Guantánamo

  Other articles repeat this tableau with other accents. A year after the National Geographic piece, Parade published a feature on Nell Schwarzenbach, a typical navy wife coming to terms with tense U.S.-Cuban relations at the base.43 “Mrs. Jeanelle Schwarzenbach, 23, a quiet, attractive mother of four, wakes up every morning threatened by the guns of a hostile, U.S.-hating Cuba,” journalist Ed Kiester wrote less than one year after the Bay of Pigs.44 “Her husband, Lt. (j.g.) Hart “Irish” Schwarzenbach, 25, is a Navy jet flier guarding our isolated naval base here against Fidel Castro’s possible aggression.” Thus the image of the U.S. naval base as an innocent and embattled enclave in Cuba is updated. “Only two miles from Nell Schwarzenbach’s kitchen, we watched sullen Cuban militiamen itchily finger their Red-supplied rifles as they patrolled the barbed-wire-topped fence dividing the base from Cuba proper.”

  Despite the mounting incidents of U.S.-Cuban hostility at the fence line, “Navy wives like Nell Schwarzenbach are cool and relaxed. Life perks along perfectly normally. Only the vaguest trace of uneasiness gives away what many must feel.” In fact, rumors of a pending military conflagration at the base are overblown, Schwarzenbach reports. “The fact is, you could live here for weeks and never give a thought to an attack.” What’s Schwarzenbach’s life like? Well, not so “different from life in a suburb of, say, Akron, Ohio. She lives in a four-bedroom, concrete-block, ordinary-looking ranch house, which sits on a street with five other identical ranches.” The Schwarzen-bachs’ eldest child attends the local nursery school; their younger children “play in a backyard that might be anywhere.”

  Though “Navy old-timers” refuse to see Castro’s rise as a threat to Guantánamo’s “soft living,” Kiester’s article attests, the backdrop of U.S.-Cuban political tension is palpable. What accounts for it? No U.S. action, to be sure—not the Bay of Pigs invasion, not ongoing CIA efforts to destabilize the current political regime and even assassinate Castro, not long-standing Cuban grievances over what remains America’s enduring imperial presence on the island. No. Simply Castro’s unaccountable, utterly capricious “threat to reclaim the area” for Cuba.45

  Like other navy wives featured in journalistic accounts of Guantánamo reaching back decades, Nell Schwarzenbach confesses to feeling a bit confined on the naval base. It can seem like a “sunny prison.” At Guantánamo, wives “feel cut off from the rest of the world. We get Sunday newspapers from the States and we read the base newspaper … . But somehow we feel out of touch with what’s going on back home, back there on the ‘big green island.’” A few of Schwarzenbach’s peers are more “bitter.” If Castro is “such a great liberator,” one wonders, “why doesn’t he liberate us?” But heck, these are just the offhand remarks of a few wives, and they can readily be ignored.46

  The tension between the United States and Cuba is manifest not in the persons of the unflappable wives but in their Cuban maids, Kiester suggests. The rise of Castro inconveniences the maids, who are now subjected to harassment and searches as they move to and from their families in Cuba. The maltreatment of them also discomfits Nell Schwarzenbach. She and her husband sorely want to intervene, but “can do nothing to help. If we gave our maid food or extra money for her family, she would only lose it at the gate. All we can do is sympathize.” Maids bear the burden of U.S.-Cuban hostility in yet another way. During and just after the Bay of Pigs invasion, Castro unaccountably closed off access to the base.

  In Billard’s account, there’s lots of talk about Castro invading the base. Nell Schwarzenbach has her doubts. “If he should attack, the U.S. would immediately strike back,” she says. “I don’t think Castro would want to give us that opportunity.” Schwarzenbach is more right than she knows. At the time this piece came out, while Castro was doing his best to stay away from Guantánamo, Kennedy administration officials were contemplating the first of several staged attacks on the base, which might serve as an excuse to invade Cuba. Withal, Nell Schwarzenbach maintains her equilibrium. Underlying the tension and her friends’ worried letters is a more fundamental fact: “Whether we’re here or not, and whether we’re in danger, or uncomfortable, or tense, or whatever, isn’t really the important thing. Castro will still be here, and that’s what they ought to be worrying about. Communism in our backyard—that’s the real menace.”47

