Guantánamo

  Castellanos is no less critical of Caimanera’s shoddiness than Corey, McIntosh, or the Navy Wife. Nor is he any less conscious of race. He arrives at an hour when one would expect to see local businesses stirring to life. But “commercial activity is negligible.” And not just because Caimanera is a city of the night, but because Castellanos visits at a time when the fleet has put to sea, taking with it the town’s means of subsistence. In its wake? Nothing but a couple of “black Jamaicans” and two or three drunks, who look to Castellanos “like Yankees.”

  From the base’s inception at the turn of the twentieth century, the navy insisted that it was a great boon to the local Cuban economy. Yet, curiously, Castellanos notes, for all the business the base generated, Caimanera itself remained woefully undeveloped. This sets Castellanos ruminating about all the money being literally flushed down the toilet. Someone may be benefiting from the U.S. propensity to “drink to the point of intoxication,” but by the looks of things, it isn’t the people of Caimanera. Nor is it the American sailors themselves, who typically squander over half a million dollars per year. More than merely wasteful, this industry is socially insidious, turning Cubans everywhere into potential “patrons” for U.S. clients. In Caimanera, U.S. and Cubans come to know each other at their predatory worst. The one or two Cuban policeman on hand cannot possibly maintain law and order, and from time to time the town succumbs to a “state of siege.” In these showdowns, the hosts suffer a distinct handicap, as everyone knows that detaining an American sailor could spark a diplomatic crisis. The guests, meanwhile, revel in their immunity.

  Castellanos wrote at a time when a moratorium on liberty party visits to Guantánamo City was just coming to an end. Historically, Guantánamo City competed with Caimanera for fleet business, and, like Caimanera, it never flourished so much as when the fleet was in. But in the mid-1920s, the cost of property damage in Guantánamo City forced Cuban bars and restaurants to raise their prices, making them a target of American hostility. This hostility, in turn, forced U.S. naval officials to declare Guantánamo City out of bounds, thus contributing to Caimanera’s boom.62

  From Caimanera, Castellanos pushes on toward the U.S. naval base, his early morning reverie long since soured by the social and economic inequality he encounters. The need to solicit the U.S. Navy’s permission to travel through Cuban waters does nothing to improve his mood. Though the Americans formally control only the outer harbor, he notes, “in fact, the entire bay with its customs facility falls under American domination.” Castellanos enters U.S. territory, his self-consciousness on high alert. “We have taken one of the channels that crosses into the naval station. Perched on one of the buoys is an enormous bird. It eyes us curiously as we continue on, sheltered by our flag, as if our little boat were a child’s plaything.”

  Past the warehouses of the Guantánamo Sugar Company, past the shoreline of the U.S. base “where typical American bungalows sit atop steep cliffs,” past the landing field at Hicacal Beach, past the commotion of the never-ending dredging work, Castellanos advances. He pauses before another beach, this one “situated at the foot of the residence of the base commander where floats an American flag, striped symbol of the North American imperial republic.” Each star represents an American state, Castellanos muses, “but among these great stars are asteroids that the world doesn’t see—symbols of peoples suffering the yoke of American imperialism. I looked then at my pretty little standard and I wondered whether I too was supposed to tip my hat to this strange flag.”63

  From the water, the base looks deceptively benign. There is scarcely any movement. No sign of warships, only a few barges huddled alongside the wharves. There are no visible fortifications, “as if the Americans recognize that fixed armaments require constant attention and are ineffective in certain situations.” In short, Castellanos concludes, the naval station is nothing but a great fueling depot for boats and warplanes. Therein lies its signal importance in extending the reach of American military and commercial influence throughout the Caribbean. In the event of an attack, the station could be defended by a few simple measures or abandoned altogether. The base “costs the US virtually nothing.” It costs Castellanos his pride.

