here), the author pulled her punches. “In justice to our men,” she wrote, apparently in reference to the base’s resident officer corps, “I must say that they are clean enough and fastidious enough to leave the native women pretty much alone. I scarcely need add that nature’s own penalty for licentiousness is more severe in the tropics than in the temperate zones.” It was the job of four “native policemen” and a “boatswain’
s mate on permanent duty” to keep the lid on Caimanera. Though technically subject to the laws of Cuba, legal transgressions involving American sailors were dealt with back at the base.52

  In 1930, living quarters at the naval base were a far cry from the cushy suburbs they have become today. The author describes arriving at “a double row of small frame bungalows, all exactly alike.” Her bungalow was distinguished from the others by “a small white cross” with her husband’s name on it. (“It looked just as if he had been buried there.”) Did she like it? her husband wanted to know. “Our own men built it.” Taking in the simple structure, with its two-foot walls painted gunboat green and its sides constructed entirely of screen, she could only reply, “The porch is very nice,” but “where is the house?” With marines on constant patrol around the neighborhood, she “undressed in the cupboard.”

  The next day began the author’s initiation into the spouses’ sorority at the naval base. Like initiations everywhere, this involved no small amount of alcohol. “The senior commander’s wife was giving a dinner party. There was a rumor that I was to be the guest of honor.” Arriving home the afternoon of the party, her husband found his wife “lying on the bed with the immodesty a tropical afternoon permits, resting from a strenuous morning of tennis.” Hurry up, she was ordered; “the cocktail boat leaves at four thirty.” Mystified, she learned that, though most household closets were neatly stacked with liquor, open drinking on government property was frowned upon. Hence base dinner parties began in Caimanera, at Pepe’s, “the ‘unofficial’ officers’ bar.”

  Function trumped form in the cafés of Caimanera. Pepe’s was “a small, picturesque but smelly shed which might have been put together in a movie studio for a Mexican melodrama. There was no art in the arrangement of the hundreds of bottles that lined the bar shelves.” Tables, a small dance floor, greasy-aproned waiters who “leered at their immaculate customers as if fully aware of the petty subterfuge to which an American was reduced in order to exercise a personal liberty.” If life at Guantánamo is any indication, Prohibition produced world-class drinkers, experts in the art of the immediate and sustained elevation of blood alcohol levels. At Pepe’s, rounds (plural) of daiquiris preceded whiskey (beer for most of the women), and finally rounds, again, of cognac—all of it designed to enable “the guests to keep their jazz throughout the coming party.”53

  Her initiation was successful, the writer discovered. (“I learned more about it the next day when the usual post-mortems were held.”) It came off, she later learned, according to regulation. “Each family had one colored servant,” who labored alongside “Wong, an obliging Chinaman … always on hire from a native restaurant.” Surely it wasn’t the food that made these parties, as there was only so much even the inventive Wong could do with canned corn, soup, peas, beef, sometimes chicken, mashed potatoes, stuffed tomatoes, saltines, ice cream, fruit cocktail, black coffee, and other staples purchased at the local commissary. “Wong and the coffee cups, loud ribald conversations about nothing, the same faces, tramp of the sentry’s feet outside, an inescapable smell of stale paint, flashing gold stripes on the officers’ costumes, the buzz and thud of tropical insects against the screens, an occasional bugle call from the station ship anchored in the roadstead …” Welcome to Guantánamo Bay.54

  The author was lucky to reach Guantánamo on the eve of the arrival of the fleet, which elevated the local population from between one and two thousand to ten to twenty thousand people, thus giving navy wives something to talk about. “Our little post turned out en masse and waved frantically as the miles-long column of grey vessels swung in from the Caribbean and steamed slowly up their anchorage abreast our quarters.” One by one, fifty destroyers, twelve cruisers, six battleships, and countless tenders and supply ships came to rest in the bay. “The heart of every woman among us beat a little faster at the long white lines of men drawn up on the decks of the warships—men who had left their women thousands of miles north and were now, in a sense, at our disposal.”55

  As the parties began, it soon became clear just who was at whose disposal. From the first, the author recalls, the fleet dances were a “nightmare,” notwithstanding the three daiquiris prescribed by a devoted husband. What exactly husbands thought they were doing towing their wives along to dances is far from clear; what they were in fact doing was serving them up, and there proved to be no shortage of rivals eager to compete for them.

