Guantánamo

  Internal navy documents corroborate Faulk’s hypothesis of the navy’s abetting the sex trade. A classified security memo from 1952 remarks that “venereal disease control presents the major health problem encountered at the Base. The only off-Base liberty is in adjacent areas where an unusually high incidence of venereal disease is present, and where there is no choice of proper companionship with the opposite sex for the majority of personnel.” In contrast to the base itself, where sailors could choose from a variety of recreational activities, “the only form of entertainment available” in Cuban towns around the base was “drinking and girls.” Neither bad policy nor poor decision making was behind the alarming incidents of VD; rather, “low-cost liquor is the cause of 95% of venereal infections,” the memo alleged, “as men who, under the influence of alcohol, fail to take advantage of the prophylaxis available.”93

  Faulk’s testimony and the evidence from the security memo support Peter Grenquist’s suspicion that the robust sex traffic he witnessed at the bay could not have proceeded without high-level support. A junior officer at Guantánamo in the early 1950s, Grenquist suggests that by the time of his visit, the epicenter of the sex traffic had shifted from Caimanera to Guantánamo City, some twelve miles up the Guantánamo Basin. Guantánamo City “had various informal brothels and young freelancers happy to service liberty parties from the base.” In order to distance itself from traffic, “the navy permanently stationed a relatively low level second-class pharmacist mate and perhaps a couple of seamen assistants in the city to test the girls for venereal disease.” Assigned to Guantánamo City for shore patrol, Grenquist remembers meeting one “enterprising petty officer” whose control of the sex trade was so complete that “the navy had to remove him quietly from his czardom.” The word on the street: “graft was a factor.”94

  Twice at Guantánamo—first as a sailor, later as a junior officer with the Fleet Training Group—Hal Sacks remembers Caimanera as “an exotic semitropical area.” The inhabitants had little to do and plenty of time on their hands. Children hung out in the streets until midnight; there were carts with roast pig on Cuban bread for five cents. There was “marvelous” Hatuey beer and “sensational” Bacardi rum. So, too, “great chicken, fish, rice, and beans.” Like Grenquist, as an officer, Sacks was assigned periodically to shore patrol, which gave him an intimate impression of the local nightlife. His headquarters were near the row of whorehouses that lined the harbor. His job was to chaperone, or “supervise,” the extracurricular activity—to make sure that nobody got hurt. “Sometimes there was a problem of guys not paying,” Sacks recalls, “sometimes somebody hit someone, including the Cuban women.” Sacks remembers that the more or less defenseless Cuban women were always grateful for his help.95

  One night, Sacks was approached by a young woman in tears; she reported being roughed up by one of the Americans. Sacks offered to escort her home. She lived in a one-room house, very simple, with nothing to distinguish it from her neighbors’ lodging except for the red-haired kid asleep on her bed—“not at all Hispanic.” Next to the bed, on the nightstand, stood a picture of the boy’s father, a “red-headed American marine.” “Syphilis wasn’t the only reason to wear a condom.” At the U.S. base and in the Cuban towns and cities that surrounded it, all sorts of sexual and conjugal alliances were struck. The Sackses lost their first maid of eight months to a U.S. sailor. There was a pecking order among the maids, Sacks reports, with darker Cubans making less money than their lighter-skinned counterparts. For the Sackses’ maid, “black and dark,” marriage to a young second-class petty officer promised immediate upward mobility. She accompanied him back to the United States and expedited U.S. citizenship.96

  Other witnesses report similar alliances. Attached to a helicopter squadron at McCalla Field, Rex Lake lived with his young family in Caimanera, at the Oasis Hotel, from the autumn of 1956 through the summer of 1958, a period that coincided with Castro’s return to Cuba and subsequent guerilla campaign waged from the nearby Sierra Maestra. Long after the end of World War II, the base population continued to exceed available housing, and it was not unusual for U.S. servicemen and civilians and their families to live in Guantánamo City and Caimanera.

