Guantánamo

  For a nineteen-year-old maverick, Ryan got along well with his father. He joined his dad on hunting trips to the Yateras River, source since 1934 of the base water supply, which meandered from the mountains to the sea just a few miles east of the northeast gate. Ryan remembers sliding down slick rocks at the river’s edge. He also occasionally accompanied his father on work trips into Cuba, once in the company of a team of medical workers helping to alleviate an outbreak of cholera. Despite cautioning his wife about exploiting the kindness of the Cuban merchants, Ryan’s dad was not beyond exploiting his own connections when opportunity arose. In one notable example, Ryan did the grunt work for a rum-running operation his dad launched, collecting and recycling empty gallon Coke syrup jugs from the neighborhoods around the base. Into these jugs, Ryan would pour rum from barrels delivered to his family’s house by Cuban workers. The boxes would then be hoisted into the holds of navy planes destined for Jacksonville, Key West, and Panama City. Ryan’s dad bought the rum for $1.25 a gallon and unloaded it for $2.50 a gallon, not a bad profit, so long as he could maintain an adequate supply. Supply didn’t seem to be a problem. So awash did Jacksonville become in cheap Guantánamo rum that the admiral there wrote his counterpart in Cuba to complain. “Stop throwing so many parties,” the commander at Guantánamo shot back, “and you’ll stop receiving so much rum!”

  Social life at the base was pleasant if unremarkable, according to Ryan. Outdoor movie theaters were its focus. The base had seven outdoor theaters in 1956, the pride of which was Mainside, situated near the officers’ club on Deer Point, one of the fingers of land that jutted out into the bay from the eastern shoreline, which was frequented by singles, couples, and officers and their families. Ryan made a name for himself among his teenage peers by revitalizing and later presiding over the teenage club. Situated in an old Quonset hut on Marine Point, just down Sherman Avenue from Deer Point, the teenage club was moribund when Ryan arrived on the premises. He called a meeting, solicited ideas for improvements, and suggested that the navy would happily help the kids transform the place into a youth center. By the time Ryan and the Navy Seabees were done, the hut had a new veranda complete with trellis, live plants, comfortable chairs, and a snack bar with its own cook—“a Jamaican, who doubled as a chaperone, and who turned out the best burgers on the base.” Kids started coming to the club every night. A movie, a burger, home by eleven—parents loved it as much as the kids. They knew where their kids were at all times and could imagine, or so they thought, what they were doing. This was a nice crowd, Ryan remembers, and a fun place. On New Year’s Eve 1956, Ryan organized a party. Tickets to the gala event cost one dollar for couples, two dollars for singles, the better to bring in a crowd. Parents shared the chaperone duty, hour by hour, and the kids made it straight through to breakfast, when the navy, delighted by the spirit, “sent over a kitchen staff and plenty of bacon” to sizzle in the New Year.

  Poised between youth and adulthood, and living simultaneously in the United States and Cuba, Charles Ryan relished his liminal status at the bay. Having accompanied his family on different posts around the world, he welcomed the unfamiliar and took pride in his independence both on and off the naval base. Not long after arriving at the base in the summer of 1956, he befriended a young Cuban named Julio Valdez, a worker at the Navy Exchange. The two struck up a casual friendship, and it wasn’t long before Valdez asked Ryan if he could procure a case of .22-caliber bullets for his grandfather’s hunting lodge in Cuba. There was nothing unusual in that, Ryan remembers thinking; hunting was popular in southeast Cuba. Like Ryan’s dad, navy chiefs and officers regularly spent weekends traipsing local plantations in search of wild boar and deer. It was no big thing to take along guns and ammunition. Shotguns, .30-06s, Colt .45s—all were readily available at the gun shop at the Navy Exchange. (If you didn’t find what you liked there, you could have it made to order.) Like food at the commissary, guns and ammo cost next to nothing on a military base in that day; the .22-caliber bullets Ryan smuggled out cost a penny apiece.