  “‘Where have you been all my life, you wonderful girl?’ For a moment I am not sure whether the voice is that of the hot and handsome lieutenant who is my partner or of one of the three or four jiggling dancers who hem me in on either side. They all smell of commissary soap and their voices are all a little hoarse from too much rum.” If tedious, most of this game is harmless. Some is not—at least it didn’t seem so to the author, and perhaps it was her willingness to say so, to break the code of silence, that raised the pique of early censors at the bay. “Before I can reply I am snatched away by powerful arms. No apology or chivalrous request for my permission to dance with a new partner; just a violent seizure, as if I were to be the victim of a rape.” More blandishments, a too-tight squeeze, an offer to go outside. Only the intervention of an equally boorish lieutenant takes her mind off the violence. But not for long. Another offer. An unwanted kiss. Again, “the idea of rape comes to me. With a woman’s instinct I realize that I am protected only by the thin shred of circumstance which lies in the proximity of so many others. I must not dare get outside the circle of light and moving white figures.” She succeeds, and “a good deal of indiscriminate kissing” draws this carnival to a close.56

  But where to go for relief? For a time, the author tried eschewing the parties altogether. This only exposed her to charges of being “selective,” a reprimand suggesting both snobbishness and promiscuity. (“I was accused of stealing the high-rankers and giving them a better time than the elder women could.”) Only when her diffidence began to jeopardize her husband’s standing did the author swallow her pride and rejoin the social circuit. Mercifully, she won the sympathy of a true navy veteran, a senior officer’s wife, who advised her to imbibe the minimal amount of alcohol required to help her “stand the life.”57

  During Prohibition, class—or, to the navy, “grade”—distinctions prohibited the enlisted men from visiting Cuban towns around the base. Why? the author wanted to know. Because, replied an officer in a position to know, “we Americans don’t know how to drink.” Clearly they were out of practice. “An officer manages to get away with it because if he goes too far his whole career is wrecked; whereas the enlisted man has very little to lose but his microscopic pay.” Still, supply is slave to demand, and local Cubans proved ingenious at getting alcohol onto U.S. ships. This commerce, common wherever the navy dropped anchor, was said to be Cuba’s greatest source of income.58

  Tedious, offensive, sometimes threatening as it was, life for the wives during fleet visits was vastly preferable to life with the fleet put to sea. With “no daily papers, no real news except a few items that sifted in by radio,” and “few books,” daily existence at the base was reduced to morning bridge games, afternoon sports, and the ubiquitous dinner parties. No wonder a navy wife took up writing. With little to differentiate themselves from one another, wives fell back on invidious distinctions of rank. “Even the servants caught the spirit of the post,” the author notes. “One morning my maid burst out with: ‘You ought to have a better rug, ma’am. Mrs. Smith’s husband is only a lieutenant, and her rugs are twice as nice as yours.’” When one wife phoned the commissary to request a certain cut of steak, she was greeted by a “Sorry, madam, but we haven’t much meat this month and your husband doesn’t rate that cut.” It was enough to drive a person to drink.59

  What did the Cubans make of all this? The “respectable ones,” those bold enough to declare themselves, did not approve of American ways. But Cubans were tolerant and far from critical. As one put it to the author, “I wouldn’t be surprised if we behaved
the same way, were conditions reversed, and were there prohibition in Cuba and liquor in America.” In all, Cubans viewed the American sailor as “a splendid chap at heart.” They were proud that their nation provided “such joyful relief from intolerable conditions in the United States.”60

  In fact, many Cubans were far from proud of the social dynamics in the towns surrounding the U.S. base. The year “Guantánamo Blues” appeared, Gerardo Castellanos, a celebrated Cuban geographer, published a record of a leisurely trip through the Cuban countryside from Remates de Guane, in far northwest Cuba, to Guantánamo, in the southeast, the culmination of a lifelong dream. Fully two-thirds of the book is devoted to the Guantánamo region, including the U.S. naval base and its immediate surroundings.61 Much of Castellanos’s book confirms the account of the Navy Wife. But he goes beyond her to provide a wrenching portrait of the base as seen from the other side.

  “We come to the US Naval Station,” Castellanos writes. “It’s very early. Since leaving Guantánamo, I have enjoyed a beautiful view of one of the saltworks of the Guaso River.” Abundant waterfowl and attentive fishermen decorate the scenery. Approaching the outer harbor, Castellanos crosses “a deserted beach,” really a dry sea, with no sign of habitation or life. Finally, he arrives at Caimanera, the “local customs office and entry point of the sea-faring trade.” Originally a maritime town, Castellanos explains, Caimanera has profited in recent years from the traffic in liquor and troops associated with the Yankee base. By 1930, alcohol had become a fabulous business in Caimanera, the source of many a rapid fortune. Indeed, so full of liquor are some of the bars and cafés of Caimanera that they seem more like “warehouses” than restaurants. Arriving in the early morning, Castellanos fails to note the sex traffic, but there are other trades in town “no less profitable” than liquor, such as the sale of perfumes and tobacco, and “the famous souvenirs,” curios and postcards depicting the Cuban landscape.