  On February 2, 1964, the U.S. Coast Guard seized four Cuban fishing vessels, manned by thirty-eight crew members, which had strayed into U.S. territorial waters while trolling off the Florida Keys. The vessels, loaded with radio equipment, appear to have been ordered into U.S. waters by Cuban authorities as a deliberate provocation. The United States was only too happy to take the bait. After returning seven teenagers among the crew to Cuba, Florida officials detained the rest in Monroe County jail. In this, the age of rule by frat boys, Castro howled in protest, and the situation quickly escalated. On February 6, in a long-anticipated strike at the naval base, Castro shut off the water line connecting the base to the nearby Yateras River. By early evening the last drops of water trickled through the pipes at the base. At the time, the base held between fourteen and fifteen million gallons in reserve, enough, at the usual rate of consumption, to last approximately seven days. Meanwhile, two water barges headed to Guantánamo from Jamaica, while several water tankers prepared for duty along the eastern seaboard of the United States. Water on the base was instantly rationed. President Johnson announced that there was plenty of water to sustain naval operations at Guantánamo Bay. And he insisted that the United States would never be driven from Guantánamo. Meanwhile Castro, ever the generous defender of the meek and vulnerable, stated that he would permit water to flow for one hour a day to provide for women and children. By this time the Johnson administration had vowed to make the base independent of Cuba, which implied the installation of a desalination plant in the near future.

  On February 8 a study group consisting of senior naval officers and representatives of the Joint Chiefs of Staff traveled to Guantánamo to assess the situation, examine the problem of Cuban labor on the base, and confront the challenges involved in making the base independent of Cuba. By February 10, pressure gauges at the naval base indicated that water was flowing to the base from the Yateras River, but naval officials declined to open the valves to accept it. Two days later, on February 12, 270 of the 2,400 or so Cuban commuters employed at the base were fired from their jobs. Naval officials had long had their eye on “security” risks among the Cuban labor force; these, along with a few recalcitrant workers and troublemakers, were the first to go. That same day, the navy announced that it would no longer permit dependents to accompany military personnel on tours to Guantánamo. Through a process of attrition, dependents would be gone within two years. “Suburban Living Is on Its Way Out as Gitmo Gears to Garrison Life,” reported the Navy Times.48

  On February 16, amid further dismissals of Cuban workers, the Cuban government accused base officials of stealing water above and beyond the one-hour, 114,000-gallon limit Castro had agreed to furnish for women and children. In fact, the base had not accepted any water since the initial shutoff, and the accusations and counteraccusations triggered a showdown between Castro and the base commander, famous in Guantánamo circles for providing the United States with its first “victory” over Cuban communism.

  The base commander at the time of the water fight was a man named John D. Bulkeley, a decorated war veteran admired for evacuating General Douglas MacArthur and his family from Corregidor in March 1942 in the face of the Japanese advance, and promoted to vice admiral by John F. Kennedy. Kennedy himself was behind Bulkeley’s assignment to Guantánamo Bay. Guantánamo, everybody in the navy knew, had the reputation of being the place where the navy sent senior officers before putting them on the shelf. Neither the president nor Bulkeley saw his new assignment that way. “That rascal Fidel Castro had been harassing our naval base at Guantánamo in every devious manner that he and his henchmen could think of,” Bulkeley later recalled. “So Bobby Kennedy told me [private
ly] that the president wanted me to go down there and take charge of the base, stand up to Castro, and show ‘that bastard with the beard who’s boss in this part of the world,’ as he put it.”49

  Bulkeley arrived at Guantánamo with all the confidence of a man who could never imagine why Castro could possibly resent an American colony on Cuban soil. “Gitmo is sure as hell not going to be another Pearl Harbor—for Castro … or anyone else,” Bulkeley told a journalist shortly after his arrival. “Nothing fazes this man,” the press reported dutifully. “Castro’s going to find out he’ll have his hands full—just like the Japs did.”50

