Guantánamo

  So long as the unrest did not threaten American businesses, U.S. administrations were happy to sit back and do nothing. By 1933 the violence began to erode profits, forcing President Roosevelt to dispatch the diplomat Sumner Welles to Cuba to try to reach an accommodation between Machado, now a dictator, and the old political elite. Machado agreed to a U.S. demand to restore at least the trappings of constitutional government. Meanwhile, Cuban Communists, labor activists, and others denounced U.S. meddling. As the unrest continued, the United States asked Machado to resign. He refused, but ultimately fell victim to further chaos generated by a general strike. Amid the political and social upheaval, the United States tried to orchestrate the appointment of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes to the presidency. This time Cubans said no, and greeted the elevation of Céspedes with violence against officials of the old Machado regime.76

  In place of Céspedes, Cuba’s enlisted officers and university students elevated Ramón Grau to the presidency, along with the radical labor activist Antonio Guiteras as prime minister—this, in direct defiance of U.S. officials, the Cuban officer corps, Cuban political elites, and, above all, the presuppositions of Platt. If unlikely to last, the Grau-Guiteras coalition was unequivocal in its insistence that Cuba determine its own political and economic fortune. The economy would be geared toward national production and consumption. Labor would be granted, among other things, a minimum wage, an eight-hour workday, worker compensation, collective bargaining, and a requirement that at least 50 percent of the labor force be Cuban-born. Perhaps most important, the new government promised land reform.77

  Despite remarkable successes in advancing much of its reform agenda, the opportunistic pairing of Grau, a moderate, with Guiteras, a radical, could not last. Difficult to maintain under any circumstances, the coalition collapsed after four months in office, the victim of U.S., Cuban Army, and conservative opposition, as well as militant labor activism. The U.S. government never recognized the Grau-Guiteras government. Instead, Ambassador Welles tapped Fulgencio Batista to take over the reins of government. A sergeant in the Cuban Army, and one of the leaders of the enlisted officers’ coup, Batista impressed U.S. officials with his ability to neutralize the old officer corps while clamping down on labor unrest. Here was a man the U.S. government could work with.78

  And work with Batista (and his puppet, President Carlos Mendieta) the United States did, abrogating the now nettlesome Platt Amendment in May 1934 in exchange for an open-ended lease of the Guantánamo naval base. Though less coerced than the original lease, the new lease was hardly negotiated between equal partners, as U.S. officials would later claim. It came on the heels not only of the U.S. elevation of Batista to power but also of passage of the Jones-Cooligan Act, which pledged the United States to a large annual purchase of Cuban sugar. In short, Batista could hardly have said no to the naval base, even had he wanted to.79

  Under Batista, the Cuban Army replaced the old political class as the true force in Cuban politics. Once aligned to labor radicals, Batista crushed the militant labor movement in 1935, assassinating Antonio Guiteras as he attempted to leave the country. Which is not to say that Batista was anticommunist or antilabor. An army man, Batista couldn’t stand disorder. Indeed, he needed the backing of organized labor and even the Communist Party to legitimate his rule. In 1938 he approved the reemergence of the old Partido Comunista de Cuba as the Partido Unión Revolucionario (PUR), which collaborated with the government in exchange for control of Cuban trade unions. For the next eight years, Cuban presidents maintained close relations with PUR, relying on its support to bolster fragile governing coalitions.80

  Batista endorsed much of the political agenda proposed by nationalist parties since the 1920s, including the establishment of a national bank, a program for agricultural diversification, profit sharing in the sugar industry, land distribution, and the advancement of public health and education. In 1940, he summoned a constitutional convention to which all parties were welcome. The convention led to the restoration of constitutional democracy in Cuba, and produced two consecutive legitimate and undisputed elections in Cuba, utterly unprecedented, the first of which Batista won.81

