Guantánamo Page 19
By June 1921, when Corey’s piece came out, the events that briefly made Guantánamo Bay a household name back in the steamy summer of 1898 were twenty-three years old and had well-nigh been forgotten. Over the course of those intervening years, the base slowly expanded, so that by the time Corey paid his visit to Guantánamo Bay, it housed roughly eleven hundred marines and laborers on a regular basis and could accommodate up to twenty thousand sailors when the fleet pulled in. Still, compared with the base of Admiral Mahan’s dreams, Guantánamo remained underdeveloped. Its most touted feature was a rifle range capable of engaging upward of three hundred men at once. An old golf course had been converted into a training facility for new seaplanes. There was a launching ground for dirigibles. There were roads, “pleasant walks and charming gardens.” There were hospitals, clubhouses, canteens, tennis and handball courts. And there were baseball diamonds—ten of them—with more on the way.2
Between December 1903 and June 1921 one would have had to be a pretty close reader to keep up with developments at Guantánamo Bay—a fan of naval appropriations hearings, perhaps, or a follower of ships’ movements. News of Guantánamo reached the United States during the 1912 “racial insurrection,” when marines left the base to protect U.S. property and restore order; and again in 1916 as political tension rose in the Dominican Republic and Guantánamo swelled with marines bound for the American intervention there. Still, Corey might as well have been introducing Americans to a new place. He was certainly introducing them to a new thing: the colonization of the nation’s overseas bases, and the cultural contact and social interaction that this entailed.
Joining the crew of the USS Black Hawk in the late autumn of 1920, Corey surprised the ship’s commander by being more interested in ships than in sailors. “A navy isn’t ships,” the commander chided. “A navy is the men.” His attention properly directed, Corey began to focus on the navy’s “production of personnel of extraordinary intelligence.” At sea, “the American is made into an excellent sailor, as a matter of course,” Corey acknowledged, “but it is likewise the navy’s effort to make him into a better American” that really counted. To this end, sailors were educated, introduced to foreign ports, well fed, well clothed, and physically and morally “guarded.” The sailor’s life at sea paid political as well as martial dividends. “Upon his return to civilian life he has attained a higher and more intelligent standard of citizenship.”3
Just as the world would know Americans by the behavior of their sailor ambassadors, so Americans would come to know the world by these cultural encounters. In one photograph accompanying Corey’s story, white sailors in white uniforms “barter with natives in one of the West Indies,” the sailors’ arms laden with fruits and vegetables, as if confirming Mahan’s belief that the navy was not only the protector but also the point man of American overseas commerce. The message here was not only one of a power disparity, with white male sailors from U.S. gunships juxtaposed against black female marketers from a barter economy; there were goods to be had, but also an economy to transform, the local labor force already in place. The American-male-versus-colonial-female juxtaposition suggested another form of exchange that remained inchoate in this image, and with which Guantánamo would become quietly synonymous: prostitution. The coincidence of what look like yuca or other tubers scattered in front of avocados or other egg-shaped fruit seems more than a little contrived.
The contrast of Americans to natives, whites to blacks, civilization to savagery, capitalist to barter economy—with the valorization it implied—was susceptible to a kind of internal critique or inversion. In its proper place, civilization is all well and good, but these sailors were supposed to be steeling themselves for battle. To prepare for battle, they would have to become not only tougher but darker. Beneath a photograph of sailors amusing themselves on a Guantánamo beach reads a caption: “It is here that the enlisted man begins in earnest to lose the pallor, the narrow shoulders, the white knobs, and bony angles of the civilian and to take on the saddle-colored coat of tan and other attributes of husky health.”4 What a relief to see elbows “sharp as boat-hooks” and forearms “puny and pale as the stems of clay pipes” yield to “blotches of bright and inflammatory red upon their shoulders.” There was “virtue in sunburn.”5
At Guantánamo, and more specifically at the nearby port of Caimanera, just outside the northern limit of the U.S. base, the husky health of the Atlantic fleet confronts its sable Cuban counterpart for an extended stay. Where a pigsty installed on the U.S. base inspires “fond recollections” of “wistful” sailors (“there is something homey and comfortable under this Cuban sun about the grunt of a Duroc Red lady whose children are gathering sustenance while she sleeps in the shade”6), the streets of Caimanera “assail the nostrils” with “one thousand assorted smells.” In Caimanera, “small dogs sleep in the sun or scratch themselves with an irritated vigor rarely manifested by other dwellers of the town.” Meanwhile, “little naked gourd-shaped babies permeate the principal thoroughfares and make excellent mudpies between showers.”
