Guantánamo

  The Cuban Missile Crisis began in midsummer 1962, when U.S. intelligence officials began to notice large shipments of Soviet military cargo being unloaded in Cuba. Accompanying the armaments were literally thousands of passengers presumed to be Soviet-bloc military personnel, along with heavy construction and communications equipment. Before long, new roads were being laid in isolated areas and new military installations thrown up. “What the construction activity involves is not yet known,” an intelligence memorandum confessed in late August. But activity in the vicinity of Matanzas, just west of Havana, suggested, among other possibilities, “the initial phases of construction of a SAM[surface-to-air missile]-equipped air defense system.”63 U.S. uncertainty about what exactly was going on in Cuba was exacerbated by a monthlong pause in CIA-operated U-2 surveillance flights due to several controversial incidents in Asia. When aerial surveillance of Cuba resumed in mid-October, it revealed a host of SAM sites, to be sure, but also the installation of medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads anywhere in the continental United States.

  The history of the Cuban Missile Crisis is well known.64 Less known is the fact that the Soviets directed nuclear missiles not only at the continental United States but also at Guantánamo itself. The United States would not comprehend the existential threat facing the base until fifty years later, when it was revealed by the journalist Michael Dobbs. Guantánamo officials reported unusual movements throughout eastern Cuba and in the vicinity of the bay as early as August 24. “Persistent reports from numerous sources indicates [sic] extensive military construction is in progress in restricted area” northwest of the naval base, the navy warned the State Department. One thousand or so Russian and Czech military personnel were at work on a missile site amid great security and secrecy. The navy also described Chinese and Soviet nationals off-loading dozens of rockets in nearby Cuban ports and transporting them to selected towns ringing Guantánamo Bay.65

  Again, U.S. intelligence officials were not sure how to read this. They never imagined that conventional, much less nuclear, missiles would be pointed at the naval base. They consistently argued that the biggest threat to the base came not from Russian arms just arrived in Cuba but from Castro himself. Indeed, they had expected the Soviets to act as a restraint on Castro’s “designs on Guantánamo.”66 On September 7, CIA director McCone learned from a Cuban source that the Communists were making preparations for the “‘complete destruction’ of the Guantánamo Base in the event of [a U.S.] attack on Cuba.” But the report made no mention that such an attack would be carried out by nuclear weapons.67 Meanwhile, reports of a military buildup throughout Cuba in general, and more specifically in the region around the naval base, continued to flow from the base commander to Washington throughout September.68

  News that the Soviets were installing nuclear warheads in Cuba reached the president on October 16. Beginning with a White House meeting that evening and continuing over the course of the next week, top national security officials contemplated a range of responses, from a full-scale military invasion of Cuba—favored by the Joint Chiefs of Staff—to targeted bombardment of missile and military sites, to a naval quarantine of the Cuban coast. Any form of U.S. military attack was at a minimum sure to provoke a strike at the naval base, everybody agreed, prompting General Maxwell Taylor, newly appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to order the evacuation of dependents on October 22. Meanwhile, the thought of using the base to bait Castro into war persisted. “One other thing is whether, uh, we should also think of, uh, uh, whether there is some other way we can get involved in through, uh, Guantánamo Bay, or something,” Attorney General Robert Kennedy stammered at the first meeting of national security officials on October 16, “or whether there’s some ship that, you know, sink the Maine again or something.”69

  It was at this time that a high-level U.S. administration official first broached the idea of returning Guantánamo to Cuba—as a negotiating ploy. What if the United States agreed not only to withdraw Jupiter missiles from Turkey and Italy but also to “limit our use of Guantánamo to a specified limited time?” Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara wondered. The president seems not to have engaged this question the first time it came up. But when Adlai Stevenson, U.S. delegate to the United Nations, repeated the suggestion minutes later, the president is reported to have “sharply rejected the thought of surrendering our base at Guantánamo in the present situation.” Relinquishing Guantánamo would only “convey to the world that we had been frightened into abandoning our position.”70 The president repeated the sentiment the next day after Stevenson once again suggested that the United States consider Guantánamo as a bargaining chip. Again, the president wouldn’t hear of it; that would only reveal the United States “in a state of panic.”71 Thus Guantánamo became a symbol of U.S. resolve to stand up to communism.