  U.S. influence remained strong in Cuba throughout Batista’s rise and consolidation of power, though it was subtler, less overt than in had once been. The sugar industry recovered during World War II, thanks partly to the continued trade reciprocity with the United States. At the same time, the Cuban labor movement began to flourish, with labor managing to pass a series of modest reforms focusing on employment protection, evidence of the fragility of Cuba’s ruling coalition.82

  For nearly two decades between the end of World War I and the saber rattling that preceded World War II, little changed at the naval base besides the cast of characters and the establishment of new social diversions for officers and their families. The war altered this. In 1938, President Roosevelt appointed a commission to examine the nation’s state of military readiness. The so-called Hepburn Board, named after its chairman, Arthur J. Hepburn, picked up pretty much where Admiral Mahan’s Navy Board had left off over a generation earlier: the United States was vulnerable to German incursion in the Caribbean, among other places. The board recommended developing the nation’s defenses throughout the Caribbean and especially at Guantánamo Bay.

  In the summer of 1940 the U.S. Navy hired the private contracting firm Frederick Snare Corporation, based in New York City but with offices scattered throughout Cuba and Latin America, to undertake a $37 million upgrade of the naval base. The project included an independent and fully functioning marine base, new airstrips on both sides of the bay, ammunition magazines, a school and chapel, and still more recreational facilities. The work was undertaken with great urgency. By 1943, when the work pace eased, some ten thousand Cubans, Jamaicans, and West Indians labored on the base alongside four thousand U.S. servicemen and civilians. The vast labor force transformed life not only at the base but also in the local Cuban communities as workers throughout eastern Cuba showed up seeking work.

  From the start, labor relations between Snare and the Cuban labor force, now enjoying the benefits of its enhanced status, were fraught with conflict and charges of exploitation against a private contractor that claimed immunity from both U.S. and Cuban labor standards and laws. The U.S. military and Snare executives saw only radicalism and eventually communism in the escalating complaints. For nearly a decade the navy successfully resisted calls from Cuban workers to allow labor representation on the base. By 1950 the navy gave in, partly to neutralize a growing Communist presence in the region.

  Meanwhile, as the Hepburn Board predicted, the Caribbean Sea became a theater of submarine warfare, with Germany targeting not only merchant ships bound for Europe in the North Atlantic but also commercial traffic between the Panama Canal and the port of New York. In February 1942 alone, Germany sank 28 Allied vessels comprising some 93,000 tons of shipping. That year 257 ships went down in the Caribbean alone. A year later, the numbers began to improve as the naval base became the linchpin in a convoy system that stretched from the Panama Canal to New York. In 1943 only twenty-two ships were sunk; the following year a mere two. During the war, commercial and naval traffic through the bay dramatically increased, with Guantánamo becoming a bustling seaport second in volume of traffic along the eastern seaboard only to New York Harbor itself.

  The World War II expansion created the footprint of office buildings, warehouses, jetties, airstrips, magazines, and residential neighborhoods still visible today. The base that Cuban labor built in World War II now stretches for three miles from the southwest corner of Windward Point along the southeast shoreline of the outer harbor, past the many jetties that extend their fingers into the bay, and on toward the salt flats that mark the northeast corner of the base. The new construction included thousands of temporary housing units but also comfortable, if modest, stand-alone suburban-style homes. Back from the shoreline and extending up into the hills, streets were laid and neighborhoods pla
nted that in the rainy season, when water turns the hills from brown to green, resembles suburban California.

  On July 30, 2007, the U.S. House of Representatives passed Resolution 121, calling on the government of Japan “to formally acknowledge, apologize, and accept historical responsibility in a clear and unequivocal manner for its Imperial Armed Force’s coercion of young women into sexual slavery, known to the world as ‘comfort women,’ during its colonial and wartime occupation of Asia and the Pacific Islands from the 1930s through the duration of World War II.” Japan’s abuse of Korean, Chinese, and Filipino women forced into sexual slavery is well documented and needs no amplification here.83 But how many of the U.S. representatives who voted for the resolution know that, since at least the time of Prohibition, the U.S. Navy condoned and later colluded in a sex traffic of its own in the Cuban towns around Guantánamo Bay? Cuba, like other countries, has a long history of commercial sex; the extracurricular activity between U.S. servicemen and local women in the towns around the naval base in the 1920s only mirrored that between international clients and professional call girls in major cities throughout the “island paradise,” especially in Havana, at the same time.84 Critics may object that the case of Japanese comfort women bears no resemblance to the good old prostitution common around overseas military bases since time immemorial. But that judgment may be better left to Cubans.85

