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Birds
of Guantanamo
By Tom Crumpacker
Posted by Bulatlat.com
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Prisoners
at a US base at Guantanamo Bay |
June
29, 2004 (NY Transfer)--Guantanamo is a city of some 200,000, capital of Cuba's
easternmost province of the same name, which is Cuba's most agricultural,
beautiful and poorest province. The travel books give the city short shrift
because it has no tourist attractions, but for those interested in people rather
than things, it has lots to offer. There's a nice old center square with a
beautifully restored Catholic church, a music pavilion where they play trova for
us old-timers on Saturday nights, and a cultural center where on Saturday
afternoons groups of primary and middle school kids put on costumed song and
dance |
routines to the delight of their parents and envy of their siblings.
Nearby there's also an adult education center, several music, art and dancing
schools and Cuba's best chess club.
The city sits at the upper end of Cuba's largest and deepest bay. There's also
now a nearby tourist attraction called the "mirador" (the US marines
call it "Castro's bunker"), which is a small cafe on a mountain on
Cuban land where you can have a sandwich and look down through a telescope on
the US military base surrounding the bay near its entrance to the sea. Since the
revolution the occupied territory has been barricaded and land mined by the US
military, preventing any contact betwwen the two sides, but before the
revolution there were some mutually beneficial connections. Some Cubans found
good-paying day jobs on the base and US sailors and marines used the city as
their whorehouse.
Through the telescope you can see the defenders of our nation playing at their
water sports and on fields in the tree-shaded base town. Several kilometers to
the east, in the desert is a large, windowless structure where they torture the
Talibans, and further south, a smaller structure where they keep the Haitian,
Cuban and Dominican balseros they catch in the Florida Straits. No birds --
except a few vultures circle -- above the base. On the other side of the bay is
the airstrip where the huge, black US military planes refuel, the ones which now
circle Cuba day and night beaming onto Cuban TV the same propaganda, commercials
and cultural trash our Rulers use to anesthetize us. Apparently to them,
communication no longer means dialogue; rather it means imposing their voices
and images on others.
One has to wonder why our Rulers fear the Cuban Revolution so much. Does the
independent road to development and modernization threaten their plans for the
rest of the Third World? In Kafkaesque fashion, they are telling us that they
are helping the Cuban people by preventing medicine and medical equipment from
reaching them, punishing and threatening foreigners who dare to do business
there, funneling multi-millions to so-called non-governmental groups to
destabilize the Cuban people's governent, conducting a relentless propaganda
campaign against the revolution, unconstitutionally eliminating our right to
travel there and to give or loan money and property to our friends and families.
What secret plans are they disguising by these absurd rationalizations?
Like Auschwitz, the Guantanamo base is the perfect place for a concentration
camp because under the new US theory of sovereignity, relations between the
people there are governed by raw power rather than law. If you find yourself in
that strange place, whether you are treated as a human or an animal depends
solely on your access to power. In the past, sovereignty meant the absolute
right of a community of people to exercise dominion over its land. Now, however,
sovereignty is conditional everywhere in the Third World -- on the acceptence of
dependent First World commercial exploitation. The reason the Cubans have not
exercised dominion over their occupied land on Guantanamo bay is that they lack
the power. The Cuban sovereignty that our Rulers now claim eliminates the rule
of law there is like the "sovereignty" they claim to be giving (as
though it were theirs to give) to the Iraqis this month. It's a mirage, a shell
game, a glass of dry water for thirsty people
The century-long US occupation at Guantanamo has significantly delayed economic
development of the province. If a foreign ship gets US permission to enter the
Cuban part of the bay, it can't dock at a US port for six months. Therefore the
province must be supplied by truck from Santiago, 250 kilometers to the west.
Fifteen years after the end of the Cold War and twelve years after the Pentagon
certified that Cuba constitutes no security risk, our Rulers have recently been
tightening the blockade in what seems to be their effort at the final solution.
The Cuban people will never be starved into submission because they have
reorganized their agriculture to become self-sufficient. But funding for many of
their innovative social programs, once the pride of Latin America, is beginning
to disappear. In Guantanamo, housing is a serious problem. In the barrios,
people often live several to a bedroom and washing, bathing and flushing is
often by bucket only. The limited funding for their self-help, cooperative
housing program had to be diverted to areas in central Cuba destroyed by the
hurricane two years ago. But for some reason, Guantanameros seem to have risen
above their difficult and crowded living conditions.
My mother-in-law Augustina lives in a three-room apartment with her mother, two
daughters and a granddaughter somewhere in the middle of Barrio Suroeste. Early
in the mornings I spend there, the rooster next door, who seems to know my last
name, gently urges me to leave my dreams. Soon the dawn comes up like thunder
from across the bay and people are scrambling everywhere to get to school or
work in the fincas and agricultural coops which surround the city. Rambler that
I am, I like to take walks around the barrio in the late mornings. On the narrow
winding road-paths walking is usually best, although bicycles and horse
carriages are also used on the thoroughfares.
"Clothes make the man" is an iron rule in Guantanamo. My wife, who
lets me slop around Miami in whatever I please, won't let me out the door in
Guantanamo without first ironing my shorts and t-shirt and making sure my
sneakers are spotless. During the day, salesmen ply the roads, selling
housewares to the stay-home women; there are also preachers, adventurers,
storytellers and all kinds of interesting characters. Later there are organ
grinders and such selling caramelas to kids. When I leave on my walks, I'm
always confident that sooner or later I'll become lost in the labyrinth, but
just as confident someone will notice my confusion and take me back to Casa
Augustina. Because my eyes are seldom on the ground in front of me where they
should be, I'm known as "el accidente que viene."
In the late afternoons after the washing is hung out, I like to rest on
Augustina's flat roof and watch las palomas. The teenage boys catch them, make
homes for them on the roofs, and train them to carry inter-barrio messages
(telephones being few and far between). They have a good life: comfortable
homes, they do useful work, and in the late afternoons they soar above the
barrios in freedom in groups of a dozen or two, catching the fresh breezes from
the bay, sometimes dropping down to taste the delicacies of the occasional mango
tree.
In the evenings when the streets grow dark, I hear the soft murmer of hundreds
of voices discussing the day's events -- sports, politics, dominos, whatever --
and realize that the streets and porches are full of people and they are
creating their community.
When I leave Guantanamo, I often find myself wondering how and why it is that
the human spirit, like the palomas, sometimes soars above its harsh condition. I
think it has something to do with the idea of real community -- where relations
among people are governed by law, justice and equality rather than power. Maybe
this is the road to real freedom, and maybe it's why only birds of prey hang out
around the military base. Posted
by Bulatlat.com
*Tom
Crumpacker is a retired lawyer living in Miami and a member of the Miami
Coalition to End the US Embargo of Cuba. He can be reached at: Crump8@aol.com
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