  Only gradually did Ryan discover the true destination of the stuff he passed along. This was a very small operation with only ten Cubans involved, besides Ryan himself. He came to know the Cubans, and they came to trust him, naturally, through friendships forged in Cuban ranches, rural homes, and local bars where Ryan spent his weekends. “I went everywhere in Oriente province,” Ryan boasts. He would leave home Friday and return Sunday night. “For the record,” he observed, “Cubans with little or no money don’t live in trash hovels. They live in homes with different generations mixed together—grandma, great-grandma, parents, children. They reserved a special room for guests’ visits,” he continues; “they had dignity and didn’t mind or apologize when I showed up.” Ryan spent the most time on Julio Valdez’s grandfather’s farm. It was via the intimacy of these visits that Valdez came to trust the American, eventually revealing the existence of the network of which he was a part. “Even this was not overt,” Ryan emphasizes, “but subtle. I’ve got a couple guns I’d like to get off the base,” Valdez would tell him. “Can you help me?” Ryan asked few questions. Subtlety was the modus operandi and key to the success of the Cuban resistance, and the reason Ryan never got caught. On these trips off the base, he came to appreciate the burden of Batista’s dictatorship on ordinary Cubans, for whom the government did less than nothing, and on whom it preyed shamelessly for its venal existence.

  Valdez was not a drinker, but he accompanied Ryan to parties and bars and dances in Guantánamo City, where the friends would listen to live music or catch a movie. “I was dark,” Ryan reports, “with dark hair. I wore Cuban clothes; there were not a lot of Americans hanging out in this part of Cuba. In Havana, yes, but not in Oriente.” Culturally sensitive, Ryan fit right in. Conversation between him and his buddies was not overtly political. He could goad his friends into complaining about Batista, but they were on the whole amazingly discreet. There were pro-labor, anti-Batista, and anti-American protests in Guantánamo City, but Ryan’s friends did not participate in them. They were careful to stay out of the limelight, as if saving themselves for something bigger. “This wasn’t about Castro,” Ryan emphasizes. “Castro wasn’t even in Cuba yet. We didn’t know whom we were working for. There was a revolution; there were many revolutionary groups; that was it.” If Valdez knew that Castro was bound for southeast Cuba, he never let on.

  Just as Ryan’s Cuban friends bided their time before openly including him in their gunrunning, so Ryan carefully cultivated the two American youngsters he would escort into the hills. Victor Buehlman was seventeen, the son of a navy commander; Michael Garvey was fifteen, the son of a navy chief. Less worldly, less curious than Ryan, Buehlman and Garvey had something Ryan lacked: size and strength. Ryan remembers looking out for them. “I set them up,” he recalls. “I was the first to insist that Michael get his poor vision fixed.” The boys would drink beer together on the base’s beaches. They easily passed for young sailors, and together the three friends began to dabble in the forbidden fruit of nearby Caimanera, their sexual exploits creating among them something of a sacred bond. Still, “I didn’t bring them in right away,” Ryan reports. “I had to find out their sympathies.”

  Convinced, finally, that he could trust the two, Ryan described his contribution to the resistance. “Look, you guys,” he told them. “You’re not doing well in school. Want to have some adventure?” They began by helping Ryan run guns off the base. Victor had a convertible, whose canvas top they lowered, filling the folds with rifles. Sometimes they would smuggle out parts of guns to be reassembled later. On one run, they concealed weapons in fifty-gallon flour drums. Another time they concealed the guns in grease. With their automobile loaded, the boys passed through checkpoints manned by Batista’s soldiers. One particular checkpoint, in front of the police station in Guantánamo City, Ryan thought might be his last. The police ran mirrors under the car, searching for contraband. Once they seized his ID. But, however suspicious, they ne
ver caught him.

  In part, Ryan owed his success to his understanding of the soft spots of customs officials and guards on both sides of the fence. Navy regulations stipulated that members of the Navy Exchange could purchase up to two cartons of cigarettes per day. And just so much whiskey. On smuggling missions, the boys would deliberately flaunt the cigarettes and whiskey to distract attention from the more precious contraband. When found by American guards to be over the daily ration of tobacco and alcohol, Ryan came up with a lame excuse ultimately ameliorated by his turning over the cigarettes and liquor. This worked in Cuba no less than on the base. “The pushier the guards,” Ryan remembers, “the more we surrendered. But we were never threatened.”

