CUBA-US: Guantanamo, a Hundred-Year Thorn in Cuba’s Flesh

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

GUANTANAMO, Cuba, Aug 28 2000 (IPS) - The Guantanamo naval base, the only United States military enclave in a socialist country, has governed the lives of the inhabitants of this region at the eastern tip of Cuba since the early 20th century.

And despite the hopes entertained by some Cubans, all signs indicate that it will continue to do so for a long time to come.

“Everyone who comes here asks the same question: how long will it be there?” says Gustavo Menéndez, a local Guantanamo resident who had believed that “this year would bring an end to the whole story.

“But the year 2000 arrived…and nothing happened. I believe that not even God has the answer to that question,” said the 38- year-old builder who decided five years ago to leave Caimanera, the town closest to the U.S. base.

Menéndez says he left because “I had work in (the city of) Guantanamo, but also because I was fed up with the checkpoints and with having to show my papers to enter and leave my hometown.”

It is not easy to visit Caimanera, located 24 kms from the city of Guantanamo and more than 900 kms from Havana. Everyone, no matter where they are coming from or who they are, must figure on a previously drawn-up list in order to enter the town.

Approaching the intersection — going straight ahead takes you to the base, while turning left brings you to the city — you can see the barbed-wire fence, the sentry boxes, and the men and women of the Cuban border brigade on permanent watch.

Menéndez, like others in Cuba, had hoped that “the base would close at the turn-of-the-century.” But as the months go by, the most optimistic now place their hopes on the year 2003, the 100th anniversary of the military base.

But these seem to be merely unfounded dreams. “I don’t know where people get those ideas,” said a young female member of the Cuban military’s border brigade, when asked if the closure of the base was near.

The idea of an imminent end to the U.S. enclave, which some intellectuals in this Caribbean island nation have described as “Cuba’s historical illusion,” has no real basis, analysts point out.

President Fidel Castro himself recently made a reference to people’s hopes that the base would close. “It is assumed that whatever is indefinite lasts 100 years. Someone came up with that concept, and not without some reason, because 100 years are apparently more than enough.”

Located 920 kms east of Havana, the naval base was built in 1903 as a concession “in perpetuity” to the United States, which will use the base as long as it deems necessary.

The “lease” was one direct result of the Platt Amendment, approved by the U.S. Congress for inclusion in Cuba’s first constitution.

The Amendment also stipulated Washington’s right to intervene in the island, and obligated Havana to sell or lease to the United States any land needed for coalyards or naval stations.

The deal involved the payment to Cuba of 2,000 pesos a year in U.S. gold — a payment that the Castro government has refused to cash in since it took power in 1959, but which Washington continues to fork over every year.

Today the “rent” is equivalent to 4,085 dollars. Local analysts see it as an attempt by the United States to legitimate an agreement that Cuban authorities detest, and which was declared “illegal, null and void” by the Cuban constitution.

Castro says the Cuban revolution “has not wished to agitate things.” But the “battle” for pushing the United States out of that part of the island will have to be undertaken some day, he adds.

The Guantanamo base was built on the bay of that name, near the Windward Passage and in a straight line with Panama, where at that time the canal that now runs between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans was in the planning stage.

Historians point out that the location of the base led Washington to place great importance on the enclave, strategically located in the case of any conflict in the Caribbean region — not to mention the characteristics of Guantanamo’s natural bay, which is 5.2 kms long, 20 metres deep, contains 20 keys and has the capacity to receive more than 40 vessels.

The area surrounding the base is peppered with some 70,000 anti- personnel and anti-tank land mines. The enclave itself comprises 117.6 square kms — 49.4 square kms of dry land, 29.4 square kms of swampland and 38.8 square kms of water. The enclave’s coastline measures 17.5 kms.

The base has two water treatment plants that use Israeli technology to produce 9.5 million litres of drinking water a day by osmosis, and generate up to 17,000 kilowatts of electricity.

In the early 1990s, the installations on the base included two hospitals, 10 churches, four schools, seven clubs, three shopping centres, two TV and three radio stations and 1,700 housing units, as well as the military installations.

“Up to the (Jan 1, 1959) triumph of the revolution, Guantanamo virtually lived off the base,” recalls a 72-year-old local resident who receives a 500-dollar monthly pension after working for several decades on the maintenance staff.

During World War II, the base served as a supply point for boats and planes only surpassed by the port of New York. It was also used for training.

Besides a source of jobs, the U.S. base became a gateway through which U.S. capital entered Cuba. It also fueled the expansion of prostitution and gambling houses.

Today the province is considered one of the most backward in Cuba, although local authorities do not agree with that assessment, and there are few hard statistics to prove it.

Guantanamo, home to a total 512,226 people in late 1999, 10,508 of whom live in Caimanera, is one of the top three Cuban provinces in terms of the number of births and number of children per women. But it is also the region that posts the highest rate of emigration to other parts of the country, according to the latest ‘Anuario Demográfico’, or “demographic yearbook.”

In the province, 59.7 percent of local residents live in towns and cities, one of the lowest rates of urbanisation in Cuba.

“Now things are calmer. They say joint U.S.-Cuban exercises have been held, and Cuban boats enter and leave through the bay,” says Menéndez. “But there have been really tense moments. Life here just isn’t life.”

According to the book “A Few Metres from the Enemy”, written by Felipa Suárez and Pilar Quesada, 13,263 incidents of provocation and violations of sovereignty by the United States, some of which caused the deaths of Cuban soldiers, were denounced by Cuba from 1962 to August 1992.

The incidents listed by the book, which was published in 1996, include 755 shots fired into Cuban territory, 610 violations of the land border and 6,307 violations of Cuban airspace.

Havana maintains that the military enclave has been used to provide support to organisations opposed to the Castro regime, to prepare “self-inflicted attacks” to justify reprisals against Cuba, and as a centre of radio-electronic espionage.

The moments of greatest tension in the past decade occurred in 1993 and 1994, and peaked in the so-called “rafters crisis” in August 1994, when thousands of Cubans attempted to reach the United States in flimsy watercraft, and some 35,000 would-be Cuban emigrés ended up at the Guantanamo base.

In 1993 alone, 1,311 Cubans made 498 attempts to defect to the U.S. base. Of that total, 12 were killed by land-mines, three drowned, and 34 were injured.

In late 1994, the enormous concentration of would-be Cuban emigrés and Haitian refugees in the base, along with 9,000 U.S. military personnel, drove the total number of inhabitants up to 55,000, which meant a density of more than one person per square metre.

The signing of migration accords by Cuba and the United States in September 1994 and May 1995 facilitated the gradual departure of Cubans and Haitians from the base, averting the explosion of what Havana considered a veritable time-bomb, according to local analysts.

Cuba’s defence minister, Gen. Raúl Castro, said in April 1995 that the base was “obsolete from a military point of view, and constitutes an unnecessary expense for the U.S. taxpayer.”

In the defence minister’s view, while the United States is dismantling dozens of installations in U.S. territory and abroad, it maintains Guantanamo simply as a “point of constant provocation and humiliation against Cuba.”

Isabel Jaramillo, a Chilean academic living in Cuba, says that “in the case of a possible outbreak of war, the control of the Caribbean basin has been, and is, a priority” for the United States, which sees the region as its “gateway.”

Jaramillo, an expert in hemispheric security affairs, says that in the case of the Caribbean region, Washington tends to keep a tight hold on “control, and thus maintains bases and continues to make demonstrations of military might and the relations of dependency.”