Guantánamo

  After a few months in Guantánamo City, the Spielmans moved onto the naval base. In August 1957, Judy gave birth to the couple’s first son, prompting Andrew to boast, “I am now a real family man: a wife, a baby, a visiting mother-in-law, and a maid, and all talking at once.”20 The base itself presented a marked contrast to Guantánamo City, its cleanliness and creature comforts almost making up for its provincialism.

  Once liberated from household chores, what did Guantánamo women do? The navy pamphlet suggested that a seemingly infinite number of activities awaited enthusiastic navy wives. Wives could shop, recreate, worship, participate in the base’s many civic clubs, or travel.21 But, by all accounts, recreation was the distinguishing feature of the place. Swimming pools, beaches, and picnic grounds were readily available, as were two golf courses (eighteen and nine holes, respectively) complete with practice green and clubhouse. Family memberships at the gulf club cost four dollars per month. If swimming, golf, and picnicking weren’t their thing, wives could amuse themselves at bowling, tennis, horseback riding, baseball, softball, basketball, volleyball, cycling, archery, sailing, boating, hunting, fishing, rollerskating, or horseshoes. There were two hobby shops, a library, and four outdoor theaters, never mind the clubs for sailors. Indeed, the pamphlet marveled, with its “dances, special parties, bingo and the like,” the base provided “recreation commensurate with the average community of 8–10,000 population and the opportunity for a good time is here for all to enjoy.”

  But that wasn’t all. For the faithful, Guantánamo offered “both Catholic and Protestant Chaplains,” as well as “a Jewish Chaplain for special Jewish celebrations.” Divine worship, Holy Communion, Vesper fellowship, adult and child Bible study, a Protestant chapel choir, Sunday school—all these were available to military and civilian personnel. The base also sponsored a host of civic institutions—from the local PTA to the Hospital Volunteers to the Ladies Auxiliary, Toastmasters, Sojourners, Fellowcrafters, Navy Wives, Transport Volunteers, Altar Guild, Girl Scouts, and Brownies clubs.22

  Those determined to escape the base could “travel to other islands in the Caribbean area for a few days of relaxation, sightseeing, and shopping.” In what remained in the late 1950s very much a man’s navy, few of the vessels traveling to Caribbean ports could accommodate women; when space or circumstances didn’t allow for Caribbean travel, residents could visit destinations within Cuba, such as Havana, Santiago, or Guantánamo City.23

  And yet all the activities in the world couldn’t disguise the monotony of the place, according to Judy Spielman. Sure, there was household help and recreational opportunities on the base; at Guantánamo, naval officers and their families enjoyed a degree of luxury unattainable for most of them back in the United States. But the free time that the Cuban labor provided only underscored the fact that there was little or nothing meaningful for American women to do at Guantánamo Bay. Though Spielman worked in the Guantánamo library, hers was an “isolated, narrow life.” With little to do at the base, many navy wives resorted to heavy drinking—and to ignobler pursuits. Spielman remembers “lots of interaction between couples.”

  The naval base that Judy Spielman came to know was a “two tiered society,” with officers and their families enjoying privileges and perks unavailable to the civilian personnel and enlisted men (never mind the local workforce). Any discomfort with this arrangement was diluted in booze-soaked get-togethers at “Oil Point,” an exclusive watering hole reserved for officers and their wives.24

  By the spring of 1958, violence in the Guantánamo area had begun to impinge on Andrew Spielman’s fieldwork. In April 1958 he wrote his supervisor a letter, eagerly anticipating his visit. “We are looking forward to your visit this summer. I am sure you will find it enjoyable. This is nice vacation country.” Just how much of this nice vacation country the visitor would actually get to see was not yet clear. “If things improve out in Cuba,” Spielman wrote, “the trapping runs should be most interesting.” Spielman himself hadn’t “been able to get off the base” since January, due to local violence. “As you probably know,” Spielman wrote, “the Gtmo area has been the scene of an awful lot of fighting. We get periodic stories of mass executions and atrocities” carried out by Batista. “All most discouraging. My poor traps!”25

