Bay Watch

guantanamo bay––At six o’clock every weekday morning, five old men walk in through a gate that marks a strange frontier; late every weekday afternoon they go back. They are the only ones allowed to make this passage. The guards call them “the commuters.”

Their crossing point is the northeast gate of the Guantanamo naval base in south-eastern Cuba. They pass underneath a wooden guard tower and through a chain-link fence crowned with coils of razor wire. On the American-controlled side there is a hut made of concrete blocks painted white; on the Cuban-controlled side, a strange, small, officious-looking structure, once a currency exchange, now caught in the freeze of bi-national relations, has fossilized into a guard hut. High sun, bare hills, quiet.

When the two governments broke off relations over four decades ago, people who lived on the Cuban side and worked on the American side were allowed to continue, but nobody was permitted to replace them. There were more than two thousand commuters then, passing through the northeast gate each morning to work in the laundries and the mess halls. Now there are five.

No pase, says the sign on the American side, facing the Cuban soldiers. Republica de Cuba, Territorio Libre de America, says the sign on the Cuban side, facing the U.S. soldiers. Some set decorator has laid a scrap of squashed hutia, or banana rat, picked over by turkey buzzards, on the crumbling road; that would be the opening image of a film about this eerie time-warped survivor of the Cold War, a shabby tropical Checkpoint Charlie set in a working minefield.

“Castro built a facility on top of that little mountain over there,” says the sergeant in charge of the media tour, “so he could watch the Marines do their training. He loved to do that.”

Maybe he still visits from time to time. If he does, he’s seen the American base grow and shrink and grow again, evolve from a refuelling station and surveillance point to a base for anti-drug operations to a detention centre for thousands of Haitian and Cuban aliens trying to reach the United States. Now it is the central prison and interrogation centre for the men held by the Coalition of the Willing.

They are never called prisoners. The Americans who guard them always refer to them as “detainees.” There are more than six hundred of them, from more than forty countries. They were detained, the Americans say, on the field of battle “in the Afghanistan theatre” and flown here to be interviewed until their usefulness to the interrogators is considered at an end.

The Cubans, of course, have no say in any of this. The Cuban government has formal sovereignty over Guantanamo naval base but does not control it and cannot enter it. For a century the base has been leased by the U.S. government under an arrangement that can be cancelled only by mutual consent. The result is an odd tangle of international and Cuban law that produces a place free of American law, and perhaps of any law at all. Although American officials at the base say that they are operating “in the spirit of the Geneva convention,” the fact is that the detainees – Afghans, Pakistanis, English, Australians, and even one young Canadian – live there under guard beneath tropical skies without charges having been laid, without access to lawyers, and with no assurance of freedom soon, or later, or maybe ever.

Resort developers, perhaps those with experience in budget destinations, would look at Guantanamo Bay with wistfulness. There are pleasant barracks and athletic facilities for the more than twenty-two hundred American military personnel, fine and uncrowded beaches, a McDonald’s, a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, and iguanas on the promontories overlooking the ocean, scrambling elbows-out, heads-up, tails flailing over the bristly grass. There is a golf course. An outdoor movie theatre. The diving is excellent. There is the Bayview Club for gourmet dining and many large-scale mess halls for all ranks.

There are sights to see as well. Camp X-Ray, with its open lines of cages that once housed the rebellious among the illegal migrants, then the first wave of illegal combatants in 2002, is locked and empty now.