  “Higher authority has directed the immediate evacuation of all dependents from the Naval Base,” a navy handbill informed the local community at 10:00 a.m. on Monday, October 22. Effective immediately, mothers (mostly) were directed to “get your suitcases and children and wait quietly in your front yard when ready”; the “buses are starting their runs now.” By 5:00 p.m. the dependents were gone, leaving the base eerily deserted. “No children riding the school buses or playing in the neighborhood; no wives returning from their bridge parties, golf course, bowling alleys or those who were employed, from their offices.” Lights were dimmed throughout the base, water rationed. “All went off smoothly,” an official report suggests. “No complaints were heard except that the commissary store sold out of TV Dinners the day following the evacuation.”72 Sailors and marines replaced the Guantánamo dependents. At its peak in late October, the military population at the naval base reached just over nine thousand (roughly split between navy and marines) as the base became an “armed garrison.”73

  Armed but defenseless. Even without nuclear weapons trained on the base, the ratcheting up of troops at Guantánamo was purely symbolic, designed to convince local and domestic audiences that the United States would stand up to communism. Surely the president knew what Admiral Dennison himself later acknowledged: surrounded by high ground in Cuban hands, Guantánamo was “undefended and indefensible. I mean here it is in a pocket on the coast, with Cuban hills looking down on it. There’s really no way to protect it.”74

  And that was from a conventional attack. The attack planned by the Soviets that autumn involved forty nuclear warheads carrying nuclear payloads of 14 kilotons each (each one roughly the size of the Hiroshima bomb), and capable of striking targets up to 110 miles away. The missiles arrived in eastern Cuba in early October, where they were stored in the village of Mayarí Arriba, thirty-five miles northwest of Guantánamo Bay, high in the San Cristobal Mountains. On Wednesday, October 24, three of the missile launchers loaded with nuclear warheads were moved from Mayarí Arriba to the village of Vilorio, a mere fifteen miles northwest of the U.S. base. On Friday, October 26, just as the missile crisis appeared ready to blow up, the missiles were moved yet again, this time to an abandoned plantation in the village of Filipinas, some ten miles south of Vilorio, in the direction of the Caribbean Sea. In the end the conflict was de-escalated and the missiles withdrawn. A navy film of the evacuation and landing of additional sailors and marines depicts the events of October 1962 in heroic light. Guantánamo had stood up to Castro.75

  Castro was angry at having been left out of the negotiation that brought the missile crisis to an end. Still, one cannot help but conclude that of the three principal players in the crisis—Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro—Castro was the winner. Among other things, Kennedy agreed to respect Cuba’s “inviolability” and “sovereignty,” and pledged neither “to interfere in its internal affairs” nor to allow U.S. “territory to be used as a bridgehead for the invasion of Cuba.” A pledge is a pledge. But were Kennedy to live up to his words, the administration would have a lot of time on its hands.76

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  THE AMERICAN DREAM

  In the autumn of 1956, Lieutenant Andrew Spielman, a navy entomologist and an expert on insect-borne disease, was ordered to report to the Guantánamo naval base to begin a two-year study on the Hippelates fly, or common eye gnat. “For a number of years,” explained a navy memo, “the pestiferous ‘eye-gnat’ has created a public welfare and secondary school health problem at the Naval Base … . The problem at Guantánamo has become so acute that the Commander has requested assistance of the Navy Disease Vector Control Center and the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery.”1 In a letter to a friend, Spielman described the situation more plainly: “There is this phenomenon called the ‘Gitmo Wave.’ You see people standing in unlikely places and waving at empty air. They are trying to get rid of eye gnats.”2

  Accompanying Spielman on his mission to Guantánamo would be his wife, Judy. The young couple expected to start a family, and not long after learning of their assignment, they received a pamphlet in the mail welcoming them to the base. “This booklet has been prepared to give you a true picture of life in Guantánamo Bay,” announced the 1956 edition. “We are looking forward to your arrival and sincerely hope that your stay at the Naval Base Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, will be as pleasant as we have found it.”3