  It was only a few months later that Raúl Castro captured the busload of marines on liberty. After the kidnapping, the navy restricted military and civilian personnel to the base. “The political situation in Cuba continues in a very bad state,” Spielman wrote a colleague that month. “I am afraid that I may never be able to resume my field work in off base areas. It would be too dangerous.” Like his gnat study, the couple’s social life shrank intolerably. “The big news of the day in Gtmo,” Spielman wrote sarcastically, “is that the commissary is now stocking Chinese Food.”26

  The class, or status, distinctions that irked Judy Spielman were not the only form of social stratification at 1950s Guantánamo. Peter C. Grenquist, a junior officer at the base in the early 1950s, remembers a “19th-century colonial atmosphere” pervading the place, with “all the prejudice and discrimination” that this implied. It was as if Guantánamo officials were determined to “turn back the clock” to the era before the Second and even the First World War, when the various races knew their places.

  Hard racial lines distinguished whites, blacks, and “coloreds” (Filipinos and Chinese “coolies”) on the base. Indeed, until well into the 1960s, the vast majority of African Americans in the U.S. Navy worked in the Stewards Branch as servants and menial laborers. In 1949 there were 19 black naval officers in the entire U.S. Navy out of an officer corps numbering 45,464 (that is, four thousandths of 1 percent); by 1960 the number of black officers had risen seven times, but black officers still comprised less than 1 percent of the officer corps.27

  At the officers’ club out on Deer Point, Grenquist remembers being waited on by Filipinos and African American “servants” from the United States, including enlisted men serving as steward’s mates. “They cleaned our quarters, made our beds, set our tables with linens, served left, picked up right, all the while as we sat in order of rank, with the executive officer at the head of the table.”28 Commander Harold Sacks recalls a racial hierarchy affecting wage laborers on the base: the darker the Cuban waiter or maid, the less the pay. “There was a definite pecking order, from dark to light,” Sacks recalls, “in terms of earnings, wages, and expectations.”29

  Evidence from the Coral Reef, yearbook of the base’s William T. Sampson School, confirms this impression of Guantánamo as a sharply stratified place. In 1958, Andrew and Judy Spielman’s first full year on the base, student enrollment at William T. Sampson exceeded eleven hundred students for the first time. By the late 1950s the U.S. population as a whole was approximately 89 percent white and 10 percent black, though in the American South, where many military enlistees originated, the proportion of African Americans was closer to 20 percent. The 1958 Coral Reef depicts a school population at least 98 percent white. There was not a single African American or “colored” student in the high school. And though there were black and “colored” American, Cuban, and Jamaican workers on the base, there were no racial minorities among the faculty and administrators of the William T. Sampson School. If the base was a microcosm of the United States, as its residents liked to believe, it was a whiter, more homogeneous nation than the place its residents had left behind.30

  An all-white Guantánamo was not a product of coincidence. Rather, it reflected conscious U.S. Navy policy dating back to the late nineteenth century. Starting around 1890, just as Mahan, Roosevelt, Lodge, and others began to look outward for bases, architects of the “New Navy” resolved to tap the American heartland for recruits. Shipboard technological innovations had reduced the need for experienced sailors to man the fleet, allowing the navy to eschew the worldly, heterogeneous, and recalcitrant seafaring population typically found in America’s ports for the supposedly more moral, more disciplined, manl
ier, and, above all, whiter population of small-town America. World War I mobilization necessitated the enlistment of African American sailors and even the commissioning of a few black naval officers. But after the war, the navy consciously winnowed the number of African Americans in its ranks, and for a decade starting in 1922 it excluded African Americans from naval recruitment entirely. By the early 1940s, African Americans comprised between 2 and 2.5 percent of enlisted men. In 1949 there were few (literally a handful) of African American naval officers, and virtually all African Americans serving in the navy worked as steward’s mates.31 In 1942 the commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps described the enlistment of African Americans in the navy as “absolutely tragic.” What, he wondered, could explain Negroes’ determination “to break into a club that doesn’t want them?”32