  In fact, Lake reports, Caimanera had more than the one street that Mills remember in his recollection of liberty parties off the U.S. base. Though Lake would come to appreciate Caimanera over the course of his two and a half years there, the town didn’t make a good first impression. “Except for the main street through town, all the streets of Caimanera were dirt,” he writes.

  In the rainy season, they were a sea of mud. Most of the population was terribly poor. One large area of shacks was built on stilts over the water. All garbage, including human waste, was simply dumped out the door or window into the bay. It helped keep the home clean, but the smell from the bay was atrocious. The odor along the little dirt streets from the rotting sewage in the ditches would nearly take your breath away. Children played in these streets and somehow many survived. Typhoid was always a fear for the many American families with small children like ours.97

  The “one street” in Caimanera that Mill recalls was undoubtedly what others knew as “the District.” It was indeed a memorable street. Here is “where all the sailors came to drink and make whoopee with the local girls.” For the bargain rate of $2.50, sailors could take their pick of the local talent (“many of whom were very lovely”) that spilled out of the bars lining the District’s lone thoroughfare. “Unfortunately,” Lake notes, “for your $2.50 you could also get a grand case of venereal disease. Gonorrhea was the main attraction, but syphilis ran a close second. To protect its young, healthy sailors, the navy set up a first aid station at the entrance to the District and dispensed free condoms and penicillin pills. This was indeed a strange and unusual life style far from the normalcy of home.” As strange as it was unpredictable. Lake knew two sailors from his group “who fell in love and married their prostitutes from the District and took them home to the United States.”98

  By the late 1940s and early ’50s, with Prohibition long since over, one didn’t have to leave the base to have a drink. As a result, Grenquist reports, a marked change occurred in the social atmosphere at Guantánamo City, where the nightlife quieted significantly.99 In contrast to the “industrial brothels” that Mill, Sacks, and Lake describe in Caimanera, in Guantánamo City the sex trade moved indoors to people’s homes, where Cuban prostitutes and U.S. sailors would sit around in living rooms before hooking up and heading off to do their thing. This trade, though obviously organized, seemed “informal, if not amateurish,” Grenquist reports. Typically the U.S. sailors arrived one day and returned to the base early the next day: “There was no illusion” that they were in town “just to have a drink.”100

  Some sailors went out of their way to flout their sexual prowess. In one case, a young “mustang” (a career sailor promoted up through the ranks to officer status) of Falstaffian bearing arrived at the Guantánamo station one morning drinking a beer and evidently “quite pleased with himself.” Before arriving at the bay, he was greeted at a local depot by a pair of Cuban girls “who looked like twins.” Full of giggles, they waved at him; he toasted them. As the shore patrol in charge, Grenquist couldn’t decide if the man had actually spent the night with the women or simply paid them to show up as a means of impressing the others.101

  It is hard to say what the navy made of this. Grenquist suggests that someone evidently had misgivings, for, though officers could go on liberty parties, too, the navy went out of its way try to keep officers entertained at the base. There they would be paired with “proper, nice Cuban girls from respectable families at Guantánamo City” at base dances at the officers’ club. The events resembled “high school proms.” Boats arrived with young Cuban women in a “rainbow of pastels.” Most did not speak much English, and few officers spoke much Spanish, making these dances exercises in mime. These were not enjoyable, Grenquist emphasizes, for either the Cubans or the America
ns. For the Cubans at least there was a reward. The young women were allowed to go to the ships’ store at the officers’ club and shop tax-free. Grenquist could not recall the effect of these abstemious encounters on the young officers. But he concedes that they may have made the officers ripe for a visit to Guantánamo City—to “have their ashes hauled.”102

  In 1950, the journalist Gervasio G. Ruiz traveled to the U.S. base for a story to be published in the travel journal Carteles.103 Ruiz’s account suggests that over a decade after Bohemia compared Guantánamo City to a sewer, the place had improved, but only a little. When Gerardo Castellanos visited Guantánamo Bay in 1930, Guantánamo City was just opening to U.S. servicemen again after a several-year hiatus; when Bohemia sent its correspondent to Guantánamo in 1938, Guantánamo City was once again off-limits, thanks to poor sanitation and its generally unsavory social climate. At the time of Ruiz’s visit, the Americans continued to shy away from Guantánamo City, a fact regrettable to the entrepreneur in Ruiz, and something he hoped to rectify. Sanitation improvements were a good start. “Until recently,” Ruiz reports, “Guantánamo was a dirty and dusty place, with poor hygiene. Today its streets are paved and can count on a sewer system, which, if not perfectly efficient, offers, at the least, a minimum of health to those who dwell or visit there.”