  Some of these gun runs Ryan had to do on his own. More than once, he ducked out on dates at the teenage club and headed down to the boat basin below Marine Point, where he was a familiar face and where, outfitted by the Cuban staff with bait and fishing tackle, he would motor to a rendezvous point with a small arsenal of rifles laid out along the floor of his boat. From the boat basin, he headed for the mangrove swamps along the northern boundary of the U.S. base, clad in a bathing suit, his friends still swinging to music back at the club. Ducking into disguised breaks in the wall of mangroves, he proceeded in silence until a few coos and whistles confirmed he had hit his mark.

  He saw interesting things while carrying out these missions along the fence line. On one trip he stumbled upon a group of marine guards who, one after another, scaled the fence via a tree notched with footholds in order to gain access to Cuban prostitutes from the nearby town of Boquerón. In all of this the thing that seemed the most amazing to Ryan was that word never got out. “We were normal students,” he observes, by which he means regular old gossiping kids. “And yet we never talked about it with our friends. There was no bragging.”

  By February 1957, two months after arriving in Oriente province, Castro’s band of eighteen men was in dire straits up in the hills of the Sierra Maestra. Initial wonder at their mere survival had long since worn off, and little distinguished these insurgents from the many like-minded cells around the country. A betting man asked to select the resistance group most likely to topple Batista would not have put his money on Castro. Short on uniforms, equipment, arms, and food, Castro was also desperately in need of men. That month, Frank País, a native of Oriente and an agent of Castro’s since the previous year, put out a call for individuals willing to join the insurgents.

  Ryan, Buehlman, and Garvey, among others, answered País’s call. On February 17, 1957, the three boys left the base and headed for Castro’s camp in the Sierra Maestra. With Batista’s men combing the area, they took a circuitous root, traveling first to Santiago, then to Manzanillo, then to the mountains, accompanied by forty-nine Cuban recruits.23 Ryan remembers being astounded by what they found there. The first thing that struck him was the simplicity of the rebels’ supply chain. Castro’s band was being kept alive by a network of primitive stores supplied by mules from nearby towns bearing rice, beans, butter, sardines, milk, lantern oil, and the like. The peasants and their mules were Castro’s lifeline. Why Batista did not think to isolate those mule trains, Ryan could never understand. Batista’s troops proceeded only as far as they could make it by truck, as if afraid to test the loyalty of the peasants.

  If it hadn’t been for the campesinos, Ryan suggests, Castro’s band of “city slickers” would never have lasted. On first arriving in the mountains, Castro and his few survivors were not any more at home there than their pursuers. If there remains any doubt about the sincerity of Castro’s sympathy for the peasants, Ryan observed, it should have long since been dispelled by the very fact of their coming to his rescue. From the peasants, the rebels learned to light fires in the rain, to make fires that did not smoke, and to preserve and transport embers—fire, along with water, the sine qua non of outdoor survival. Compared to Batista’s troops, Castro and company were veritable Boy Scouts. One evening, Ryan and his fellow insurgents awoke to a cacophony of gunfire just across the valley from where they lay concealed. The gunfire was directed not at their camp but at a nearby hillside that they knew to be abandoned. “What the hell were they up to?” the rebels wanted to know. Out of their element and simply terrified, the government forces were shooting at random. When next Batista’s forces returned to the mountains, they did so by air, dropping bombs on peasant communities, further alienating the local population.

  Castro’s band was “a strange little group,” Ryan reports. They were very disciplined, never raising their voices above a whisper. “They didn’t curse. They didn’t drink. They ate little. They smoked cigars. They thought of themselves as guerillas more than rebels”—the word rebel suggests a casualness their professionalism belied. Castro had a way with people, Ryan remembers. He got along as naturally with campesinos as he did with intellectuals, professionals, and students. The peasants of the Sierra Maestra trusted him implicitly, as he didn’t condescend to or bully them—unless he had a reason to. With traitors, Castro was merciless. By contrast, Che Guevara couldn’t disguise his elitism. Che is famous for his equal treatment of the peasants and for stoicism in the face of injury, most of which Ryan dismisses as “bogus”—“as anyone familiar with Che would have known.” Still, Fidel and Che got along like robbers. Both were well-read and happy to talk ideas late into the night. Che regaled Fidel with proposals for agricultural reform; Fidel taught Che the art of guerilla warfare. Buehlman remembers Camilo Cienfuegos, Castro’s most trusted assistant, with particular fondness. Celia Sánchez, Raúl Castro—all were there accompanied by the three boys. With pride and a hint of wistfulness, Ryan recalls smoking in his twentieth birthday with fine cigars in the company of Castro, Guevara, and Cienfuegos.

