Guantánamo

  Sympathetic to the Cubans’ plight, Ryan joined the Cuban resistance quite by accident. Only slowly did he come to learn that the ammunition he purchased at the Guantánamo gun shop and turned over to Cubans off the base was bound not for the hunting lodge of this or that Cuban friend, as he had been led to believe, but for a weapons cache being accumulated by one of several local resistance factions. At first Ryan’s smuggling of arms and ammunition had little to do with Fidel Castro, who didn’t return to Cuba until early December 1956. But Castro’s arrival along the southeast coast lent the opposition a focus it had previously lacked. Secluded in the Sierra Maestra, and desperate for weapons and ammunition, Castro’s lieutenants canvassed the local territory for support, finding it in unlikely places—at the Guantánamo naval base, for instance—and in the affable, apparently directionless Ryan. When the cry for ammunition yielded to a call to arms in February 1957, Ryan led two teenage drinking buddies from the base up into the mountains of the Sierra Maestra, where the spirit of Hungary—to Ryan, the spirit of America—lived on in the resistance movement of Fidel Castro.

  Ryan’s story complicates the received notion of Guantánamo Bay as a bastion of political reaction in cold-war Cuba. As an isolated imperial enclave of the United States, the naval base spawned unpredictable political alliances as well as uninhibited social behavior. At the very moment when Batista was digging in his heels, supported by $16 million per year in U.S. military aid, many U.S. Navy officers and their families were passing food, money, and ammunition to the Cuban resistance. By the early 1960s, Fidel Castro would become the focus of U.S.-Cuban cold-war recrimination. But the cold war long preceded Castro’s rise to power in Cuba. After World War II, Castro was a mildly anti-American member of Eduardo Chibás’s nationalist Orthodox Party (with a soft spot for Americans themselves); as late as April 1959, Castro sought recognition from Eisenhower officials for his revolution. Haunted by the specter of communism in Latin America, Eisenhower mistook Castro’s nationalism for Marxism, ultimately denying him recognition and radically curtailing America’s purchase of Cuban sugar—Cuba’s (and Castro’s) lifeline. Castro concluded that he had no choice but to seek the support of the Soviet Union. As a result, by the early 1960s a climate of hostility and brinkmanship displaced the low-level reciprocity between some Cubans and Americans at the U.S. base personified by Charles Ryan. But that result was hardly inevitable at the time Charles Ryan and his buddies took to the hills.

  The Cuban government’s opportunistic courtship of Communists did not last beyond necessity. In the 1946 midterm election, President Ramón Grau’s Auténtico Party won a majority of both houses of Congress, making the Communist Party, reorganized once more as the Partido Socialista Popular (PSP), dispensable. With the cold war heating up, and President Grau determined to ingratiate himself to U.S. and Cuban businessmen, the government purged Communists from the major trade confederation (the Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba, or CTC), which promptly joined officials from the American Federation of Labor in talks about how to combat Communist influence in Latin America. Auténtico’s banishing of Communists from the CTC had the unintended consequence of making Cuban communism more radical and more anti-American than it had been since the early 1930s.7

  But the big story in Cuba in the aftermath of World War II was less the split in labor ranks between conservatives and radicals than the bloating of government bureaucracy—national, provincial, municipal—along with escalating political corruption. By 1950, 11 percent of Cuban workers held government positions, which consumed a staggering 80 percent of the federal budget. Elected president in 1948, Carlos Prío Socarrás, a genial if uninspiring man, was more concerned with securing government posts for his family and friends than protecting the country from the armed gangs that terrorized the population, often at the behest of local politicians.8

  Into this breach came Batista once more. In March 1952, he deposed Prío, setting aside that fall’s scheduled presidential election while restoring order. As always, U.S. and Cuban capital responded to the restoration of order favorably. Parties opposed to Batista’s suspending of elections were unable to reconcile their differences. This opposition included a young member of the new Ortodoxo, or Orthodox, Party named Fidel Castro, who on July 26, 1953, the hundredth anniversary of José Martí’s birth, led a futile assault on the Moncada Barracks at Santiago de Cuba. The assault was a dismal failure, and resulted in the capture, torture, and death of many of the young insurrectionaries. Still, the cause endured, thanks partly to Batista’s overreaction, and the date of the attack, the Twenty-sixth of July, became the name of the revolutionary movement waged by Castro against Batista from the mountains surrounding the naval base.9