  But substandard sanitation was not the only impediment to luring U.S. business back to Guantánamo City. Local opposition to “Yankee imperialism” had made Guantánamo City an unfriendly place. Ruiz confirmed Grenquist’s account of base officials importing young women from Guantánamo City’s “best” families to spice up Thursday night dances at the officers’ club. Sometimes these courtesy visits stoked fierce local opposition, and one particularly belligerent protest forced the base commander to cancel a dance, shelter the young women for the night, and return them by plane directly to Guantánamo City. To Ruiz, the so-called patriotic critics of the base were really “Stalinists” determined “to provoke yet another scandal against Yankee imperialism.”

  Yet a third cause for American wariness toward Guantánamo City were the hustlers who assaulted American sailors when the trains pulled in from the bayside stations at Caimanera and Boquerón. “No sooner had the sailors set foot in Guantánamo station,” Ruiz reports, “than tour guides and ticket sellers and salesmen would converge on them like a plague of locusts to rob them blind.” The good citizens of Guantánamo opposed the traffic in alcohol, women, and other contraband, Ruiz insisted. And the base authorities tried to put an end to it. Reluctant to offend the Americans on whom Guantánamo’s revitalization would depend, Ruiz did not blame the U.S. sailors, who, though not entirely innocent, “would probably have steered clear of Guantánamo’s underworld if it weren’t for the encouragement of the local merchants.”

  If eager to protect the Americans’ reputation, Ruiz bent over backward to try to please base officials. Against all the evidence of other eyewitnesses, Ruiz insisted that “one shouldn’t confuse the behavior of American troops who pass through the base with the long-term residents and their families.” With a population of twelve thousand, the base community propelled the local economy. Base residents got along very well with the Cuban population. So well, in fact, that twenty or so “senoritas guantanameras” had married into the officers’ club.” The town of Caimanera, meanwhile, was “moribund,” totally off-limits to U.S. servicemen.104

  Ruiz had not expected to visit the naval base; most visitors to Guantánamo Bay were not admitted. But Carteles had connections with Antonio Civit Jané, a local doctor and a figure well-known at the base, who introduced Ruiz to Hugh Barr Miller, the head of naval intelligence. “The first thing that struck me,” Ruiz reports, describing the base, “was the cleanliness of the place—the roads, the gardens, the buildings, indeed, everything we saw.” Fumigation and hygiene machinery abounded, and seemed to be used “without stop for getting rid of mosquitoes and cleaning every last aspect of the place.”

  As the local intelligence officer, Miller was the liaison between the base and the local Cuban community. At every moment, he told Ruiz, the Americans had tried to demonstrate their fondness for the Cuban people and government. Ruiz asked him when the Americans would lift the ban on travel to Caimanera. As soon as the reasons for it are alleviated, Miller responded.

  Like Castellanos before him, Ruiz was also struck by the absence of visible signs of ammunition on base. “On our tour,” he writes, “we didn’t see a single cannon, nor armaments that disfigured the natural beauty of the place.”