  Once in the mountains, the boys marched. And marched. And marched. It took a while for news of their flight from the base to reach the United States. On March 8 The New York Times reported “3 U.S. Youths Missing” from the Guantánamo naval base.24 At the end of that month, the paper announced the “U.S. Studying Case of 3 Youths in Cuba.”25 The Batista government denied that the boys were in the mountains with the rebels; indeed, Batista insisted that there were no rebels left in the mountains for the boys to join. The boys were in Havana, Batista declared, or perhaps in Miami.26 Thus it was with some embarrassment that Batista was forced to admit his error when, two weeks later, two teams of journalists from the United States (one from Time, the other from CBS News) met and interviewed the rebel leader, along with the three boys. Later, CBS News correspondent Robert Taber and the three boys became the object of scorn for allegedly legitimating Castro’s resistance, and presumably underwriting fifty years of Communist oppression in Cuba. That scorn is misplaced. Castro was not a Communist, Ryan and Buehlman insist. There were Communists in his ranks—Che Guevara among them—but that was a fact of the resistance movement by 1956–57, not evidence of Castro’s political aims at the time.

  Bigger and burlier than Ryan, Buehlman and Garvey lacked his commitment. Seventeen and fifteen years old, respectively, they were technically minors, and when Taber suggested that he usher them back to the base, Castro and the two teenagers agreed. Back they went, then, in early May 1957, just over a fortnight before Ryan got his first taste of combat in a successful raid on the rural guard outpost at El Uvero.

  Ryan remained with Castro’s forces through that summer. In October 1957 he was called to headquarters, where one of Castro’s lieutenants presented him with a fateful choice. “From this spot lead two trails,” the man told Ryan. “Up this trail comes Andrew St. George,” the Hungarian freedom fighter turned Life correspondent, “who we think is CIA, and who is coming to interview you for a story; you could be famous. At the end of this trail, on the other hand, lies a boatload of guns in Brooklyn, New York, collected for us, and which we need dearly. That trail can get you out of the mountains, out of Cuba, and away from Batista’s agents, who, if they catch you, will tear you to pieces.” Ryan, never much of a student, did
n’t like allegories. “I asked Castro’s assistant to spit it out; to tell me what he wanted me to do.” What “we want you to do,” the man explained, “is to get to New York City. The July 26 movement lies in pieces. Contact them. Tell them to forget their petty disagreements, and come together. There is only one government in exile. Then go to New York and get the guns. You know the mountains; you’ve been here the longest; you can get back to us.”

  Thus began for Ryan an infinitely more dangerous mission than remaining with Castro in the Sierra Maestra. Just to get out of Cuba, via Guantánamo Bay, entailed tapping the resources of a network of Castro sympathizers that stretched from Pico Turquino, atop the Sierra Maestra, to Manzanillo, Bayamo, Santiago, Guantánamo, and finally New York. “I walked for days,” Ryan recalls. “I was hidden in walls. I was disguised as a cowboy, dressed in double-seated mauve pants, cowboy boots, with hair and mustache trimmed day to day according to local styles.” The climax of the journey was the final leg to Santiago, where Ryan played the part of a Cuban dentist, seated in the back of a car with a wife on one side, a child on the other, dressed in a suit, immaculately coiffed, sailing through one roadblock after another, until he arrived at the residence of the U.S. consul, of all people, who fed him, regaled him, and ultimately transferred him to the naval base. The U.S. consul was a regular visitor to the base, where he exercised all matter of official duties, from marrying American sailors to local Cuban girls, to ensuring the legitimacy of the ubiquitous real estate and business transactions involving Americans from the base, to investigating accusations of U.S. torture of a sailor who went mad after being forbidden to travel to Caimanera to marry his prostitute.