  Before heading back to Caimanera, Castellanos makes a final stop at El Deseo, a tiny village in Cuban territory on the outskirts of Caimanera. El Deseo returns Castellanos to the subject of alcohol. Approaching the wharves that skirt the village, Castellanos is surprised to find several American launches tied up to a pier. One of the boats is particularly fancy, evidently the property of the base commander. Live jazz and murmured conversation float over the water. At the foot of one of the wharves sits a small café with an outdoor terrace and dance floor. On a large counter along one wall of the café “shimmer a rainbow of liquor bottles.” Seated at tables are groups of men and women drinking an assortment of cocktails. “There is much merriment,” Castellanos observes. “Swollen faces, the smell of alcohol. From the orchestra, one Yankee air after another.” All patrons are residents of the naval base. Officers of every grade mix together, from the lowest to the commandant. The dress is informal. “Almost nobody wears their stripes.” Some wear T-shirts, others swimming trunks. The ladies appear “saturated” in alcohol. Castellanos is astounded by this “representation of the Yankee Navy.” Here it is only midafternoon.

  Only the commandant maintains his distance, “upholding the laws of his country.” Meanwhile, one of the ladies approaches Castellanos and speaks to him in “correct Castilian.” An officer joins the author’s table and accepts a drink. “Another officer, as if jealous, pretends to discharge his revolver” at Castellanos’s companion, a local judge. The chief of the naval station converses with everyone, dances, but still holds back. “But I know the ropes,” Castellanos writes; “the more the goat backs away, the worse the charge.”

  The charge comes, but only after some unseen signal silences the band and draws the happy hour to a close. The Americans all carry off at least one hidden bottle as the commandant looks the other way. The “drunks and drinkers” depart, but the commandant lingers. “Now it’s his turn,” Castellanos notes. “I look at him and he smiles slyly. He is drinking. Another follows. And another. His cheeks flush.” Castellanos departs for Caimanera.64

  Not all the Americans’ socializing at Guantánamo involved overindulgence in alcohol and women. Guantánamo featured plenty of wholesome recreation, too, as the Navy Wife reports, such as golf and tennis, swimming and riding, baseball and volleyball, and hiking trips into the local mountains, where waterfalls and caves caught the Americans’ attention. Though the base infrastructure remained largely unchanged between the wars, the opportunities for recreation constantly expanded, so that by World War II, Guantánamo had become synonymous with play.

  Part of the credit for this is owed to Admiral Charles M. Cooke, who took command of the base in June 1934, six months after Prohibition came to an end. Up until Admiral Cooke’s appointment, his daughter Maynard remembers, “the station was considered a graveyard tour for any officer sent to be commandant.” For many years, “under the command of a series of officers unhappy with being stuck in this backwater,” the base had gone “downhill.” Cooke was charged with bringing the base “up to snuff,” a mission he understood to include not just making the facility war-ready but improving base morale.65

  Cooke liked parties. One Halloween, he transformed the officers’ club into a haunted house, taking pains to order well in advance some sixty black-and-orange clown costumes, complete with headgear and black masks. A hit with the children, who were allowed to preview the haunted house before being hauled off to bed, the party was a smash with base personnel, who relished the social inversion that anonymity afforded. Cooke was also known for constructing an open-air pavilion, complete with concrete floor, thatched roof, and an icebox, on the crest of John Paul Jones Hill, the highest elevation at the base. Called Mountain House by the locals, the pavilion provided officers and their wives a dazzling view from which
to catch the sunset as they wet their whistle, and sometimes spent the night.66

  At the beginning of the century, journalist Frank Carpenter described the area surrounding the Guantánamo naval base to readers of the Boston Sunday Globe. In the lowlands of the Guantánamo Basin, surrounding the U.S. base, were some “large plantations of sugar owned by Americans, and coffee grows well on the hills.” This part of Cuba was “especially healthy,” Carpenter reported, “and it was at one time a sort of Newport for the rich sugar and coffee men of the eastern end.” One planter supposedly “had an avenue running from his residence to the sea shore. The road was covered with shells and was lined with lemon and orange trees.”67

  By the time Cooke arrived at Guantánamo, the sugar industry had become a victim of the Great Depression, but also of global competition from the rise of the sugar beet industry. If no longer a second Newport by 1934, the surrounding countryside still boasted plenty of opportunities for amusement as well as a few luxurious estates, one of them owned by William “Shorty” Osment, administrator general of the U.S.-owned and -operated Guantánamo and Western Railroad Company, headquartered at Guantánamo City. Cooke befriended U.S. and foreign planters throughout the basin, but he grew particularly close to Osment, with the Cookes visiting Osment at his estate outside Boquerón and Osment traveling to the base for parties at the officers’ club.68 Osment owned a private rail line, which connected his estate to the town of Boquerón. On this track he mounted what Cubans called a sequena, an American automobile converted to run on rails. Cooke’s daughter, Maynard, remembers riding this “car” into Osment’s estate, overrun with peacocks.69