  Yet, the idea of a New Navy comprised entirely of stolid small-town Anglo-Saxon stock was under assault from the very beginning. It represented a futile attempt to dodge the social and economic forces that threatened inherited Anglo-American assumptions about citizenship, civic identity, and racial and gender roles. By the 1950s the pace of this assault quickened, creating widespread anxiety, spawning political and cultural reaction, and inducing many citizens to run for cover. The U.S. Navy was not immune to these developments, and by the 1950s and early 1960s, African Americans began to infiltrate first the enlisted ranks and then, still more slowly, the officer corps. By the 1970s the navy began to refit its ships to accommodate a small but growing number of women.

  As depicted in the Coral Reef of 1958, the base at Guantánamo Bay might well be considered the last vestige of the New Navy. There is almost nothing in the yearbook to distinguish the base from the small-town, lily-white community about which the New Navy architects had dreamed. The crown-wearing king and queen of “the Stardust Ball”; the queen and her attendants at the boys’ Basketball Crowning; the school sports teams; the Student Council; the National Honor Society; the faculty; the “senior story”; the “when I grow ups”; the “last will and testament”; the first names: Don, Pam, Carol, Diana, Fred, Nancy, Judy, Beverly; the last names: Holloway, Newton, Delfo, Lyman, Williams, Stewart, Hoover, Ilgenfritz—everything about the yearbook suggests a place untouched by the social and cultural upheaval beginning to break over the United States. Only the School Board, consisting of nine officers and a few civilians, gives the game away, revealing that this is not small-town America at all but a mighty American naval base. “We’ve crossed the river,” reads the class epigram; “the ocean lies beyond.” That, and a cultural and social sea change for the graduates of the William T. Sampson School, who seem, somehow, inadequately prepared for the complexity of life back in the States. The journalist Tom Miller observed a few decades later in Esquire, “It is all very strange for someone approaching fifteen or sixteen to have spent most of her or his life within a forty-five-square-mile compound of leisure. Many remain on the base after high-school graduation as long as their parents remain. It is comparable to some prisoners who are afraid to reenter society after a few years in the pen. They hang out near the jail as a secure and familiar reference point.”33

  In March 1961, National Geographic magazine published its second major feature article on the U.S. naval base, the first since the coming of Castro. Journalists clearly welcomed the tension that the Cuban Revolution introduced to the base. They finally had something to write about.34 National Geographic staff writer Jules Billard told the story as a straightforward morality play. The Cuban Revolution not only jeopardized century-long rosy relations at the base, but it also imperiled the American Dream. But neither the base nor the American Dream would yield easily, Billard insists. They would be defended by the base’s intrepid soldiers and their unflappable women.

  By 1961 the myth of the U.S. naval base as a bastion of American virtue committed to securing both U.S. and Cuban interests was well advanced. The historical revisionism began at the beginning, ignoring the history of U.S. imperialism and the century-long debate in the United States about annexing Cuba. After Fidel Castro’s ascendancy, as the base’s importance as a symbol of American democracy in a Communist country increased, journalistic accounts juxtaposed the hostility emanating from Communist Cuba to the initial years of the base when it was “hired from a friendly Cuba.”35 The myth continues with the Teller Amendment’s disclaimer of U.S. ambition to dominate the newly independent Cuban republic, which works only by ignoring yet another debate, this time over the Platt Amendment. In place of Root’s and Wood’s open coercion of the Cuban Constitutional Convention, readers learn from Billard that in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish-American War, “the U.S. went whole-heartedly about living up to its high promise and began putting Cuba on its feet as an independent nation.” With “Uncle Sam” keeping “a protective arm around his island neighbor,” a Cuban republic was born. There followed “a 1903 treaty between the two nations” that conceded not only the right of the United States to occupy Guantánamo Bay, but also the right “to send its troops back whenever needed to smooth out Cuban affairs.” The rest, as the saying goes, is history. “For nearly 60 years the base placidly went about its business under the Caribbean sun. Now an unfriendly regime in Cuba wants the U.S. to move out.”36

  The myth is accompanied by carefully selected illustrations. The piece opens with two photographs of U.S. military surveillance of Cuba, one from an aircraft, one from a marine observation post. These are followed a few pages later by a photo of a U.S. helicopter patrolling the base’s perimeter. The situation is serious, readers are told, but the Americans have things readily in hand. It is safe to read on.