Why endure the squalid town? Alcohol. It’s still 1921, after all, and “‘Sis’s Place’ and ‘The Two Sisters’ and ‘The American Bar’ woo thirsty callers by a display of backbars stacked with bottles. There are no fronts to the saloons,” writes Corey, “so that one pauses on the pavement, so to speak, to wet an arid whistle.” Many of Caimanera’s bars sit on pilings out over the water. Nearby, “on their verandas,” also over the water, “one sees dark-skinned women, dressed in flowing white, languidly fanning themselves as the ship’s barge pulls in.” The bars, the water, the nearby Guantánamo River, the languid locals—all call to mind “Conrad’s African backgrounds.” Everything has such “a remote and exotic air.” As if succumbing to temptation, Corey seems relieved to encounter “the black and green badge of the [U.S. Navy] shore patrol,” mistaking its presence as evidence that the nearby streets and alleys of Caimanera “are emphatically out of bounds.”
At the time of Corey’s visit, only officers, not enlisted men, enjoyed the liberty of Caimanera. To extend Corey’s Conrad analogy, they play the part of Marlow to the Cubans’ Kurtz; there is a desperation to the officers’ imbibing that clashes with the exotic, as if Prohibition could last twelve more years. Arriving at five o’clock, the officers depart by six, their calls for drinks causing their Cuban hosts to “rain perspiration from their dark brows as they shake ’em up.” And “so it goes down the dingy, dusty, sometimes flagrantly muddy street, with its weird multitude of vicious odors.” The Cubans and Americans regard one another with bemusement. “It is not the Cuban temperament to hurry so over a handful of drinks. Nor does the Cuban need to hurry. Big negroes, with the strong features of the Arab, look one squarely in the eye.”7
A booze-soaked outpost, its tawdrier side lurking just offstage—this is not the Guantánamo of navy mythology. Yet it is the salient feature of virtually all journalistic and eyewitness accounts of the U.S. naval base from the 1920s until the coming of Castro, which ended U.S. “liberty” tours of Cuban villages and towns around the base. Most of these narratives describe these cultural encounters as innocent. The boys just want to have fun. Long after the inconvenience of the venereal disease has passed, the memories endure.
At the close of the nineteenth century, historian Frederick Jackson Turner warned Americans that the frontier was filling up. The opportunity and prosperity Americans had come to take for granted on the continent must now be won overseas. In the aftermath of the Cuban War of “Independence,” Americans of all stripes flocked to Cuba as if hearkening to Turner’s warning. No sector of Cuban commerce and industry was left untouched: real estate, agriculture, mining, finance, engineering, construction, education, the professions, gambling, prostitution, and so on were all overrun by opportunistic Americans who arrived in Cuba often with extended families in tow. It is hard to exaggerate the scale of the migration. By 1905 some thirteen thousand Americans had bought land in Cuba valued at $50 m
illion. By 1919 forty-four thousand Americans had moved there, prompting one southern journal to remark, “Little by little the whole island is passing into the hands of American citizens.” And why not? In U.S. journals and newspapers, Cuba was depicted as “a land of perpetual sunshine, flowing with milk and honey,” “an all-the-year-round country” with “no unproductive season.”8
Oriente province, the least developed region of Cuba, was the target of intense foreign investment. After the War of Independence, the development of Oriente proceeded at an exhilarating pace, spurred by U.S. entrepreneurs who at long last responded to the calls of the early Americans who first sang Guantánamo’s praises. Historians describe the Americanization of Oriente in terms of an “invasion.” Much of this invasion took place in the Guantánamo Basin, where low population combined with cheap real estate to set off a land rush.9
In the first decade after independence, U.S. capital investment in Cuba soared from $80 million to $220 million; by 1923 it had reached $1.3 billion, over half of which was devoted to sugar. Much of this sugar capitalization happened in Oriente, which by the third decade of the new century had become Cuba’s second most populous province and its second leading sugar producer. Between 1907 and 1919, when Cuba’s population increased by slightly over 40 percent, Guantánamo’s rose by an astounding 60 percent. By 1929, foreign sugar growers, most of them American, owned 64 percent of Oriente province.10 Three quarters of foreign investment in Oriente was devoted to sugar production, which by the second decade of the century pushed aside smaller homegrown industries such as coffee and tobacco, displacing local farmers and workers and replacing them with cheaper Haitian, Jamaican, and West Indian labor. Coming so quickly on the heels of what was supposed to have been Cuban independence, the social upheaval entailed in transforming Oriente into Cuba’s leading sugar-producing region would have been untenable but for Platt and the proximity of the new U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay. Together, the two acted as an insurance policy for U.S. and foreign businesses, maintaining order and tamping down agitation for political and economic reform. It took nearly half a century for Guantánamo to become the place of Admiral Mahan’s dreams. In the meantime, it functioned quite efficiently as American capital’s private guard not only in Cuba but throughout the Caribbean region.