  Meanwhile, labor and other dissident groups who opposed Batista were met with brutal force. An attack on the Matanzas Barracks, outside Havana, in 1956 followed an unsuccessful military coup the preceding year. In March 1957 a student group based in Havana stormed the presidential palace in an attempt to assassinate Batista. Though these efforts all failed, they succeeded in gradually rallying Batista opponents into a loose coalition finally oriented around Fidel Castro, who returned to Cuba in December 1956 aboard a ship named Granma. This loose coalition issued a joint communiqué calling for the return of civil government and a program of liberal social and economic reforms. By this time, Batista was deaf to calls for liberal reform. By 1958 even his U.S. sponsor had become alienated by his increasingly brutal tactics, prompting the U.S. government to suspend military aid. By midsummer 1958, Cuba was in a state of social, economic, and political collapse, and the immediate future, at least, seemed to belong to Castro.10

  Just as in Cuba proper, the cold war came to the naval base itself long before the rise of Castro. The surge of Cuban and other foreign labor on the base associated with World War II expansion had the potential to promote a sense both of reciprocity (jobs for Cubans!) and of suspicion (who could be sure that the workers weren’t Communists?). The wave of hiring coincided with a series of political reforms in Cuba protecting workers’ rights. On the U.S. base, American officials historically opposed labor protections, as they typically made the local workforce less exploitable and more expensive. As the cold-war tensions mounted across the Caribbean, naval officials came to interpret all but the most modest labor demands as evidence of Communist activity.

  Complicating labor relations on the base, much of the hiring was done not by the U.S. Navy itself but by contractors such as the Frederick Snare Corporation, whose responsibility to U.S. and Cuban labor laws was ambiguous at best. Like the contractors themselves, the U.S. Navy exploited the ambiguity to keep costs down. Hence there evolved at the naval base a multitiered system of labor rights and labor compensation, with U.S. civil service employees at the top and Cuban maids and part-time Cuban and West Indian labor at the bottom.11 Snare was skilled in manipulating the distinction between part-time employees, to whom it owed virtually nothing, and full-time employees, to whom it potentially owed a lot. Snare hired part-timers whenever possible, thereby further cutting costs. The company was no more sympathetic than the U.S. government to criticism of its labor policies; like the U.S. government, it tended to equate criticism with communism, contributing to a growing blacklist of workers unwelcome on the base.12

  The navy and private contractors were also skilled at manipulating racial distinctions to divide workers and drive down wages. U.S. officers and their wives paid dark-skinned maids less than they paid light-skinned maids, just as American sailors generally paid less for dark-skinned prostitutes than for light-skinned prostitutes. In the early 1940s a premium on English-speaking ability dramatically raised the currency of West Indian labor on the base. In exchange for their loyalty, naval officials protected West Indian workers from having to confirm their foreign status with Cuban authorities, and reserved for them the most desired jobs. The elevated status of West Indian labor inevitably created tension with their Cuban counterparts. Such preferential treatment tapped into late
nt resentment dating back to the importation of Chinese indentured servants in the mid-nineteenth century. Though Africans and Chinese were originally imported to work on the sugar, coffee, and tobacco plantations, the seasonal and cyclical nature of these industries left labor markets flooded with foreign workers who competed with Cubans for scarce jobs. There was hardly a labor platform in Cuba that did not include a demand that the Cuban workforce be at least 50 percent native-born.13

  When Fulgencio Batista rose to power in the 1930s, he did so partly thanks to an alliance with moderate labor elements, which lent his government popular legitimacy. In 1938 he allied himself with a reformed Communist Party and the new Cuban Workers’ Confederation (Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba, or CTC). With Batista’s backing, and widespread popular support, the CTC managed to pass a series of reforms in 1940 that dramatically improved the plight of Cuban labor. Though wary of Communist influence, the United States put up with the reforms in exchange for Cuban cooperation in World War II.