  The pamphlet opened with a detailed description of Cuba’s and Guantánamo’s strategic value to the United States, followed by an account of the region’s racial composition. “In race and customs,” the pamphlet explained, the local population was “predominantly Spanish.” About half of Guantánamo City’s population was “white, about one-quarter colored, and the other quarter of mixed descent.” The average Cuban was “slender, with small feet and hands, polite, and loves color, music and dancing.”4

  This happy people comprised a ready labor force. “One of the nice luxuries of Guantánamo Bay,” the pamphlet continued, “is the fact that domestic help is available.” Of course, “as with all good things, a certain amount of responsibility goes hand in hand with this feature of better living.” Prospective wives, the pamphlet advised, should expect to be patient when communicating with workers who don’t speak the language. They should also expect “a little confusion at first,” though most “will be surprised and delighted to find your household running smoothly with the help of your neighbor’s English-speaking maid acting as an interpreter.”5

  Newcomers were sure to be surprised by the Cubans’ pay scale. “Maids’ salaries range from a minimum of $15.00 a month for an untrained person to a maximum of $35.00 a month (plus board) for experienced help.” Now, “this may seem ridiculously low,” the pamphlet allowed, “and our natural tendency is to spoil them with extra gratuities.” But even at the low end (50 cents a day or 6 cents an hour), these wages far exceeded wages off the base.6 And though “normal human relations require us to be gracious to our employees, it is well to remember that if you allow too much freedom to your maid, you do her a disservice as well as to the next Navy wife who might hire her.” Managed correctly, Cuban maids provided “efficient housecleaning, washing, and ironing, as well as child care.” They also made good babysitters, “as permanent maids are assigned quarters on the Base when they are available.” Further, the most highly paid help could be “expected to do any or all of the cooking if you so desire.”7

  Cuban maids worked eight-hour days. Wives who wanted to extend the workday for chores such as babysitting could expect to pay an additional twenty-five cents an hour, though maids’ hours could be adjusted to incorporate babysitting into the normal workday. The same applied to help with “after-hours parties.” Cuban maids worked six-day weeks, typically working two weeks straight, then getting two days off. Wives who released their maids on Friday afternoons rather than Saturday mornings were being exceedingly “generous,” the pamphlet cautioned, once again putting fellow wives in an uncomfortable position. 8

  The Spielmans’ assignment to Guantánamo Bay coincided with a period that people familiar with the base have come to think of as its golden age: between Guantánamo’s emergence as a full-blown naval base during World War II and the rise of Fidel Castro, which permanently soured U.S.-Cuban relations and curtailed U.S. access to Cuba.9 An assignment to Guantánamo Bay put naval and civilian personnel and their families within reach of an American Dream more accessible than at home. Commander Harold Sacks, a young lieutenant at Guantánamo in the late 1950s (and a friend of the Spielmans’), remembers “joyful years” on the base. “We lieutenants and our growing families lived in what can best be termed ‘genteel poverty,’ in an idyllic 5,000 person ‘bungalow colony,’ replete with live-in-maid service, dollar prime rib dinners at the Marine Family Restaurant, ten cent happy hours at the Officer’s Club, and occasional weekend visits as guests aboard the Navy ships to Ocho Rios, Kingston or Montego Bay, Jamaica, Port au Prince, Haiti, and Panama.”10

  During the 1950s the population of the base swelled to more than fifteen thousand residents.11 In addition, some three thousand Cubans traveled to the base each day for work, helping to transform this little corner of Cuba into a fair-size American town. With a tight-knit community, traditional values, ample recreational facilities, and cordial relations with its neighbor, the base was thought to represent the best America had to offer, a throwback to the days before civil rights and feminist agitation and political radicalism began to unhinge the United States.