  Ruiz returned to Guantánamo via Caimanera. In contrast to what he had seen at the base, he found Caimanera desolate and depressing. His encounter with the two Cuban cities and the U.S. base left him pondering what it would take to move eastern Cuba forward. Clearly, force was needed to discourage the “wolves” who preyed on the U.S. visitors. But force alone would never be enough, and Ruiz hoped that Cubans themselves would demonstrate enough pride to get their house in order. As a journalist, Ruiz knew the history of the place. It never occurred to him that the United States might be part of the solution.105

  6

  SEEING RED

  On the evening of November 3, 1956, a thousand Soviet Army tanks surrounded the Hungarian capital, Budapest, center of an anti-Soviet uprising and home to the new National Government of Imre Nagy. Sparked by a student protest on October 23, the Hungarian Revolution spread rapidly across a nation weary of Communist oppression and suffering prolonged economic stagnation. For a time, things seemed to be going the Hungarians’ way. On November 1, The New York Times proclaimed “Victory in Hungary”; that same day, Nagy announced that Hungary had withdrawn from the Warsaw Pact. While the Times cautioned that “communist despotism” might yet be restored by “Soviet troops,” the Soviet Army appeared to be heading for the border, as if acknowledging that the people of Hungary had spoken.1

  But early in the morning of November 4, Soviet tanks crashed through the center of Budapest, and, amid heavy aerial and artillery bombardment, Soviet troops occupied government ministries and began rounding up revolutionary leaders. Simultaneously, Nagy took to the airwaves, assuring democratic allies that his government remained in power, while appealing desperately for their help. Within several hours, he had taken cover in the Yugoslav embassy as the Times announced, not quite accurately, that “Soviet Attacks Hungary, Seizes Nagy.”2 It took a fortnight for Soviet officials actually to get their hands on Nagy, whom they executed in June 1958. By November 10, the revolution was essentially over. In its wake, some 2,500 Hungarians were dead and 200,000 more bound for exile.

  Six thousand miles away, at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Charles Ryan, the nineteen-year-old son of a navy hospital corpsman, followed the events in Hungary with rapt attention. Like young men and women throughout the world, Ryan quickened to media accounts describing the Hungarians’ valor and likening them to America’s founding fathers. As a young man in search of a calling, Ryan was inspired by the Hungarians’ commitment to liberal democracy in the face of the most powerful army in the world—all of which made America’s tepid response to the Soviet assault bitterly disappointing. Through CIA-operated Radio Free Europe, the Eisenhower administration had spurred on the Hungarians, even suggesting that the United States would come to their assistance in the face of Soviet aggression.3 But the American government did nothing once the Soviets mobilized, in effect offering up the students for slaughter. Over the course of the ensuing days and weeks, as Time magazine named an anonymous “Hungarian Freedom Fighter” its Man of the Year, Ryan struggled unsuccessfully to get the Hungarian Revolution off his mind.4

  In the autumn of 1956, a kid drinking beer on a beach at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, with sympathy for peoples suffering oppression did not need to venture far to embroil himself in revolution. Four years earlier, Fulgencio Batista, the self-styled custodian of Cuban law and order, had launched his second military coup. The coup gave rise not only to a dictatorship more interested in rewarding cronies and pleasing foreig
n business interests than in addressing Cuba’s problems, but also to a host of dissident political groups determined to restore constitutional democracy. Batista did not introduce corruption to Cuba, but under him, corruption reached unprecedented heights, as Cuban politicians entered into an unholy alliance with U.S. gangsters, corporations, and political and law enforcement officials to keep the island safe for capitalist exploitation. The eight years of Batista’s final reign saw a burst of commercial development across the country that featured the construction of hotel-casinos and private resorts geared to Cuba’s exploding gambling and sex trades, along with the infrastructure required to bring foreign clients to the tables (and beds). With Batista at the helm, Cuba was up for sale, and U.S. investments in Cuban sugar, oil, financial, and other industries soared from $142 million in 1946 to just shy of $1 billion by 1959. Surely some people were making money from what one historian has labeled this “capitalist Shangri-La,” but it wasn’t ordinary Cubans. Ordinary Cubans provided the services and labor that kept Batista and the notorious U.S. mob boss Meyer Lansky and his associates in business. Cubans who thought to complain about the moral and political bankrupting of the country were brutally suppressed. 5

  If sheltered from the most insidious effects of Batista rule, the Guantánamo naval base was not immune to it. Ryan could sense the weight of Batista’s bullying on the faces of Cuban laborers who commuted to the base each day, many of whom he came to know as friends. And he experienced Batista’s bullying firsthand on his many excursions off the base.6