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Guantanamo is a city of some 200,000, capital of Cuba’s easternmost
province of the same name and Cuba’s most agricultural, beautiful and poorest province. The travel books give the city
short shrift because it has no tourist attractions, but for those interested in people rather than things it has lots to offer.
There’s a nice old center square with a beautifully restored Catholic church, a music pavilion where they play trova
for us old-timers on Saturday nights, and a cultural center where on Saturday afternoons groups of primary and middle school
kids put on costumed song and dance routines to the delight of their parents and envy of their siblings. Nearby there’s
also an adult education center, several music, art and dancing schools and Cuba’s best chess club.
The city sits at the upper end of Cuba’s largest and deepest
bay. There’s also now a nearby tourist attraction called the mirador (the US marines call it “Castro’s
bunker”), which is a small café on a mountain on Cuban land where you can have a sandwich and look down through a telescope
on the US military base surrounding the bay near its entrance to the sea. Since the revolution the occupied territory
has been barricaded and landmined by the US military, preventing any contact between the two sides, but before the revolution
there were some mutually beneficial connections. Some Cubans found well paying day jobs on the base and US sailors and marines
used the city as their whorehouse.
Through the telescope you can see the defenders of our nation playing
at their water sports and on fields in the tree-shaded base town. Several kilometers to the east in the desert is a large,
windowless structure where they torture the Talibans, and further south, a smaller structure where they keep the Haitian,
Cuban and Dominican balseros they catch in the Florida Straits. No birds, except a few vultures circle above the
town. On the other side of the bay is the airstrip where the huge, black US military planes refuel, the ones which now circle
Cuba day and night beaming on to Cuban television the same propaganda, commercials and cultural trash our Rulers use to anesthetize
us. Apparently to them communication no longer means dialogue, rather it means imposing their voices and images on others.
One has to wonder why our Rulers fear the Cuban Revolution so much.
Does the independent road to development and modernization threaten their plans for the rest of the Third World? In
Kafkaesque fashion they are telling us that they are helping the Cuban people by preventing medicine and medical equipment
from reaching them, punishing and threatening foreigners who dare to do business there, funneling multi-millions to so called
non-governmental groups to destabilize the Cuban people's government, conducting a relentless propaganda campaign against
the revolution, unconstitutionally eliminating our rights to travel there and give or loan money and property to our friends
and families. What secret plans are they disguising by these absurd rationalizations?
Like Auschwitz, the Guantanamo base is the perfect place for
a concentration camp because under the new US theory of sovereignty, relations between the people there are governed by raw
power rather than law. If you find yourself in that strange place, whether you are treated as a human or animal depends solely
on your access to power. In the past sovereignty meant the absolute right of a community of people to exercise dominion over
its land. Now, however, sovereignty is conditional everywhere in the Third World - on the acceptance of dependent First World
commercial exploitation. The reason the Cubans have not exercised dominion over their occupied land on Guantanamo bay is that
they lack the power. The Cuban sovereignty our Rulers now claim eliminates the rule of law there is like the “sovereignty”
they claim to be giving (as though it were theirs to give) to the Iraqis this month. It’s a mirage, a shell game, a
glass of dry water for thirsty people.
The century long US occupation of Guantanamo has significantly delayed
economic development of the province. If a foreign ship gets US permission to enter the Cuban part of the bay, it can’t
dock at a US port for six months. Therefore the province must be supplied by truck from Santiago, 250 kilometers to the west.
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the Pentagon certified Cuba constitutes no security risk, our Rulers have recently been tightening the blockade in what seems
to be their effort at “the final solution.” The Cuban people will never be starved into submission because they
have reorganized their agriculture to become self sufficient, but funding for many of their innovative social programs, once
the pride of Latin America, is beginning to disappear. In Guantanamo, housing is a serious problem. In the barrios,
people often live several to a bedroom and washing, bathing and flushing is often by bucket only. The limited funding for
their self-help, cooperative housing program had to be diverted to areas in central Cuba destroyed by the hurricane two years
ago, but for some reason Guantanameros seem to have risen above their difficult and crowded living conditions.
My mother-in-law, Augustina, lives in a three room apartment with her mother, two daughters and a granddaughter somewhere
in the middle of Barrio Suroeste. Early in the mornings I spend there, the rooster next door, who seems to know my last name,
gently urges me to leave my dreams. Soon the dawn comes up like thunder from across the bay and people are scrambling everywhere
to get to school or work in the fincas and agricultural co-ops which surround the city. Rambler that I am, I like
to take walks around the barrio in the late mornings. On the narrow winding road-paths walking is usually best, although
bicycles and horse carriages are also used on the thoroughfares. “Clothes make the man” is an iron rule in Guantanamo.
My wife, who lets me slop around Miami in whatever I please, won’t let me out the door in Guantanamo without first ironing
my shorts and t-shirt and making sure my sneakers are spotless. During the day, salesmen ply the roads selling their wares
to the stay-home women. There are also preachers, adventurers, story tellers and all kinds of interesting characters. Later,
organ grinders and such sell caramelas to kids. When I leave on my walks, I’m always confident that sooner
or later I’ll become lost in the labyrinth, but just as confident someone will notice my confusion and take me back
to Casa Augustina. Because my eyes are seldom on the ground in front of me where they should be, I’m known as el
accidente que viene.
In the late afternoons after the washing is hung out, I like
to rest on Augustina’s flat roof and watch las palomas. The teenage boys catch them, make homes for them on
the roofs and train them to carry inter-barrio messages (telephones being few and far between). They have a good
life: comfortable homes, plenty of grain, they do useful work and in the late afternoons they soar above the barrios in
freedom in groups of a dozen or two, catching the fresh breezes from the bay, sometimes dropping down to taste the delicacies
of the occasional mango tree.
In the evenings when the streets grow dark, I hear the soft
murmur of hundreds of voices discussing the day’s events, sports, politics, dominos, or whatever and realize that the
streets and porches are full of people, and they are creating their community.
When I leave Guantanamo, I often find myself wondering how and why
it is that the human spirit, like the palomas, sometimes soars above its harsh condition. I think it has something
to do with the idea of real community – where relations among people are governed by law, justice and equality rather
than power. Maybe this is the road to real freedom, and maybe it’s why only birds of prey hang out around the military
base.
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