“The difficulty of our colonial possessions [is] beginning to weigh heavily on our deliberations,” U.S. navy secretary John Long confided in his diary at the Paris peace talks in December 1898. “What an immense task it is to change our whole system of government in Cuba.” On the one hand, Long recognized that the United States “must establish naval stations” on the island; on the other hand, he knew that seizing Cuban land would violate America’s promise to leave Cuba to its own devices at the end of the war with Spain. Wary of alienating the Cuban and American public, the McKinley administration refused to take up the matter of naval stations in the Treaty of Paris. What was a navy secretary of an up-and-coming liberal empire to do?11
Enlist the help of his subordinates. Before the United States intervened in the Cuban War of Independence, Alfred Mahan had been in the minority in calling insistently for overseas bases. By the end of the war in August 1898, very few Americans did not concede that overseas bases had become a necessity. With the war barely drawing to a close, government officials were debating which offshore coaling stations the United States ought to acquire, tacit acknowledgment that Americans were ready to forsake what Senator Henry Cabot Lodge called the nation’s “blundering” policy of isolation.12
Passing the Naval War Board’s findings on to Secretary Long, Admiral Mahan suggested that there were two regions in the world where U.S. and foreign interests were sure to collide: the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. To safeguard U.S. access to the increasingly lucrative Asian trade, the board recommended establishing coaling stations at Guam, Manila, Hawaii, and Samoa; to control Pacific Ocean access to the much-anticipated isthmian canal, it suggested occupying Ports Culebra and La Union in Costa Rica and El Salvador, respectively. In the Caribbean, meanwhile, the board urged the establishment of stations at San Juan, Puerto Rico, and in eastern Cuba (at either Santiago de Cuba or Guantánamo Bay). “The Caribbean Sea is one of the most interesting and vital regions in the world to the United States, considered from the point of view of commerce and of war,” the board remarked; “there our interests may be most seriously interrupted by hostile navies in time of war.”13
In the Caribbean, nothing was more important than controlling the Windward Passage. “No solution to the problem of coaling and naval stations can be considered satisfactory which does not provide for military safety upon that route,” the board observed. As potential sites of U.S. stations along the Windward Passage, both Santiago and Guantánamo had their advantages. Santiago, with its narrow channel, was easily defensible. Guantánamo, with its generous entrance, would be easy to escape in the event of enemy attack. Santiago was well sheltered. Guantánamo could accommodate a whole fleet of ships.14
So began a long debate about the virtues of Guantánamo Bay, not only compared with Santiago de Cuba and other Cuban harbors, but among Guantánamo and other locations throughout the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico and along the eastern seaboard of the United States. Had the debate remained within the limits of the naval community, it would quickly have resolved in Guantánamo’s favor. Along with New York and Norfolk harbors, Guantánamo was generally acknowledged to be an invaluable strategic asset among experienced naval personnel. But the debate didn’t remain intramural. Politicians, too, would have their say. U.S. bases provided jobs and income to host communities whose representatives in Washington did not want naval funding moved offshore. In negotiations about naval appropriations in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century, U.S. politicians seized on the slightest pretext to deny Guantánamo the funding required to make it a fully functioning naval base, with a fuel depot, dry docks, machine shops, ample living quarters, and appropriate defenses. Instead, sustained by discretionary funding channeled to the station by the secretary of the navy, Guantánamo became a limited coaling and emergency repair facility—useful to the navy as a rendezvous site for the fleet and as a jumping-off point in Cuba, but hardly the springboard of the forceful new naval strategy envisioned by Mahan, Roosevelt, and Henry Cabot Lodge.