  By 1943 the United States had begun to anticipate the need to curb Communist influence in Cuba and throughout Latin America. One vehicle of U.S. anticommunism was the American Federation of Labor, which worked in tandem with the U.S. State Department to promote a moderate, pro-business labor movement in the region.14 The concessions won by Cuban labor in the early 1940s were not recognized on the U.S. base, and in 1940–1941, a series of incidents demonstrated the vulnerability of unprotected Cuban workers. In one notable example, a Cuban worker named Lino Rodríguez Grenot was unceremoniously beaten by a U.S. Navy officer and tossed into the harbor at Caimanera while attempting to board a boat filled with Cuban workers bound for the naval base. Rodríguez died in plain view of a host of Cuban and American eyewitnesses among whom there was no uncertainty about what had happened. But there was indeed uncertainty about who had legal jurisdiction over the case: Americans or Cubans? Had officials concluded that Rodríguez had died in Cuban waters, then according to the lease agreement by which the U.S. Navy occupied Guantánamo Bay, the case would have had to be tried in a Cuban courtroom, a prospect the navy naturally found unpalatable. But if Rodríguez had died while on a U.S. vessel, in this case the navy launch that ferried Cuban workers to the base, then the navy would retain jurisdiction over the case, and the alleged perpetrator would be given a court-martial. This is what the navy argued, ultimately exonerating Rodríguez’s murderer of charges of manslaughter, to the enduring chagrin of local Cuban people.15

  Several subsequent cases confirmed the appearance of American impunity at the bay. In the wake of an unexplained shooting of a Cuban worker by an American sentry, the base commander told a U.S. consular official that “the US government is in no way responsible nor liable for the criminal acts of its employees, including the personnel of the armed forces.” This overstated the case, though it is true that few if any of the Americans accused of mistreating Cuban workers were found guilty. Meanwhile, the Cuban government was in no position to protest the appearance of injustice. Indeed, in some of these cases, it went out of its way to keep the lid on Cuban reaction.16

  It took the outbreak of the cold war to bring labor representation to Cuban and foreign workers on the U.S. base. This seeming paradox is explained by logic similar to that which helped promote civil rights reform in 1950s America: it was a means to deflate Soviet propaganda that American society was racist and unfriendly to workers. The way to combat Communist influence in Cuba, representatives of the American Federation of Labor told U.S. officials, was to encourage the moderate labor movement both in Cuba and on the naval base. The timing seemed propitious. The recent consolidation of political power by the increasingly conservative Auténtico Party of Cuban president Ramón Grau led to a government-wide purge of Communists from the CTC. Though the Americans refused to concede to “unions” on the base, they allowed workers to form “employee groups,” which, in exchange for forfeiting the right to strike, were granted an eight-hour day, workers’ compensation, and pensions, concessions that by the late 1940s could hardly be considered radical. Notably, workers hired by private contractors, usually on a part-time basis, continued to receive no security at all.17

  Alert for signs of Communist influence and infiltration, U.S. naval officials at Guantánamo began to recognize it in the many inevitable incidents of petty crime on the base, and resolved to bring the perpetrators to justice. By the terms of the original lease agreement, Cuban fugitives apprehended on the U.S. base were to be returned to Cuban territory for prosecution, just as U.S. fugitives apprehended in Cuba were supposed to be returned to the U.S. base. When Cuban courts demonstrated a persistent lack of will to hold Cubans responsible for crimes committed on the naval base, U.S. officials took the law into their own hands. Claiming the authority of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, they began detaining alleged criminals on the base.18