  Amid the laid-back atmosphere that was 1930s Guantánamo, Cooke had no problem mixing naval business with pleasure. His tenure at Guantánamo coincided with a growing sense of urgency about the base water supply, which in 1934 arrived there in railroad tanks via Guantánamo City and the Guaso River. In 1934, political instability in Cuba combined with enduring uneasiness over the base’s dependence on an outside water source to inspire a series of studies about an alternative water source. As most of the proposals involved tapping resources in Cuba, Cooke thought it prudent to examine the proposed sites for himself. On such trips, he was delighted to tap the hospitality of his friend Osment, bringing along not only his wife but a handful of officers and their wives, to a maximum of eight guests.70 As a foreign businessman operating in a historically volatile region of Cuba during a period of political instability, Osment found it only natural to ingratiate himself with the base commander. Besides furnishing Mrs. Cooke and her daughter with horses, Osment provided souvenirs of his guests’ visits.71 He quartered Cooke and his friends during diplomatic stopovers in Guantánamo City, and he kept Cooke stocked with Cuban cigars.72

  It is no wonder that Cooke preferred to stay with Shorty Osment on his visits to Guantánamo City rather than at local establishments. In March 1938 the popular Cuban journal Bohemia ran an article exposing the U.S. claim that the base propped up the nearby Cuban economy. The article contrasted “Caimanera,” the Cuban name for the U.S. base, with the nearby city of Guantánamo, the “sewer of Cuba,” where shameless politicians pursued their self-interest in a “stagnant, hedonistic, dirty, and desolate” place. Spotlessly clean and neatly laid out, the base shimmered with energy and purpose, its “luxurious profusion of lights” illuminating a way of life distinctly foreign to the Cuban workers arriving there. Whereas the base overflowed with flowering gardens and snapped with colorful flags, Guantánamo City languished in a state of despondency and boredom, eliciting nothing so much as a large yawn. At once dull and decadent, its citizens failed to even notice the squalor in which they had sunk. Oh, there were still a few well-off Cubans who distracted themselves with the fantasy of marrying their daughters off to American officers and thereby lightening their family’s darker skin. But they were but further evidence of a city unable to help itself and shoulder the responsibility required of real improvement.73

  An enthusiastic guest, Cooke was also a generous host. In March 1935 a yacht named Cachalot, with nine family members aboard, radioed the U.S. naval base for permission to ride out a March northeaster in Guantánamo Bay. Permission granted, Cachalot was scudding along Cuba’s bleak southeast coastline when it was met by a friendly naval escort dispatched by Commander Cooke. Just before dark, Jane Hartge remembers, Chachalot entered “the huge bay studded with warships of every size and armor”—“war clouds were rising across the world” at the time. Never mind the threat of war; as Chachalot bobbed gratefully at her “designated anchorage in the midst of all this pomp and circumstance … alongside came a gleaming brass and macramé spangled ‘barge’ with invitation from the commanding officer and his lady to our ‘party’ to come ashore for cocktails.” As so often at Guantanamo, cocktails led to more cocktails, then to dinner and an outdoor cinema, at which Cooke and his guests were greeted like royalty, with “the entire audience standing.”74

  In times of crisis, Cooke’s generosity extended to his Caribbean neighbors. A few months after Chachalot’s visit, Cooke had just completed a Navy Day address when he was handed an urgent telegraph from his bosses in Washington, D.C.:

  COMMUNICATE DIRECT WITH CHARGE DAFFAIRES US EMBASSY AT PORTAUPRINCE AND ASCERTAIN EXTENT OF ASSISTANCE REQUIRED PERIOD STATE DEPARTMENT STATES THAT FOOD SUPPLIES AND MEDICAL ASSISTANCE ARE NECESSARY PERIOD FURNISH ALL POSSIBLE ASSISTANCE UTILIZING WOODCOCK AND INFORM OPNAV OF GENERAL CONDITIONS AND ASSISTANCE REQUIRED BEYOND YOUR FACILITIES.

