Guantanamo Bay: The Epitome of So Close, and Yet So Far Away

The drink selection is limited, but the view is hard to match.

Where else but on the red vinyl bar stools atop Mt. Malones could tourists sip rum in Cuba while peering through Soviet-made binoculars at the U.S. naval base on Guantanamo Bay?

Here, visitors--mainly Europeans--watch helicopters take off to patrol the base perimeter, or look at residential zones through a viewer made by Sea Coast Manufacturing of Fair Hope, Ala., imported somehow despite a decades-long U.S. trade embargo. And they spend dollars that Cuba desperately needs to pay for imports.

In an irony typical of life in Guantanamo, Cubans have made a tourist attraction of a hated symbol of U.S. incursion into their island, a reminder of the time when the United States dominated Cuba.

“People think that Cuba is 90 miles from the United States, but it’s not,” said Pedro Hope, who guides tourists through three Cuban military checkpoints to reach the lookout. “Here in Guantanamo, the United States is right next door.”

That proximity sharpens the contrast between two markedly different societies.

The base that tourists see from Mt. Malones has wide, well-kept streets and modern buildings so freshly painted they gleam.

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Guantanamo is in one of impoverished Cuba’s poorest provinces, also called Guantanamo.

At Cuba’s eastern tip, it is the land where palm trees grow in “Guantanamera” (as a woman from Guantanamo is called), probably the best-known song about Cuba.

The boulevard that leads from the highway into the town of Guantanamo has flowered median strips and painted curbs. But most of the town consists of old, wooden buildings whose paint is fading, if not chipped away, in the tropical heat.

No one knows the contrasts between the town and the base better than Hector Hodges. For 42 years, he journeyed every day from Guantanamo’s potholed streets to the shipshape naval base.

“In Gitmo, we have no traffic,” he said of his town, using Navy slang for Guantanamo. “On the U.S. naval base a few miles from here, you couldn’t imagine the amount of cars and trucks. Everybody has transportation on base.”

He retired the day after Christmas last year, at age 72. Despite glasses as thick as bottles, Hodges could no longer see well enough to drive a delivery truck with so many other vehicles on the road.

With his departure, only 18 Cuban workers, all hired before the 1959 revolution, are still at the base. They are a privileged group here, because they earn dollars.

Hodges’ $500 monthly pension, paid in U.S. dollars, is 10 times the wage of a Cuban factory worker. Because the town of Guantanamo has few factories and high unemployment, most people here live on far less than even those wages.

In that atmosphere, Hodges’ hefty pension sometimes creates resentment.

“The neighbors treat me different because I have dollars,” Hodges said. People expect him to lend them money and become angry if he does not, and they expect him to bring the rum or beer to any gathering.

“They believe I am super-rich,” Hodges said. “I am not super-rich.”

He is able to afford at least one ostentatious quirk. Waiting for him outside the Odd Fellows Lodge where he reminisces is the horse coach and driver he keeps on hand--his solution to the gasoline shortages that make cars impractical in the town.

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The lodge is a relic of the days when the base and the town were almost one and the same, similar to the relationship between military bases and nearby small towns in the United States. Two lodge members out of five used to work at the base.

When the base, a legacy of the Spanish-American War that briefly made Cuba a U.S. protectorate, was expanded during World War II, it offered jobs for civilians as office workers, deliverymen and other such positions. Jamaicans, who had migrated to Cuba to cut sugar cane, and their descendants flocked to Guantanamo to fill them.

English “was not required to work on base, but if you could speak English, it was to your benefit,” Hodges said. “You could get a better job.”

Hodges is the son of Jamaicans and was born in the neighboring state of Holguin.

Tour guide Hope’s Jamaican-born father also migrated from western Cuba to Guantanamo to get a job at the base, along with more than 800 other workers.

As a result, Guantanamo has one of the largest English-speaking communities in Cuba. Many of them have proudly passed on English to their children and grandchildren.

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Susana Brown, the granddaughter of Jamaicans and the daughter of a former naval base employee, speaks English shyly, with a perfect Jamaican accent.

“When I was a little girl, I used to go play with children on the base,” recalled Brown, now 40. “Everything was different. All the streets were lighted.”

Thirty years later, the town still does not have lighted streets.

“The situation here was different then too,” she said, sipping a soft drink at an open-air restaurant near Guantanamo’s main square. “People could dress well, and there was plenty of food.” U.S. armed forces stationed at the base spent money in the town.

