As I studied Gitmo from the overlook, I thought the base was an absurdity, a ludicrous embodiment of America’s imperial ambitions (past and present); but I did not regard the base as particularly invidious or inimical or evil—a characterization of the place that shortly would become more accurate. Moreover, on that day in 1998, I had forgotten that just a few years before my visit Guantánamo had already been deployed as a prison camp of sorts. In the early 1990s, Haitian refugees captured on the open seas had been diverted to Guantánamo and held there in what were reported to be deplorable conditions; the practice, which included isolating HIV-positive people, ended in 1995 after the camp was declared illegal by a US district court judge. At the time, US government officials were already claiming that Gitmo was not subject to laws of the mainland because Guantánamo was not technically US territory. In retrospect, dealing with the Haitian refugees turned out to be a logistical trial run for what was to come later, after 9/11.
*
The tour guide had finished with his overview of Guantánamo’s topography. The German tourists had taken their photographs and wandered away from the lookout platform to the outpost’s other attraction—a diner that served up chicken and drinks. In fact, the price of the tour included a complimentary drink from the bar, your choice of rum mixed with fruit juice or cola. The Germans were jovially imbibing. I went over to the bar for my drink. It was very strong, more rum than juice, and I said as much in Spanish to the bartender. He beamed. This was the highest quality rum, he asserted, the best in Cuba. In the world. Of course, it was strong. Cuban rum was the strongest and the best. He asked me how to say “best” in German.
Not German, I told him. American.
His response was typical of what I had encountered in Cuba—surprise and keen interest.
“A Yanqui!” He called over to the waiter to tell him the news: a Yanqui in their midst. The waiter came over to have a look. “A Yanqui, eh? Don’t you know you’re supposed to be down there”—he waved toward the base—“not up here? Did you get lost? Or maybe you are a defector!” He smiled broadly. He was getting a kick out of teasing me.
No, just a tourist, I said.
“So you want to see what your imperialist government is up to, eh?” Yes, I agreed, that pretty much summarized it.
He nodded. “Tell me, amigo, are you a baseball fanatic? Yes? Then tell me—I need inside information—who is strong this year? Who will win the championship of American baseball? I have bets with my compañeros.”
“Hard to say,” I said, “but definitely not Miami.”
“No? But they are last year’s champions, the defenders.” “Yes, but they sold their best players.”
“Sold?”
“Yes, or traded them.”
“Sold. Traded. I see, like slaves.” “Something like that.”
“This,” he asserted, “is why Cuban baseball is better than American baseball. In America, the players must perform as slaves for the owners. No matter how much money the players get, they are still property. In Cuba, they play for love of the sport. They play with their hearts. Now, then, tell me, who will win this year’s championship?”
“Good question,” I said. “Probably the Yankees. The Yankees always win.” “Always? Well, we will see. We will see. Perhaps one day the Yankees will prove not so powerful as they think.” He smiled and shook my hand.
*
Having basked in the warm sun and indulged in the strong drinks, we tourists tipsily boarded the bus for the short ride down to Caimanera, a fishing village situated just outside the perimeter of the naval base. There were more checkpoints, then a causeway lined with salt dehydration ponds. On the other side of the causeway, Caimanera was perched on an extension of Guantánamo Bay. The hotel occupied a small hill looking onto the waterfront. The hotel grounds included a pool and a watchtower, the latter built to give hotel guests a better view of the perimeter of the base.
After getting settled in my room, I went out to ascend the tower. Meanwhile, the Germans, lolling around the pool, were drinking again—mojitos and daiquiris. Music played over the loudspeakers, including, inevitably, the popular song, “Guantanamera.”
The observation tower offered a partial view of the inner bay and the base, but nothing like the view from the overlook where I had just been. So I turned my attention to the little town. It appeared to be as sleepy and slow as you would imagine a waterfront town in the tropics to be. A few people strolled the streets, kids played in the dirt, dogs sniffed puddles and trash cans. Here and there people stood in clusters or sat on doorsteps engaged in casual and sometimes spirited chatter. As usual in Cuba, the conversations were not hushed; voices carried, and I could almost eavesdrop on the gossip, the friendly arguments, the earnest conversations taking place several blocks away. Three men peered into the open hood of a car, deep in deliberation over the vehicle’s malfunction and possible solutions. Two women laughed heartily at a joke. A boy whistled as he rode a bicycle.
