Guantánamo by Jonathan M. Hansen Page A

this past decade that
defines contemporary Guantánamo, but the hospitable and wholesome community in which everybody knows your name.
    Like all creation myths, this one serves the interest of those who espouse it, celebrating certain groups and individuals and inviting certain questions while ignoring or obscuring others. It would have been news, for example, to Cuba’s Taino “Indians” to hear that Columbus discovered Guantánamo Bay, just as it must have been humiliating to Cuban insurgents to read American journalists disparaging their contribution to the defeat of Spain. Moreover, it is inaccurate to suggest that Cuba welcomed the U.S. occupation of Guantánamo Bay. The Guantánamo myth is full of such self-serving valorizations that have never been exposed to historical scrutiny. History is often inconvenient to the powerful. Several times on my first visit to Guantánamo I reached for news clippings about racial discrimination or labor exploitation or gender bias on the base, only to be asked by my host, who had failed to beat me to them, “Why are you interested in that?”
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    Guantánamo’s climate is comparable to San Diego’s. Two short rainy seasons in May and October deliver just over twenty inches of rain per year on average, not enough to alter impressions of a landscape dry, rugged, and unforgiving—if starkly beautiful. On a typical October day, it showers for a few hours in the late afternoon. The autumn of my first visit to the bay, the rains came early and hardly let up. Taking advantage of a break in the weather, I ventured out on the water with the base naturalist. If inconvenient, the rain was transformative. The bay called to mind California’s Marin County in the spring. Hillsides glistened in knee-high grass. Palm trees produced new fronds. Cactus and manzanillo bloomed. Mangroves bobbed with pelicans, bitterns, ibis, herons, and hawks. In a region of the world whose resources have been ravaged by poverty, the base presented a striking anomaly. The U.S. Navy describes the base as a wildlife sanctuary, among other things, and I saw nothing to refute that characterization at first glance.
    Columbus “discovered” Guantánamo Bay in May 1494, at the end of one such rainy season. I asked my host to take us out into the open sea, the better to see the bay as the admiral himself might first have glimpsed it. Puerto Grande, Columbus reportedly christened the bay,
and indeed its grandness was the first thing that came to mind. Twelve miles long, six miles wide, and ranging from thirty to sixty feet deep, Guantánamo is dotted with cays and inlets that make it seem both limitless and inviting. Like San Francisco Bay, it is ringed by hills, in this case the granite escarpment of Cuba’s Sierra Maestra, the highest, most picturesque mountains in the land. Columbus was disappointed to find the bay uninhabited. It appears underinhabited to this day. The navy has developed few of the forty-five square miles that comprise the base, and most of the development is tucked behind Windward Point, the peninsula at the southeast entrance of the bay, out of sight to incoming traffic.
    European explorers of the new world had very specific ideas about what constituted legitimate land use. Columbus assumed Guantánamo to be uninhabited because it remained undivided, unalloted, unfenced. And yet evidence suggests that the Taino people who welcomed Columbus to southeast Cuba had been making efficient use of the Guantánamo basin as a game preserve. I was intrigued to hear that the navy, not known for its environmental and cultural stewardship, carries on Taino traditions to this day—in its own way. It is true that Guantánamo remains largely undeveloped, but it is not the pristine place it appears to be. “We can’t go there,” my host remarked, pointing to a flooded plain on Leeward Point, at the southwest corner of the bay. “That