  By all accounts, an industrialization of the sex trade paralleled the wartime expansion of the naval base. In 1943, Doug White, an enlisted man stationed in Puerto Rico with the Naval Radio Service, was marooned at Guantánamo Bay while awaiting passage back to the United States. Though he has forgotten the name of the place, White visited the little town beyond “the Cuban land gate, which was open to all servicemen” by this time, and where “there was a street solid with bars and bordellos.” Sailors such as White had

  to run the gauntlet of posters and warnings about venereal diseases to reach the border, but once there, it was a daily circus until the gate closed at 10:00 p.m. The street was mud, the bars loud, the broads filthy, the rum watered and grossly unsanitary. It was impossible to walk on the street without being snatched into a bar or show, which was usually a front for more pleasurable pursuits in the back room. Awaiting your return, just inside the gate was a building of attended cubicles. Whether you had dallied or not, you were made to strip and shower, then were sprayed, scoured, powdered and salved for any souvenirs you might have collected during your Cuban charge.

  White visited Guantánamo Bay as part of a convoy crew during World War II. Convoy crews lived “a grueling existence,” he remembers, with “six hours on duty, six hours off, for weeks on end, with a day off only at their destinations, usually Rio or Guantánamo.” No doubt the men “greatly appreciated the recreation available both on and off the base when they reached it.”86

  Late in the war, William Mills, a twenty-year-old ensign and gunnery officer, traveled to Guantánamo Bay aboard the USS LSM-104, an amphibious landing craft. While at Guantánamo, Mills visited Caimanera. Mills remembers the naval base as “ordinary,” the quarters as “quite comfortable, with full recreational facilities such as swimming pool, officers’ club, etc., all heavily used.”87 Meanwhile Caimanera lived up to its reputation, Mill reports, “as a large-scale brothel for accommodating ‘our boys’ in ways Mother never intended. Many of us enjoyed it, some fully and others only as a curiosity we’d never seen before.” Mills was among the few to admit that he had spent a night at Caimanera. (“Yes,” he volunteered. “Once.”)

  “We were carried to Caimanera on Navy LCVPs [landing craft, vehicle and personnel],” Mills recalls, “where we stepped off already in the town. I recall only one main street, although doubtless there were others. The nighttime street was brightly lighted with raucous music on every hand and open-air ‘bars’ lining both sides of the street.” Separating Caimanera’s bars were “pro stations,” small canvas-covered cubicles “where several sailors simultaneously could enter and, concealed knee to neck from the street, drop the front of their trousers and inject the contents of a prophylactic tube into their urethras, said to be a surefire way, postcoital, to avoid VD. I think it was.” Mills doubted that these “remarkably clean” facilities could operate “so efficiently” without formal naval sponsorship. The booths were in “regular use, all in an atmosphere of business as usual.” They provoked no reactions from passersby. By night, anyway, Mills remembers Caimanera having few civilians other than the “working girls” and bartenders, “all others being uniformed US Navy men.” Caimanera’s “volatile mixture” was kept in check by Navy “SPs,” or shore patrols.

  Once inoculated, the U.S. sailors “entered the bar, sat down at a table and ordered (usually) beer. Cuban prostitutes lined the walls of Caimanera’s bars, usually seated on single chairs. The surrounding whores assessed their chances and chose accordingly to approach the candidate for business.” While not every sailor partook in this ritual, “enough did to maintain high occupancy of the ‘business rooms.’” Couples retreated to “very small rooms lining the three inner walls, each with a single door and, inside, a single bed, washstand, and pitcher of water. Occupancy was for a limited time that could be enforced, for those who lingered, by a stern knock on the door by an old woman.”

