“No pictures, no photography, none,” says Specialist Meyer, as she fits a key into a padlock.

“But you’re not using this facility now,” says the man from Die Zeit.

“Joint Task Force says no pictures.”

The cages are oddly lovely, over-grown with dead vines; each is about three paces by four, meant for two men. There is a plywood roof over each double row of cages, scraps of plastic sheeting hung from the juncture of the plywood and the mesh, and a slanting pipe running between the cages with a bulbous metal cup at groin level. A banana rat, a kind of modified beaver the size of a housecat, with a rat’s tail, tiptoes along the top of a fence and stops, shocked, at the sight of the man from Die Zeit.

It is as empty a place as I have ever seen. The cages are stripped and swept, even of litter. There are tan banana-rat droppings the size of pencil erasers in clumps on the dirt, and nothing else. A four-inch strand of plastic lies half-hidden at the foot of a cell, with a square nub where it once closed in a cuff – temporary shackles, cut and thrown away.

Prisoners in maximum security are kept in individual cells in a newer facility dubbed Camp Delta. They are able to speak with their neighbours but freed only for occasional exercise or for interviews with intelligence officers. Reporters never see them. Inmates in Delta’s Camp Four medium-security unit live in dormitories and can talk with each other and the guards. Reporters are allowed a quick look: balding, brown-skinned, bearded men in white robes, strolling behind the wire. It is hard to think what you could do with Camp Delta when the global war on terror ends and the resort planners come in. Perhaps young people from Third World nations could be flown in for a week’s introduction to the culture of the west, with a night in a Camp Delta cage as a taste of the future for a failed terrorist.

The base commander, Captain Les McCoy, has a glorious leather-and-mahogany office overlooking Guantanamo Bay. He’s a startlingly fit-looking, black Navy pilot in a blinding white uniform. He’s fond of the word “surreal,” and uses it especially in talking about the old men who commute every day from Cuba.

“Only five of them now,” he says.

“Used to be, when one retired, he and his friends would shove all the stuff he was taking back home from the base over the fence, and then on the other side he’d have to get people to help haul it up the hill on foot. Then one man died of a heart attack doing that, the day he ended work. The Cubans send a truck now. The old men would like to retire now, but they can’t – they have to take the pension cheques back for another hundred retired workers over there. We haven’t figured out any other way to get their pensions to them. So these old men still have to get up at three, four o’clock in the morning. Some have been working here fifty years.”

“Could we get a picture of the old men coming across the border?”