Guantanamo: Isolated pawn in power game
GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba --Nearly every evening at the cocktail hour, the US Navy drops bombs on Cuba.
The noise does not attract much attention. American sailors barely look
from the tennis courts as TA-4 jets blast low over the coastline, lighting the sky with flares. Officers and their wives chat over drinks on verandas.
Not even Cuban troops posted within earshot stir at the explosions. In a nearby city whose motto is "The First Trenchline of Anti-Imperialism," routine training of US fighter pilots fails to distract domino players sitting down to a night of friendly betting.
"Oh yes, the Americans do drop their bombs on their side, and we do drop our bombs, too," said Primitivo Ferrer, a 62-year-old mechanic. "It's quite a custom. It is a product of the mutual hatred between our governments."
Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, is set to begin a visit to Cuba today. If he came here to the southeastern edge of the island, which is not expected, he would see one of the most bizarre sights anywhere in the Communist alliance: a US military base and its hometown.
There is not great interest these days in Guantanamo Bay, where a US base, valued by the US Navy but ignored by most Americans, looks across the world's largest mine field at a region of Cuba valued as symbolic by Fidel Castro but largely neglected by his government.
On both sides, Guantanamo Bay is a relic of US-Cuban relations that have been frozen in time for almost 30 years and seem destined to remain so. Under a treaty older than the 1959 revolution, the base, on Cuban soil, belongs to the United States through an indefinite lease.
Every year, the US government sends Cuba a rent check for $4,085. Every year, Cuba refuses to cash it.
Yet hostility has evolved here into a strange accommodation between adversaries. Soviet vessels and US warships slide by each other in the bay, their crews often waving. A deadly fence has made good neighbors, bound by common isolation and hopeless curiosity about life next door.
"I stare at the city lights at night and wonder what it's like over there," said the wife of a Marine officer, looking into the distance from the patio one evening as jazz from a Cuban radio station played in the background. ''If there is one regret about this place, it is that closed gate."
Guantanamo Bay's curious role in American history began at the turn of the century, after US troops intervened in Cuba's war of independence against Spain. In 1903, 45 square miles of deep-water port and shoreline land became the first US military base overseas.
The terms of the lease were changed in 1934 under the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, a US ally. Challenging logic, the amended treaty held that Guantanamo Bay belonged to Cuba but that the United States had rights to occupy it forever.
The base became the backbone of the area's identity. Sailors on liberty flocked to Guantanamo city and the small port of Caimanera on tropical evenings, filling bars, brothels and gambling halls. Two thousand Cubans entered the gates daily to work on the base.
Castro led the overthrow of Batista from rugged mountains that rise off the coast here. As relations between Cuba and the United States disintegrated -- breaking off entirely with a US trade embargo in 1961 -- the base became a refuge for Cuban exiles and a focus of contention.
The gates were closed. About 50,000 land mines were planted and guard towers erected. In 1964, while promising not to attack, the Cuban government severed the base's electricity and fresh water.
Today the base, called "Gitmo" or "the rock" by residents, is an island on an island. Its physical link to the outside world is a chartered flight that arrives twice a week from Norfolk, Va. Food is shipped in. Electricity and fresh water are processed at enormous expense from the sea.
The chief mission of the base has little to do with politics. Terrific weather and deep water eight minutes from dockside allow the Navy to schedule intense training exercises for 85 ships a year from the Atlantic Fleet.
Cuban officials acknowledge that the base poses little real military threat. US officials acknowledge that it possesses minimal strategic importance.
"The Cubans can very easily view and observe everything that we do on our
closed little station," said the base commander, Capt. John Boyd. "There are no surprises about what goes on here."
In fact, apart from the military, almost nothing seems to go on here. The base is a picture of small-town America, population 7,000. There is a single stoplight, one McDonald's and no crime. Yellow school buses ferry teen-agers to a single high school. Drivers leave their keys in the ignition because, simply, there is no place to take a stolen car.
"We're three hours from Norfolk, but we're a million miles from the United States," said Col. Thomas Stouffer, who commands 350 Marines stationed to defend the base. "There's no news, not much activity, and most residents don't know anything about the country 2 miles away across the fence."