  In the autumn of 1954 one of these detentions got out of hand. A Cuban named Lorenzo Salomon Deer was suspected of pilfering cigarettes from the Navy Exchange. Navy officials detained Deer for a fortnight, allegedly beating him and making him stand for hours on end. Deer accused the navy of torture, and a navy official conceded that the treatment of Deer had been extreme. Deer signed a confession of guilt, and served time in jail in Santiago. The navy’s alleged mistreatment of him sparked outrage in local Cuban communities. The base union leaders vented their dismay in the local papers, on the radio, and in correspondence with government officials back in the United States. “We could not conceive that in a naval establishment of the most powerful nation in the world, champion of democracy, things like this could happen,” the leaders wrote in language eerily resonant of post-9/11. The leaders’ eloquence earned them dismissal from the naval base. Worse, it jeopardized the union’s standing at the base more generally, where officials had only grudgingly conceded to labor representation in the first place and then only to the extent that it did nothing to threaten navy authority.19

  Predictably, the firing of the labor leaders did little to mollify local outrage at alleged abuse on the base, or the demand of base workers to be treated with dignity. Indeed, the more suspicious that base officials became of Cuban workers and the more hostility they demonstrated toward the labor leadership, the more they came to resemble the Batista dictatorship itself—with whom, not so incidentally, the U.S. government was in close communication. The base workers wanted nothing so much as justice, the fired labor leaders reminded U.S. officials, an end that had nothing whatsoever to do with communism. “It is not by caressing the RED DEVILS that peace for the civilized world will be achieved; no, it is by practicing SOCIAL JUSTICE; it is by practicing the magnificent postulates of democracy, of which our employers boast themselves to be the champions when in reality the only thing they do is to show their contempt for the things which are really vital to the greatness and sovereignty of countries.” The workers were no less “enemies of Iron Curtains” than the Americans themselves, “but we are also enemies of any type of oppression harming human dignity,” they pointedly announced, especially “the dignity of the country we belong to.” They were the “REAL DEMOCRATS.”20

  By the mid-1950s, “real democrats” committed to the “dignity” of Cuba were not welcome on the U.S. base. The U.S. occupation of Guantánamo Bay had never been about promoting Cuban interests. And it was not about to become so in 1954 or 1955, when communism appeared to be on the march in Latin America, and when Fulgencio Batista was all that prevented communism from washing up on American shores.

  Charles Ryan and his family arrived at Guantánamo Bay in mid-1956, amid mounting hostility between base officials and the local Cuban labor movement. Ryan’s dad worked in Vector Control, the department responsible for combating infectious diseases. As the base health inspector, Ryan Sr. was responsible for ensuring the cleanliness of food provision and preparation. This work kept him in constant contact with the local Cuban community, which provided the base with all sorts of merchandise, fresh fruits and vegetables, and occas
ionally meat, poultry, and seafood. Ryan remembers accompanying his mother to the wharves where the Cubans unloaded their produce. Small, dark, and attractive, Ryan’s mother looked more Latin than her native Irish. The Cubans flirted with her, Ryan recalls, often filling her bags while refusing her money—an attempt, her husband cautioned, to get in the good graces of the sanitation commissioner.21

  The long history of anti-Americanism in Cuba in the wake of the Platt Amendment, the record of U.S. exploitation of labor on the base and throughout Cuba generally, and the increasing suspicion of Cuban activists bred by the cold war made for difficult social relations. The formal hostility masked countless opportunities for and instances of kindness. Open-minded and gregarious, Ryan got to know many of the Cuban and foreign workers. Generous to the Cubans, he found they were generous to him, frequently engaging him in conversation and giving him rides in their cars and trucks.

  When he arrived at Guantánamo, Ryan was not your average navy brat. For one thing, he was nineteen years old, older than many of the sailors at the base (the minimum enlistment age at the time was seventeen), and a member of the U.S. Navy Reserve. Isolated today, Guantánamo was just as isolated then. What was a nineteen-year-old doing following his family to Cuba? Cuba was a nice place, Ryan remembers his dad telling him. Ryan could join his parents and younger brother at Guantánamo so long as he returned to high school, from which he had dropped out a few years back. To sweeten the deal, Ryan’s dad pledged to give his son a weekly allowance and all the freedom a young man could ask for—so long as he did not date the girls at William T. Sampson School. Ryan’s father had himself a deal. A lack of girls, according to the word in navy circles, was not a problem at the place U.S. Marines fondly referred to as “git’ mo’.”22