The U.S. Navy never really abandoned Guantánamo Bay in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. But the U.S. occupation of Guantánamo became official in October 1903, when the Cuban Senate ratified a treaty leasing forty-five square miles of territory at the outer harbor to the United States, as stipulated in the Platt Amendment. The treaty included the leasing of Bahia Honda in northwest Cuba, a site the navy never developed.15 From the first, navy officials and President Roosevelt himself were dissatisfied with the amount of land conceded by Cuba. Even an unseasoned observer could see that it was surrounded by higher land. As early as December 1900, naval officials had requested that Cuba concede a ten-mile radius focused on the old Spanish battery at the top (or north) of the outer harbor on South Toro Cay, which the navy expected to become the heart of the U.S. station. The three-hundred-odd square miles of territory within that radius included the local foothills of the Sierra Maestra and Nipe-Sagua-Baracoa mountains, and would allow the navy to command the high ground surrounding Toro Cay. It also encompassed access to the freshwater of the Guantánamo, Guaso, and Yateras rivers, the absence of which in the land allotted to the navy proved nettlesome for years to come.
If three hundred square miles seems an unreasonable request on the part of navy officials, their concern about the defensibility of the base was vindicated in February 1904, when the Japanese successfully captured the Russian naval bastion at Port Arthur, Manchuria. It wasn’t so much that Port Arthur and Guantánamo were analogous in their degree of vulnerability to potential enemies; Port Arthur was infinitely more exposed. Rather, the apparent susceptibility of Guantánamo to a land-based attack was all the fodder that jealous congressmen n
eeded to withhold support for Guantánamo over the course of the next ten years. Meanwhile, naval officials did everything they could both to quell fears about Guantánamo’s vulnerability and expand the territory of the base. When political instability in Cuba in 1905–1906 provoked a second U.S. military occupation lasting three years, naval officers thought the time might be ripe for simply seizing more land. President Roosevelt and Elihu Root, now secretary of state, refused to endorse the suggestion, sensitive to America’s deteriorating reputation throughout the region.16
Talk of expanding the base continued through January 1914, when mounting hostilities in Europe deflected attention away from Cuba. In the waning days of the Taft administration, U.S. and Cuban officials signed a treaty, never ratified or implemented, that would have afforded the base the much-coveted high ground surrounding Toro Cay as well as a freshwater source at the Yateras River. Meanwhile, naval and congressional officials continued to debate the merits of Guantánamo versus existing naval installations along the eastern seaboard and throughout the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.
Congress’s reluctance to fund a full-fledged naval base in the first decade of the U.S. occupation did not detract from the base’s usefulness. On May 21, 1912, The New York Times reported that a “Negro” insurrection on the island of Cuba threatened American lives and property.17 The revolt seems to have had its origin in disgruntlement among Afro-Cubans who had seen their position in Cuba decline in the aftermath of independence. Prominent in the revolutionary movements of the nineteenth century, Cuban blacks were denied full participation in Cuban society during and after the U.S. military occupation. In 1902, for instance, the United States banned black Cubans from a new Artillery Corps; when convening the Cuban Constitutional Convention in autumn 1900, Leonard Wood tried to exclude black Cubans from participating in the electoral process. The “illiterate mass of people” had no business participating in the democratic process, Wood declared, equating illiteracy with “the sons and daughters of Africans imported into the island as slaves.”18