  As base residents worked to transform these forty-five square miles into a home away from home, many sensed that they were building more than a navy base; they were erecting a model community. To this day, Guantánamo residents refer to the naval base as a place frozen in time—a modern Mayberry, as a recent commanding officer put it in what has become a standard cliché, after the idealized community of the 1960s sitcom The Andy Griffith Show. (For some, the 1950s weren’t good enough; these would compare Guantánamo to America in the 1920s.12) “It’s very safe for people here. It’s safe for kids. There’s no crime; there’s no drugs. They can walk out and go to the McDonald’s at 9 at night and you don’t worry about it. There’s not many places in the world where you can do that.”13

  But a place beyond the reach of social and political upheaval is a place more mythical than real. After all, as another Guantánamo official recently acknowledged, 1950s America was a nation “of walls, divisions, and hostility, of exploitation and prejudice.”14 In their tenure at Guantánamo Bay, the Spielmans and Sackses came to appreciate firsthand the base’s many virtues. But their acknowledgment of its virtues did not blind them to its limitations, or to the tension inherent in what remained an American imperial project in Cuba. The American Dream that was 1950s Guantánamo was a particular kind of dream, a class-conscious, color-coded, gender-sensitive dream that entailed its share of exploitation and coercion as well as opportunity and good fun. No one set foot on the Guantánamo naval base who hadn’t been approved by the commanding officer, making it the ultimate gated community.

  The Andy Griffith Show did not come on air until October 1960, just one month before the U.S. presidential election and just as relations between Fidel Castro and the United States had deteriorated beyond repair. Coinciding with the base’s diminishing strategic significance, Guantánamo’s new symbolic importance gave the base a new lease on life, quieting calls by Ambassador Adlai Stevenson and others to return the base to Cuba. But with Cuba closed to American tourists, life at Guantánamo would never be the same. As Americans remained pinned down on the base, the glowing reports of life at Guantánamo came to seem halfhearted, if not forced. The myth of Mayberry grew in tandem with the base’s isolation, its authority discernible in the way it blinded Americans to the true history of the base and to the larger imperial project of which the base remained an integral part.

  The Spielmans arrived at Guantánamo Bay in April 1957 with Judy five months pregnant. That year, Cuba was suffering the final throes of Batista’s dictatorship, with Castro’s revolutionary forces alternately dodging and engaging government troops throughout Oriente
province, often in close proximity to Guantánamo Bay. With no family housing available on the base, the Spielmans moved into a home in Guantánamo City, against the advice of a base official, who warned Andrew Spielman that he would be the only U.S. officer there. Judy Spielman remembers Guantánamo City as an unhappy, dirty, and dilapidated place with little in the way of industry besides a few cigar factories and whorehouses catering to U.S. demand. Andrew experienced Guantánamo City differently. The city “is really very nice,” he wrote his navy supervisor; indeed, Cuba itself was “a nice place.”15

  In many ways, living in Guantánamo City suited Andrew Spielman ideally. Eye gnats are cosmopolitan and ecumenical. Living off base allowed Spielman to extend the compass of his fieldwork, and he ended up laying more insect traps outside the base than inside. “Since I have use of a jeep I have been able to travel over much of Oriente Province in the course of my work,” he wrote his supervisor. “I have found the Cuban people to be very helpful and the country beautiful.”16

  Judy Spielman often accompanied her husband on field trips throughout the Guantánamo region. These trips extended the couple’s social and cultural horizon as well as Andrew Spielman’s investigations, and it wasn’t long before the local inhabitants became accustomed to the couple’s presence—and invested in Andrew’s fieldwork. Cubans contributed anecdotal evidence about the patterns and proclivities of the pest they called “Guasasa,” as well as information about the region’s ubiquitous mosquitoes.17 “Many of the local Cubans have been asking about mosquito control here,” Spielman wrote his boss. “The managers of the big sugar ‘centrals’ are quite interested in improving the living conditions around their homes. I have spoken to a few ranchers who likewise expressed much interest.”18 Indeed, so great was local interest in his work that Spielman produced a handout for the Cubans that enabled them to distinguish the different kinds of gnats and mosquitoes from one another. They might think of it as a way of “improving public relations,” Spielman observed. “If a man really wants to do something by way of control, I can give him more specific information. If my Spanish improves enough, I might even attempt to translate it.”19