  Nineteen sixty-four was an election year, and when news of the water fight broke out in the United States, President Johnson and presidential candidate Barry Goldwater competed to out-bluster each other. “If Castro thinks he can blackmail the Johnson administration out of Guantánamo,” Johnson is said to have remarked, “he has totally misread his adversary.” The United States must “be firm,” Goldwater countered. “Castro’s action has made the United States the laughing stock of the world … . Our flag has been spat upon and torn to the ground, and as an American I am sick and tired of it.” The next day, Goldwater boasted that he would be happy to lead the U.S. Marines in a charge on the Cuban pumping station, so long as “Castro [himself] promises to be” there.51 Kennedy had personalized the conflict with Cuba. Johnson, Goldwater, and Bulkeley were only too happy to join the fray, notwithstanding Kennedy’s lack of success in undermining the Cuban dictator. As the water fight escalated, one Guantánamo staff member recalled that “all of us around the admiral felt that, if it could be arranged, Bulkeley would like nothing better than to meet Castro in a one-on-one, no-holds-barred barroom brawl—winner take all.”52

  Meanwhile, the U.S. press service clamored for access to the naval base. Initially the Pentagon said no; such meddling was not in the “national interest.”53 Restricted access to press, civilians, and other prying eyes is partly what made the naval base so valuable. But the vacuum of U.S. news out of Guantánamo played right into Castro’s hands. Beginning on February 16, U.S. Navy secretary Paul H. Nitze complained that news accounts out of Cuba accusing the base of stealing water were “gaining some currency in the US.” Wasn’t there something base officials could do to counter Castro’s lies? Grant access to the U.S. press corps, came the obvious reply. Within days, more than a dozen reporters descended on the naval base. Bulkeley played the press like a fiddle. On the evening of February 17 he gathered a group of reporters and base officials at the northeast gate, where the water pipe from the Yateras River entered the naval base. There, amid flashing cameras and great fanfare, he excavated a large square of earth down to the Yateras pipeline, removing a thirty-eight-inch section. The U.S. pipeline was dry; accusations that the base was stealing water were a lie. Asked if superiors in Washington had ordered him to cut the pipe, Bulkeley replied no: he had simply informed the Pentagon that he planned to cut it unless otherwise directed; after all, Castro had called him “a liar.”54

  Bulkeley had ensured that the U.S. naval base would now have to provide its own water. Reading press and biographical accounts of the episode, one might conclude that Bulkeley had introduced liberal democracy to Cuba. Clearly the press relished the appearance of the United States coming out on top. “Almost overnight, John Bulkeley’s hole in the ground near the main gate has become a sort of Guantánamo liberty bell,” Bulkeley’s biographer wrote years later (a telling metaphor for a U.S. triumph at this imperialist enclave). Cartoons of a brisk and businesslike Bulkeley cutting off Castro’s pipeline (which, in the G-rated version, looks like nothing so much as a bullhorn) accompanied glowing descriptions of the Guantánamo commander finally forcing Castro to “Pipe Down.”55 This was a “tale of triumph,” the London Daily Telegraph reporter Edwin Tetlow announced. “The U.S. has won a tactical victory in a tussle with Fidel Castro and in a more significant struggle with world communism. Such victories have been scarce enough.”56

  Bulkeley himself appears to have been on quite a high that night. Castro was rumored to be lurking in nearby Cuban hills during the pipe-cutting ceremony, his Colt .45 slung from a holster. Bulkeley favored the .357 Magnum, and it, too, was close at hand. Through much of the night after the pipe cutting, Bulkeley patrolled the base perimeter, “scrambling up one steep hill and down another” clad “in combat gear and carrying a loaded rifle.” In this game of cops and robbers, the vice admiral was not going to be caught off guard. “In the darkness, the admiral threaded past mine fields, some real, some dummies, with their triangular red warning signs. His bodyguard, a Tommy gun–toting marine less than half Bulkeley’s age, was hard put to keep pace.”57