Along the 17 miles of fence line, Marines and the Cuban Frontier Brigade pass most of the time staring at one another through telescopes. They record ship traffic and take pictures of each other, at times exchanging an internationally recognized single-digit greeting.
Tension along the line has virtually disappeared since the 1960s, when Cuba reported that one of its guards had been killed and several wounded by US troops. The Cuban government once issued a detailed annual summary of alleged acts of US provocation, ranging from "aiming weapons" to "offensive language." It no longer does.
The only contact with Cuba for most residents of the base is through exiles living on the military compound or from Cuban workers who still commute daily.
Under an agreement, Cuban employees on the base have been allowed to keep their jobs until retirement. Forty-one workers, now old men, walk to the northeast gate each morning through a cattle chute that threads its way across the mine fields.
Each night, they return to places in many ways as isolated as the one where they work. The city of Guantanamo and the town of Caimanera, trapped against the bay by a huge salt flat, are 500 miles from Havana and among the areas least developed by the revolution.
The presence of the base still excites mixed feelings among local Cubans. In Guantanamo, a quiet city of columned homes and shaded sidewalks, a history museum displays pictures both of the economic bustle and degradation often associated with the base.
"I never liked that base. I'm a Cuban. When the sailors left here, it eradicated something bad," said Primitivo Ferrer, who once worked as a shoeshine boy in the red-light district frequented by Americans.
"On the other hand, I really do hope that we can regain relations with the United States," he added, tinkering with the engine of a beautifully preserved 1952 Buick. "Our maximum leader, Fidel Castro, says that the United States is bad. But its products are good. This, for example, is the greatest automobile ever made."
Rafael Martinez, who worked at the base for 39 years before retiring last year, said he favored the base's return to Cuba. But he praised his American employers and said he has kept his job depite harassment from Communist Party officials.
"This city, and I say this from my heart, owes whatever greatness it has to the Americans and their naval base," he said. "I am proud to be a Cuban. But I don't understand the hate, the rancor. When I was young, the identification badge from the American base was a badge of honor."
In the early 1960s, hundreds of Cubans sought asylum on the base as political refugees, many of them braving the fence, land mines and searchlights. Some still make the journey. Six men arrived in January, two after a three-hour swim up the bay from Caimanera.
A handful of exiles remain on the base, where many are provided jobs and free housing by the US government. Yet here, too, the separation is an emotional trial.
Harry Sharpe, the manager of the Navy Chief Petty Officers' Club, said that for months after he came to stay in 1963, he had to drink heavily just to be able to gaze nights at the lights of Guantanamo.
"It still makes me nostalgic," he said. Sharpe, who became a US citizen, returned to Guantanamo in 1980 as a tourist, visiting family members for the first time since he had left.
"I liked it over there," he said. "The people who used to be up were down, and the people who used to be down were up. We were poor, but now I have a niece who's a doctor."
"Thirty years is a long time," he said. "If the United States can be a friend of Russia, then why not Cuba? It's the fault of both sides."
Cuban officials and academics in Havana argue that the base has become obsolete and is maintained in order to humiliate Cuba. They also argue that the existing lease is illegal.
"Every lawyer in the world knows that a lease without terms is not a lease, it's possession," said Miguel Antonio D'Estefano, a professor at the University of Havana who has written about the base. "This was agreed to with a gun at our head more than 50 years ago. It should be renegotiated."
Officials say that Cuba would agree not to use the base, if returned, for military purposes, as happened at the former US base in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam.
"Guantanamo Bay has economic importance for Cuba," said Rafael Hernandez of the Cuban Center of American Studies. "The development of the entire southeastern part of Cuba is limited by the absence of a deep-water port like that held by the Americans."
But the base appears to have slipped as a priority for negotiations. The US commitment to keeping it is likely to deepen as the base becomes increasingly involved in providing assistance to Coast Guard drug interdiction.
For Cubans on either side of the fence, Guantanamo Bay will remain a place where a country parted.
"I will remain Cuban, but my children will become Americans one day and leave me here," said Gilda Romero, an exile on the base for 25 years who has been denied US citizenship because she does not speak English.
"It is a tragedy to live in your own country and miss your country at the same time," she said. "But what can I do? It breaks my heart."