  As in Corey’s National Geographic piece from 1921, and in other journalistic accounts of the base, the most salient contrast remains that of color. In 1961 dark Cubans continued to work for white Americans. But Castro’s rise introduced an air of suspicion into what was once an ideal colonial relationship. (“U.S. citizens should not engage in arguments with Cuban nationals concerning Cuban political affairs,” advises a pamphlet prepared for prospective schoolteachers at Guantánamo Bay in 1968, though “the advantages of Democracy as opposed to Communism can be explained”37). A photo of Cubans hard at work on the base is juxtaposed with Cuban commuters being frisked by U.S. Marines as they head home, a safeguard that, readers learn, was designed to “discourage pilfering and cigarette smuggling.” On the whole, noted H. P. McNeal, the industrial relations officer at the base, “we think the Cubans are loyal employees,” though Billard learned that “one union leader has been fired for anti-U.S. statements” and there had been “disciplinary measures taken against other workers.” 38 After Castro’s arrival, apparently, workers could no longer be trusted.

  The dark, virtually all-male Cuban labor force depicted in these pages contrasts markedly to images of white domesticity. In one tableau, entitled “Guantánamo kiddies cherish their own Captain Kangaroo,” eight children (all but one towheads) surround Marine Corporal Walter Garwood, host of an entertainment show on the base television. Garwood, aka Cousin Whigby, is dressed for the prairie, in a straw hat, plaid shirt, and dungarees held up by suspenders. The following page offers a lesson in free enterprise and American culture. In one photo, a navy wife, dressed in a white sundress and sandals, purchases vegetables from a darkly clad Cuban farmer. In another, an all-white audience takes in the movie Bells Are Ringing on the terrace at the officers’ club. Finally, in a third photo, a naval officer unwinds with a Cuban newspaper bearing a picture of Fidel Castro and the headline “Are You with Us or Against Us!” (CON LA PATRIA O CONTRA LA PATRIA!) emblazoned on its front. The disorder gripping Cuba is juxtaposed with the calm of a well-ordered American living room on the U.S. base. Across the room from Dad, in a small inflatable swimming pool, sits a child closely supervised by his mother. Dad is unperturbed, the roles clear.39

  In 1921, Corey was gently reprimanded by the base commander for mistaking the navy for its ships rather than its men. One way of reading Billard’s piece, some forty yea
rs later, is that the navy is not just its men but also its women. They remind us what we’re fighting for. A year after Billard’s trip to Guantánamo Bay, another journalist asked the Defense Department why in the world “Navy wives and children remain in such a political hot spot as Guantánamo Bay.” Government policy, came the reply; the military “encourages dependents to accompany servicemen to foreign posts,” so long as their presence is consistent with “combat readiness.” (In 1962, over half a million servicemen’s and civilian employees’ dependents resided abroad.40) In short, the military expected wives to stand by their men. At Guantánamo, Billard suggests, this is exactly what wives do. In yet another photo, taken alongside a monument at McCalla Hill (where the U.S. Marines first came ashore in June 1898), an officer, clad in dress whites, tosses his child playfully into the air while his wife, no less primly dressed, stands statuesque, one arm resting on a ship’s cannon, confidently guarding the scene.41

  In 1961, no less than in 1930, not everyone found the bay completely to their liking. “For some,” Billard observes, “living within the confines of the seven-foot-high chain link fence is like being in an idyllic prison camp—a sort of ‘comfortable claustrophobia,’ as one seaman’s wife described it.” With only two stores to choose from, it was “the same old thing day after day.” With real work to do, navy officers seemed to find the base less constricting than their wives. One pilot compared the base to an island paradise—“Hawaii with Cubans.”42