  The water episode led to a public relations blitz, suggesting that the Johnson administration preferred to fight this cold-war battle with propaganda rather than outright espionage. That same year, Guantánamo officials set out to win the hearts and minds not only of Cubans on the base but also of nationals at other Caribbean ports. The plan was simply to outspend the enemy. For Cubans living and working on the base, there would be sumptuous Christmas dinners, Spanish-language movies, and rehabilitation of Cuban housing. Farther afield, there would be Girl Scout trips from the base to Jamaica, distribution of “materials” to other Caribbean ports, and disaster relief for Haiti following Hurricane Flora. Though the effect of such programs was hard to quantify, Guantánamo officials insisted that “the authorities and peoples of the countries within the GTMO Sector, CARIBSAFRON have been favorably influenced by the Cold War activities carried out by the command. The resources being devoted to Cold War activities are considered to be paying a worthwhile return.” These initiatives did not completely take the place of muscle flexing. “There is ample evidence in this area that the readiness and capability of the United States to prevail in limited and general war is well-demonstrated, is credible, and has provided a deterrent to aggression,” a report emphasized. With the Fleet Training Group keeping the bay full of warships, the base could be confident that Castro would behave himself. When “parades, static displays, demonstrations, air shows,” and threat of war weren’t enough, there was always a demonstration of America’s material wealth: “The Navy and Marine Corps exchanges, commissary, certain clubs, beaches and other facilities are patronized by indigenous persons along with U.S. citizens,” a report observed. “By this means indigenous personnel are afforded an opportunity to see, appreciate, and share in the bounty provided by our system of government.”58

  When Castro cut off the water in February 1964 the United States responded by firing roughly four-fifths of the Cuban commuters (consisting of “Cuban nationals,” “Chinese, West Indians, etc”) working on the base. Like cutting off the water pipe, cutting off the Cuban labor supply was designed to make the base independent of Cuban labor and thereby free of Cuban government interference. As early as 1961, Castro had forbidden Cubans to seek new jobs on the base, confronting the Americans with a labor deficit as Cubans retired or ceased working, and forcing U.S. officials to appeal to the Jamaican government for labor. In fact, a 1967 Guantánamo labor report suggests that, in releasing the Cuban workers, the Americans shot themselves in the foot. Among other advantages, “the Cuban commuters required practically no logistic support except for on-base transportation” and a few meals. By contrast, a replacement workforce from Jamaica or elsewhere required everything—from room and board to training and transportation. Moreover, the commuting population comprised men and women both. Again, by contrast, the Jamaican labor force consisted of men only. Less cut out for domestic maid service, they were unable to free up “dependent U.S. wives from household chores,” thereby disqualifying American women from the base workforce.59

  The firing of commuters had other unanticipated repercussions. Faced with the termination of their jobs, many commuters declared themselves exiles and appealed to naval officials for permanent residency on the base. This confronted the base with the prospect, unprecedented in U.S. military experienc
e, of inheriting a permanent, aging occupational force that would one day be in need of geriatric care. (Indeed, to this day, there remain aging Cubans on the base whose medical requirements differ markedly from those of the conventional military population.) Curiously, many of this last category were Chinese, unwilling to return to Cuba or Communist China.60 “Some of them are already old men incapable of work. Ultimately all of them will attain this status, imposing a potential geriatric problem upon the Naval Hospital.” As if this weren’t enough, the “same trend [of aging Chinese and Cuban residents alike] must be anticipated for requirements for caskets and burial plots in the Base cemetery.”61

  The balance of the 1967 Work Force Study addressed the difficulty caused by trying to replace mostly skilled so-called Cuban nationals, Chinese, and West Indians with mostly unskilled Jamaicans, which turns out to have been the only segment of its population that the Jamaican labor ministry was willing to part with. Many factors contributed to souring the relationship between the Jamaicans and their American hosts, from the fact that the Americans did not hide their preference for the old commuters, to substandard wages, poor housing, and the fact that U.S. officials did not allow families to accompany the Jamaican workers to the base.62 But a wider chasm divided the Jamaicans from the American community: race. The 1967 report admitted as much. “The majority of the Jamaican workers are emotionally immature,” the report suggests, and therefore cannot handle separation from their families. Separation “is a traumatic experience for them because of their fundamental and unsophisticated attitudes towards sex.” Jamaican workers “lack a sense of responsibility for planning for the future and think in terms of day-to-day living.” Inevitably among such a population there was a “high turn-over rate.” No wonder, then, that “most American supervisors on the Base,” both military and civilian, treated the Jamaicans in a “deprecatory and demeaning” manner. “The low productivity of the Jamaican, his lack of native industry, his color, his language, his body odor, are all subjects of disparagement and critical comment.” As a result, training and assimilating the Jamaicans became extremely difficult, ultimately handicapping the base still more. For their part, the Jamaicans obviously recognized the “contempt” of their American hosts and resented the Americans’ name-calling. (Gooney was a favorite term of opprobrium.)