During Gitmo’s heyday, in the years before Castro came to power, Caimanera was quite a lively town, with several bars and brothels attending to the desires of American servicemen. During Prohibition, when drinking was not allowed on the base, Caimanera was especially active—and atmospheric. According to National Geographic’s reporter in 1921, “one thousand associated smells assail the nostrils when one climbs on [Caimanera’s] rickety boat wharf” to visit the town with its “sordid streets of one-story shanties.” Dogs and “naked gourd-shaped babies” predominated while a two-goat cart hauled water to the plaza for domestic use. There were “dark-skinned women dressed in flowing white, languidly fanning themselves as the ship’s barge puts in.” The bars were Sis’s Place, The Two Sisters, and The American Bar. These were open-air saloons, and the action was frenetic. The bartenders would “rain perspiration from their dark brows” as they prepared “the seductive daiquiri.”
On Sundays, the town featured day-long cockfights. Beyond the bars, “down the dingy, dusty, sometimes flagrantly muddy street, with its weird multitude of vicious odors,” the National Geographic writer detected the symbolic aura of another continent: “All the way up the Guantánamo River the atmosphere has suggested Joseph Conrad’s African backgrounds. The dark currents, the violent green of the contorted mangroves that curtain the banks, the ‘Red Mill’ at which a sugar schooner bakes lazily in the sun and near which a solitary saloon is thrust invitingly forward over water—all have a remote and exotic air.” In such a setting, American soldiers could well imagine that they had truly taken up “the white man’s burden,” as Kipling had exhorted them to do in his well-known poem written on the occasion of America’s defeat of Spain in 1898—the victory that had delivered Guantánamo to the United States. In the poem, Kipling spoke of America’s “new-caught, sullen peoples / Half-devil and half-child.”
In 1958, when civic unrest during Castro’s rebellion put Americans in danger, Caimanera and the rest of Cuba became off limits for Gitmo’s personnel.The pre-1959 literature on Guantánamo Naval Base—primarily magazine and newspaper articles—usually gave Caimanera a lot of attention. For example, a 1927 article published in H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury described Caimanera as a “queer little village” where American officers drank daiquiris in “a rickety wooden building like a squat barn built on piles over whispering, greenish water.” At “a long, battered mahogany bar,” the sailors sang songs about life on the base with lines like, “We’re sitting here so free swallowing Bacardi” and “Put your troubles on the bum, here we come full of rum.” Dogs scavenged the floor and a character named Peanut Mary stood in the doorway hawking peanuts and lottery tickets. (In American Mercury’s rendition, Peanut Mary is made to speak with some sort of Southern black or perhaps Jamaican dialect.) Meanwhile, the residents of Caimanera were on the outside looking in: “A hundred grinning black faces at the wide glassless windows on the street side.” The Navy Wife, too, in her 1930 article “Guantánamo Blues,” ventured into Caimanera to describe Pepe’s Bar, “a small picturesque but smelly shed which might have been put together in a movie studio for a Mexican melodrama.”
In 1958, when civic unrest during Castro’s rebellion put Americans in danger, Caimanera and the rest of Cuba became off limits for Gitmo’s personnel. But in the years leading up to the closing of the gates, Caimanera was a riotous—and repugnant—place. Sailors who had been stationed at the base later recalled Caimanera’s muddy streets and wretched poverty. Shacks wobbled on stilts over the bay. Garbage and human waste drifted in putrid water. Atrocious smells predominated, venereal diseases were prevalent, typhoid a constant concern. Caimanera was “a large-scale brothel,” according to one sailor who visited in the 1940s, with girls available for the going rate of $2.50. The Navy operated an off-base first-aid station right in Caimanera, dispensing condoms and penicillin.
Cuban discontent over the US presence at Guantánamo began the moment the treaty granting occupancy to the United States was signed. It continued through the decades and fed the ire of revolutionaries. Cuba had been prostituted to the United States both metaphorically—billions in profits from sugar production, casinos, and tourism left the country for the United States—and literally in places like Caimanera.
