Maintaining a Unique Balance

WE SAW STORMS OVER the brown hills in the distance nearly every day, but it never rained over the harbor. The ground was dry and dusty, but the air was always humid, hot, and oppressive. It was almost too easy to draw a metaphorical relation between the politics of the place and its weather. How much subtle tension, a brooding, pre-thunderstorm atmosphere can such a small area take?

Since the semester began, I've been taking a kind of informal poll. First I ask people if they've ever heard of Guantanamo Bay. If they say yes, I ask them where it is. If they know it's in Cuba, I ask them who controls it. And so far I've had only two or three correct answers to this last question.

Very few "ordinary" Americans, at least college-aged ones, know that the United States has a small yet completely functional Navy and Marine Corps base on the mainland of Cuba.

In fact, the large harbor and surrounding land known as Guantanamo Bay has been a U.S. possession since 1899. One of the best harbors in the Caribbean came under the Stars and Stripes after the Spanish-American War. As far as I've been able to find out, the treaty concerning the port is bilateral in only the most abstract sense. One version I've heard is that it's a treaty "in perpetuity," or until both sides shall agree to a fundamental change. Castro says he wants the Navy to leave, and it's not going. The United States has interpreted the treaty to mean we can stay, and Castro has said he sees it another way. It's the kind of thing that keeps international lawyers and the U.N. busy.

Or does it? Scratch a little deeper and you'll see, as I did, the odd nature of these kinds of places. Guantanamo, like Hong Kong or West Berlin, serves many purposes for many people. And few people, Castro included, look like they're in any big hurry to see it go.

AT FIRST GLANCE IT doesn't seem like the kind of place worth spending much money on. Since it's on the southeastern tip of Cuba and surrounded by mountains, its climate greatly resembles southern California's. Trade winds blow moisture off the Caribbean over the harbor and into the mountains, where it finally rains. As a result the immediate harbor area is desert--no streams, springs or significant vegetation of any kind. What's green and grows was probably brought in.

But what the land surrounds makes Guantanamo golden. The harbor is deep and wide, suitable for a myriad of ocean-going vessels. This was evident long before the war with the Spanish, and the entire area was one of the first concessions demanded by Washington during the peace negotiations. The Navy's held it ever since.

In the succeeding decades the harbor was used as a base for U.S. activities in and around the Caribbean, and for training and recreation. Cuban workers performed the thousands of tasks needed to support a naval base, and American sailors spent many a wild night in Guantanamo City. Next to Havana itself this was probably the most economically dynamic area of Cuba, especially during wartime. Here, and in Subic Bay and Manila in the Philippines, the United States experienced its first and only taste of direct imperialism.

Any 20th century American history or gov course will give you an analysis of why the Cuban revolution occurred, and doubtless a professor will tell you that Guantanamo Bay played some sort of role. Castro, at any rate, used it with great effect. In the mid-60s he halted the employment of Cuban workers at the base. At the same time he accused the Americans of "stealing" Cuban water through the pipeline from the mountains which had served the base since the turn of the century. In response, the Navy severed the pipeline, engineered a 'waterlift' of freshwater tankers for a year, and meanwhile built a desalination plant which still supplies the base with power and freshwater. Guantanamo naval station is completely independent from the Cuban mainland. Food and all supplies are shipped in from the East Coast.

Such a harbor is obviously useful to the United States. On a year-to-year basis, the Navy uses it for observation and training. And of course it is a long-run strategic holding in the event of any East/West conflict. Plans under consideration in the '70s to gradually demobilize it due to its expense have been dropped, with no prospect for revival.

BUT IT'S NOT HARD TO enumerate the benefits resulting from U.S. possession of Guantanamo Bay. The more interesting stance to consider is that of the Cubans'. One would think that they hate our presence there, and are kicking up a continual fuss over it in international forums. In fact, however, they have done very little of this since the first years of Communist control.

Castro realizes several gains from the alien presence on his soil. His much-publicized cessation in '65 of the flow of Cuban labor to the base conveniently did not include current workers. It's taken fully two decades to narrow the Cuban workforce to a few hundred from an early '60s level of several thousand. All workers on the base are paid in dollars. The hard currency flow to the cash-strapped Havana regime must be extremely welcome.

The observation benefits cut both ways, as well. I saw numerous Cuban observation posts around the perimeter of the base. They watch U.S. naval maneuvers and listen to communications, just as we watch and listen to them.

And the propaganda value of the base is probably as strong and useful to Castro as when he first used it extensively for such purposes back in the mid '60s. At the only functional gate remaining in the barbed-wire-lined and mine-strewn perimeter, I saw a sign on the Cuban side. Through binoculars I could read it: Territorio Libertad de America. And one of the weekends I was there, we heard that a huge Cuban independence celebration was being held in nearby Guantanamo City. Castro himself was supposed to attend. It's not hard to imagine the type of speech he gave.

SO NO ONE SEEMS too unhappy about the only American possession in a Communist country. Castro would probably be quite upset if the U.S. actually took him at his occasional word and pulled up stakes. The situation recalls nothing so much as the Chinese Communists' response to continued British sovereignty over Hong Kong. At first hostile, then complacent, and now accommodative of a "special place" for the Westernized colony in the People's Republic, the leadership of the Chinese Party has found almost every major way to exploit continued Western presence on their land, just as they were once exploited. Propaganda, hard currency, technology, trade--Hong Kong has meant all these things to the PRC. Doctrine apparently died an easy death in the face of these advantages.

The Cubans don't have all of these benefits available to them, mostly because U.S. policy has denied it. The hard currency will eventually dry up. Trade doesn't occur now, and no one knows if it ever will. But there has never been any sort of attack from either side, and given this static situation, it is difficult to show that the Cubans are being hurt by the American presence.

The propaganda value, the scapegoat for Cuba's ills, remains. Although less tangible than money or technological knowledge or industrial trade, a lightning rod like Guantanamo can prove invaluable to a young regime like Cuba's.

The Writer is a First Class midshipman at MITNROTC.