  The women, meanwhile, were “typical of their kind.” Mills describes “simple folk from a background of third-world [extreme] poverty who cope with a harsh life.” Many of these women “responded gratefully to even minimal courtesy or kindness. Contrary to popular opinion I’ve heard, most will respond sincerely to any credible romantic overture, and yes, that too happened more than you’d think with youthful American soldiers and sailors.”88

  “When you’re living in a foreign country,” observed Captain Roland Faulk, a navy chaplain well acquainted with the cultural economy of the Guantánamo naval base during the 1940s and ’50s, “you want to protect your own troops and not become a victim of the host country’s standards.”89 Thus Faulk joined the age-old debate about the relationship between supply and demand in the underground economy by blaming the other side. The occasion of these remarks was an unusually candid interview with the archivist John Mason about prostitution in the U.S. military. Where the navy condoned and indeed facilitated the sex trade in overseas bases, Faulk opposed it on pragmatic as well as moral grounds: not only was prostitution just plain wrong according to the moral code that Faulk had committed his life to defending, but the venereal disease that went with it incapacitated the men.

  Visiting Guantánamo Bay in the mid-1940s, Faulk took his concerns to Captain Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, commander of the USS Missouri, who, upon arriving at the bay, dispatched a liberty party to the Cuban town of Caimanera, just outside the boundary of the U.S. base. Caimanera, Faulk warned Hillenkoetter, “had only one purpose for its existence,” namely, “prostitution.” Like many officers in the navy, Hillenkoetter (later to become director of the Central Intelligence Agency) was unimpressed by Faulk’s reservations. But Faulk was not to be deterred. Returning to Guantánamo for an extended stay a few years later, he confronted the base commander, Rear Admiral W. K. Phillips, about the local traffic in sex. “Why can’t we put the place out of bounds?” Faulk asked Phillips. The answer was “quite simple,” Phillips replied. “We could put it out of bounds but up in Havana the Cuban government would go to our ambassador and lodge a protest. That protest would go back to the American State Department. The State Department would call the secretary of the navy and say, ‘What are you doing down there in Cuba? You can’t do that.’ And so the out of bounds would have to be lifted.” What was a proponent of personal responsibility and clean living to do? With Cuba impeding a collective solution, Faulk could only “leave it to the individual man. Preach against it, exhort against it, talk against it, persuade against it. That’s about all you could do.”90

  In fact, Faulk did more. Suspicious that the source of the problem was not indeed Cuba—that the navy was “aiding and abetting prost
itution” at U.S. bases around the world—Faulk resolved to study venereal disease rates among the sailors at Guantánamo and elsewhere. Evidence from 188 cases of syphilis at Guantánamo led him to surmise that misguided naval policies were encouraging the spread of disease. A larger study later confirmed the evidence from Guantánamo. “One of the first things which caught my attention when I was Fleet Chaplain was the recurring rumor which I heard to the effect that Commanding Officers were requiring men going ashore in the Far East to take with them prophylaxis,” Faulk reported. Unable at first to trace the origin of that rule, Faulk discovered “that it was carried in a confidential Operation Order issued by the Fleet Commander.” Further investigation into naval involvement in prostitution proved “eyeopening.” While naval officials touted the benefits of prophylaxis, infection rates in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, for example, reached as high as 1,780 infections per 1,000 men per year—nearly 2 infections for every sailor.91

  There is no reason to think Guantánamo was any different. If anything, Faulk’s study suggests that infection rates there may have been higher still. “Your [Cuban] servants are given regular health checks, including the Kahn blood test and chest X-rays,” a Guantánamo “Housing Information Manual” assured navy wives relocating to the U.S. base in 1958.92 Designed to screen individuals for venereal disease, the Kahn blood test would have seemed contraindicated for domestic servants unless the infection rate in eastern Cuba had been extraordinarily high. Just how that piece of information was supposed to comfort young navy wives is not clear.