That all changed after Fidel Castro became president after the revolution and declared himself a Marxist.

“There have been more tensions, more restrictions since Castro took over,” Hodges said.

As the relationship between the United States and Cuba became more hostile, the relationship between the base and the town also changed.

In 1964, two Cuban soldiers were killed patrolling outside the base, and in 1966 a third Cuban soldier was shot to death. The Cuban government retaliated by cutting off electricity and water to the base.

Minefields were substituted for guards near the base, and an area 15 miles wide around the perimeter of the base was declared a Cuban military zone with restricted access.

Since then, there has been only one access route to the base by land, through the gate that the civilian workers use. Only those workers now travel between the base and Guantanamo--no sailors go to town and no Guantanameros visit the base.

Everything at the base is now imported. Those who have visited the commissary say it looks like a U.S. supermarket, with no hint of any Cuban-made goods or other indication that the shoppers are in Cuba.

Because of the U.S. embargo, parts are no longer available in town for the old U.S.-made radios, appliances and occasional jalopy that Cubans somehow manage to keep running. Anything new was manufactured in former Soviet states, China or Europe.

“In the decade of the ‘60s, [U.S. officials] began to pressure us to either stay at the base”--to defect--”or be fired,” Hodges recalled. “I have my wife and two children. I could not stay. They came to me three times. I told them: ‘I’m not staying on base. Take away my pass. I don’t care.’ ”

Hodges is vague about how he was able to keep his job. Most of his colleagues were not as lucky. Between 1966 and 1968, 800 Cuban workers were forced to give up their jobs at the naval base because they would not defect.

Victor Swayve, now 83, was among them. Thirty years later, he is still bitter.

“When I worked at the base, I was satisfied,” the former office clerk said. “I was someone important. They took that away.”

Swayve’s neighbors looked up to him when he worked at the base, earning dollars and having access to the commissary, he said. Women liked the gifts he could buy them. After leaving the base he found a job as a baker in a government bread store, but life was never the same.

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The loss of the civilian jobs--and the possibility of dollar earnings that they represented--had a profound impact on the town. Instead of being a privileged town where people brought home big paychecks from the base, Guantanamo became simply the capital of a struggling province.

“Political problems [between the United States and Cuba] put an end to the possibilities that our parents enjoyed,” Brown said.

Now, Brown, a veterinarian specializing in poultry, works to develop chickens that will lay eggs regularly and eat food that they scrounge for themselves. Cubans cannot always afford chicken feed and need an inexpensive source of protein.

The day-to-day struggle to live through the economic crisis brought on by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of the subsidies it sent Cuba occupies the minds of most of the town’s residents more than the base does.

Billboards scattered throughout the town, however, constantly remind people here to be vigilant and prepared--a reminder of their proximity to the base.

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The base has been a constant point of conflict between the United States, which refuses to give it up, and the Cubans, who have concluded that nothing short of war can enforce their demands that the Americans leave what is their second-best harbor after Havana.

The base, which has housed Caribbean refugees, including Haitians and Cuban rafters, has been a magnet for Cubans fleeing their country, at least those who dare to slip through the barbed wire and cross minefields or mined waters to reach the base.

Most recently, the Cuban government has been angered because the Americans have not returned a hijacker who flew into the base this summer. The Cubans are demanding his return under an immigration agreement signed two years ago, the only official accord between the United States and Cuba.

Tours organized by the Cuban government tour agency, Gaviota, have allowed the town to recover a small part of its lost opportunities--and dollars--by exploiting the base as a tourist attraction. The operation is small-scale, employing just a few guides, a couple of waiters and a bartender, but visits to the edge of the military zone are also a useful propaganda tool.

Visitors pass through the heavy iron gate at the first checkpoint in the military zone and drive into one of Cuba’s few deserts. The varieties of cactus and an occasional appearance by a deer keep tourists entertained as they drive along the rough dirt roads.

At the second checkpoint, Cuban soldiers carrying old Soviet guns lead the way to a relief map of the base and the area surrounding it. They point out where their comrades were killed three decades ago.

The third checkpoint is at a crossroads, where one of the dirt roads leads to the gate that civilian workers enter each day. Another climbs 1,000 feet to the top of Mt. Malones and the real attraction: a perfect view of the base that is so close and so inaccessible.