Free Guantánamo by Jonathan M. Hansen Page B

area’s closed on account of unexploded ordnance,” the result of U.S. target practice. What’s that? I asked. “A bombing range.” Over there? “More unexploded ordnance.” There? “An old minefield. Strictly off-limits.” And so this wildlife sanctuary is safe from human incursion. But how do the animals fare? Any casualties from unexploded ordnance or unrecovered land mines? I wondered. “Nothing,” my host replied, “besides the occasional deer.”
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    One afternoon, I toured the fence line that separates the base from Cuba. My tour began at the Northeast Gate, site of countless altercations between U.S. soldiers and their Cuban counterparts over the decades, as well as more constructive meetings between U.S. and Cuban military officials in recent years. The official contact point between the base and Cuba, the Northeast Gate is where a dwindling
number of Cuban “commuters,” as Cuban laborers are called, enter the base each day for work. I was struck by the utter desolation of the place. No hostility. No people to sustain a grudge—in fact, no people at all. An old barracks that held up to 150 U.S. marines at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis is the solitary reminder of the gate’s symbolic importance. Also empty is the U.S. marine observation point, or MOP, that soars over the gate. In fact, very few of the MOPs along the base’s seventeen-mile perimeter are still manned, and these less to keep an eye on a hostile enemy than to track the movement of asylum seekers desperate enough to attempt to pick their way though a Cuban minefield onto the U.S. base.
    In the several years before 9/11, the base functioned at “minimum pillar,” navy parlance for maintaining just enough U.S. presence at the bay to prevent Castro from claiming that the base had been abandoned. From an outsider’s perspective, minimum pillar persists. The perimeter road on the U.S. side of the fence has all but eroded, quite a contrast to the pristine Castro Bay Area Road on the other side. The base’s general state of disrepair became starker still in contrast to the new prison camp, where on my three visits to the bay everything appeared amply funded. We cruised by the so-called playground where “good prisoners” are allowed to take fresh air. “Fifteen million dollars,” muttered my host. “That’s the site of the new twenty-five-million-dollar permanent prison … There, the twenty-million-dollar mental health clinic.” Navy people console themselves that without the base you couldn’t have the prison, but from a visitor’s perspective it seems that the prison has all but become the base.
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    â€œAn Eisenhower-era community perched alongside an Eisenhower-era country.” These are the words of the public works officer who took me on a drive around the base’s residential neighborhoods. With stucco homes, pristine lawns, scattered toys, SUVs, and the odd boat trailer, the U.S. enclave at Guantánamo redefines the term “gated community”—with Subway, McDonald’s, Starbucks, and the Navy Exchange just down the street. I found it odd that a place notorious for abusing prisoners could feel so familiar, so safe. But safety is the buzzword in these suburbs, where “there is no traffic, no drugs, no crime,
and where you can go out alone at night without having to lock your doors.”
    The prison camp lies along the Cuban coastline, separated from the hub of naval activity by a range of hills. Navy folks like to think of their side of the hills as the “real Guantánamo” (sometimes the “good Guantánamo”), leaving the visitor to conclude what he or she may about the prison. But the prison wouldn’t be here without the navy. And the navy wouldn’t be here without the U.S. government’s decision to retain the bay at the end of the war with Spain. Finally,