CUBA: Tourists Pay to ‘Spy’ on U.S. Naval Base

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Apr 23 1996 (IPS) - A flashpoint for Cuban-U.S. relations for more than 35 years, the U.S. Guantánamo naval base in Cuba has started to interest a new kind of spy.

For a modest 100 dollar fee, Latin American and European visitors to this Caribbean country can take advantage of a unique tour offered by the Gaviota Cuban tourist company under the suggestive name “Border Scenes.”

Responding with characteristic humor to a national campaign to develop the leisure industry into the country’s main source of foreign exchange, Cubans decided to turn the bitterly disputed base into a tourist destination.

The Cuban government hopes the island’s white-sand beaches, unspoiled reefs, nature preserves, historic sites, conference facilities and now, enemy military base will attract a million tourists to the island by the year 2000.

Industry experts say Cuba has the potential to become a leading regional tourist destination by the end of the century, bettering the 750,000 visitors who left 1.1 billion dollars in the country last year.

“A relic of the Cold War, live and in full color!,” brays promotional material touting the anomaly of a U.S. military base located in a socialist country despite the demise of the Soviet bloc.

How could anyone resist the temptation to observe a military base from hostile terrain, peer through binoculars at U.S. marines in training and watch enemy ships and aircraft conducting maneuvers?

The tempting offer includes the possibility of contemplating the most densely-mined terrain in the world, according to military experts, with a base perimeter surrounded by interminable kilometers of fences and thickets of barbed wire studded with sentry boxes.

Built in 1903, the Guantanamo naval base is located some 900 kilometers from Havana and at the beginning of this decade included some 3,000 military personnel and 4,000 civilians shielded from Cuban territory with 70,000 anti-personnel and anti- tank mines.

Official Cuban sources report more than 12,500 base-side provocations of Cuban troops between 1962 and 1990.

Covering an area of 117.3 square kilometers, only 49.4 of which are on land, the military base includes a refugee camp that sheltered many of the 35,000 Cubans who left the island during the “boat crisis” of August 1994.

Now tourists are taken to the first Cuban watchpost in a Soviet helicopter and driven by bus another dozen kilometers through semi- desert terrain to Malones, at an altitude of slightly more than 300 meters.

At Malones, the visitor enjoys traditional music and cocktails made with the famous Cuban rum before continuing to ascend through tunnels to the other side of the hill. At the summit is the observation post offering a fascinating panorama of the U.S. military base.

The tour package plans to include a visit to Caimanera, a town of 10,000 inhabitants located inside Guantánamo bay and the only place in Cuba with restricted access because of its location on the military border.

Visitors can rest at a three-star hotel with a swimming pool, restaurant, bar, and enjoy water sports in a cove dominated by the tense silence of enemy guards who study each other across a kind of tropical and invisible Berlin Wall.

But it appears that the Cubans aren’t the only ones who decided to finish out the century by taking economic advantage of the base.

As the Guantánamo refugees gradually leave the base under the U.S.-Cuban migration agreements struck last May, the U.S. authorities have decided to sell off the huge tent city that at one point sheltered more than 40,000 Cubans and Haitians.

Now everything appears to be for sale: tents, beds, lavatories, trash containers, cushions, complete vehicles and parts, feeding bottles, drapery, clothing and even a transporter.

In an advertisement published in the daily “Miami Herald” – the English version of the U.S. Cuban exile community’s most important newspaper – the Pentagon touted its Guantánamo sale as “the greatest Cuban opportunity since selling cigars.”

The Marines’ apparent intention is to recover part of the estimated one million dollars per day it cost U.S. taxpayers to support the rescue operation of Haitians and Cubans in the high seas.

Potential buyers are being lured with chance to participate in the first large military equipment sale in the history of the Guantánamo base.

Optimistic observers believe the “military sale” may signal the possible closing of the base by the end of the century in response to the Cuban government’s longstanding complaint that the installation illegally occupies Cuban territory.

But others insist that the base will remain there as long as the President Fidel Castro regime remains in power and neither side is ready to make the concessions the other requires to reduce bilateral tensions.

“We have to get something out of such an obsolete military enclave,” said a Cuban Tourism Ministry official who nevertheless declined to divulge the number of tourists who had yielded to the temptation to “spy” on the U.S. base from Cuban territory.