The United States was always quick to point out that American investment had brought major improvements to Cuba, especially in terms of infrastructure. The base at Guantánamo, the argument went, was the economic engine for the region (a similar argument was made about the US Naval base at Subic Bay in the Philippines). Many locals had jobs on the base—good jobs—and without those jobs the region would be mired in economic depression. Such arguments did not account for the huge social costs that Caimanera and nearby Guantánamo City were forced to pay. The sailors’ and journalists’ descriptions of the towns at the time suggest that seediness prevailed, that the wealth supposedly generated by the American presence never really trickled down.
Certainly the vast majority of Cubans have seen little to no good in the US occupation of Guantánamo. Like the Filipinos who objected to the US naval base at Subic Bay, Cubans have longed desperately for an end to the imperial occupation. Fidel Castro called the base “a dagger in the heart of Cuba,” and there is every reason to believe that he spoke from the deep anguish of a patriot and not as a posturing propagandist (as many American officials were keen to characterize him).
The wounds have been very real. Consider “Guantanamera,” the irresistible song that celebrates the charms of a young woman from Guantánamo province. It is probably the most famous, the most world-renowned piece of music to come out of Cuba (and that is saying something given how musically prolific the island has been), a universally recognized manifestation of Cuban culture. Americans never think of this, but many Cubans do: during the years when the song was gaining in popularity and earning international renown, there was a very good chance that any given Guantanamera was a prostitute entertaining American servicemen for $2.50.
My view of Caimanera from the observation tower suggested that the little town was much better off now that it had no traffic with the base. It was relatively clean and sanitation was adequate. People were not rich but they were able to get by with dignity. Prostitution was a thing of the past. Life was tranquil and, by all appearances, pleasant enough. I doubted that anyone wanted to go back to prior arrangements.
The sun was now setting and the people ambling the streets of Caimanera were receding into shadows. The bay waters flashed with silver. At that moment, I felt fortunate to have had the chance to visit this part of Cuba, fortunate to have had a glimpse of the base, fortunate to have seen this once notorious little town now so much changed from what it had been when the sailors and Marines hooted and howled and puked on its streets. Most of all, I felt fortunate to have had the chance to see, however distantly, a place of importance to Stephen Crane’s personal history and to the ongoing story of Cuban–American relations.
*
In retrospect, my casual and pleasant visit with its complimentary rum drink has taken on a more sobering quality. The tropical haze hovering over the place has become thicker, darker. Imagine someone in 1950 recalling a 1925 visit to the once tranquil German village of Dachau: That is how I now feel about my brief glimpse of Guantánamo. Years after that glimpse, Gitmo, having been repurposed as a Kafkaesque penal colony, can no longer be dismissed as the odd neocolonial outpost that I thought I saw from the Malones Lookout. What had seemed merely ludicrous and anachronistic in 1998 has become, in hindsight, something much more insidious.
By 2004, nearly 800 prisoners in the War on Terror had been brought to Guantánamo and incarcerated in an isolated sector of the base known as Camp Delta. Over the years, reports of mistreatment and torture have surfaced, leading to international condemnation. Though the number of prisoners has steadily been reduced, to this day the prison camp remains operational and, by presidential executive order in 2017, will remain operational indefinitely. Meanwhile, the United States has no plans to turn the naval base over to Cuba.
By coincidence, the place where Stephen Crane and the Marines landed in 1898 is located just four miles from Camp Delta. As Crane reported, he and the Marines came ashore at nightfall. Nearby, a small village was burning—the result of American bombardment. From this first beachhead, the Cuban interior appeared “sombre,” a place of “mysterious hills” covered with “a thick, tangled mass.” The Marines did not know what awaited them in that interior, but they were, as Crane described them, confident that they could subdue whatever force they encountered.
In 1898, with one of the nation’s major writers as witness, some of the defining attributes of American hubris were on display from San Juan Hill to the shores of Guantánamo Bay. They still are.
This essay originally appears in the current issue of the New England Review.