  On October 23, a slow-moving hurricane churned up the Windward Passage after inundating Jamaica and claiming the life of an eleven-year-old boy. The day before, The New York Times reported “heavy rains in Haiti” and described communities across the region hunkering down. At the Guantánamo naval station, residents were ushered into hillside bunkers, while Cuba evacuated the towns of Caimanera and Boqueron.

  Washington followed developments in the waters south of Cuba closely. That very day, President Franklin Roosevelt was returning from a fishing trip aboard the presidential yacht Houston, just hours ahead of the mounting storm. President Roosevelt was not the only one scurrying for cover. Aboard his three-hundred-foot steamer Alva, William K. Vanderbilt was making desperately for Fort Pierce, Florida, in the company of his wife, Rosamund, his daughter, Muriel, and Alva’s forty-two-person crew. With means of escape, the president, the commodore, and U.S. base personnel were all spared when the hurricane came ashore in the vicinity of Guantánamo Bay. But Haitians living on the southern peninsula, west of the capital, Port-au-Prince, weren’t so lucky. On October 25, news reached the naval station of flooding in Haiti accompanied by “great loss of life.” Someone broached the idea of outfitting the Guantánamo station ship USS Woodcock for emergency relief, but no orders followed, and the base continued on with its work.

  Then came the tales of horror, of whole villages washed down the Grand Anse River, of thousands of bodies flushed out to sea near the town of Jacmel. In the Anse Valley, Cooke later reported, “the floods came up about midnight October 21–22, and filled the valley floor from twenty to seventy feet, sweeping houses, people, chickens, hogs, cattle and goats out to sea.” Survivors were found clinging to trees, having “lost everything including their clothes.” In one village, eight out of four hundred inhabitants survived. With the Haitians’ homes went all means of subsistence. Wells were contaminated, sewage exposed, crops ruined. Had there been any medicine in the worst-hit villages, there was scarcely anyone left to administer it. In some towns, nobody remained to bury the dead.

  It took five days for the scale of the calamity to register in Port-au-Prince. With roads impassable and electrical and telegraph lines cut, the southwest peninsula was completely shut off. News of the disaster reached the capital only after a cargo ship sailing up the Windward Passage encountered a raft of bodies and debris bobbing off the Haitian coast.

  Once alerted to the crisis, the Guantánamo naval station sprang into action. On Monday, October 29, the
Woodcock, laden with rice, beans, and disinfectant, cleared Guantánamo harbor, Commander Cooke himself at the helm. Arriving in Haiti the next morning, the Woodcock offloaded supplies at the port of Jeremie, near the mouth of the Anse River, then proceeded on to the capital. In Port-au-Prince, Cooke was met by Haitian government officials, including the sister of President Sténio Vincent. After welcoming the Haitians aboard, the Woodcock set off to deliver lumber, medicine, and other necessities to the stricken villages. By Friday, November 2, Cooke and his crew had returned to Guantánamo Bay, their humanitarian mission complete, in its wake a palpable feeling of goodwill.75

  By the eve of World War II, Cuba was suffering through a nearly two-decade-long cycle of personality-based politics, in which capricious and self-serving individuals retained power by means of favoritism and intimidation. In 1925, Cubans elected Gerardo Machado president. An industrialist and former general in the Liberation Army, Machado ran on a reform platform, advocating, among other things, tariffs to promote Cuban industry, new infrastructure, and improvements in education and health care. Without the effects of the Great Depression, Machado’s attempt to diversify the Cuban economy would have been difficult; despite the falling value of sugar production worldwide, sugar remained the primary source of Cuban capital. But the Depression ravaged Cuban sugar, robbing the new government of the resources required for political and social reform. When Machado responded to the inevitable strikes and antigovernment protests with violence and rigged elections, Cuba succumbed to armed conflict. Underemployed youths, intellectuals, professionals, and students faced off against an increasingly powerful army. The outcome was never in doubt, but the effect was insidious. The government resorted to political repression and physical brutality to crush the dissidents. The rebels hit back with kidnapping, assassination, and terror.