Early twentieth-century images of Guantanamo Bay share some eerie similarities.
I frequently attempt to write a book proposal about the modern movement of postcard images between Cuba and the United States. However, my hoard of Guantanamo Bay region postcards always complicates the story. There are other hoarders of Cuban material culture who, with a lot of work, have hammered out coherent historical accounts about Cuban and U.S. relations. And institutions have elegantly promoted a few of my fellow hoarders to “collectors,” including Vicki Gold Levi whose remarkable collections are in the Wolfsonian. Likewise, Emilio Cueto has such a laudable array of Cubania that both The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal describe how his home functions as a museum. Rather than point to a better understanding of Cuba’s cultural movements, I worry that my hoard, including several dozen postcard images of Guantanamo Bay and its environs, illustrates decades of mixed messages shared between Cuba and the United States.
Beginning with the arrival of U.S. troops in the Bay in 1898, and lasting until Cuba’s mail services to the U.S. largely ceased in 1961, U.S. sailors and officers purchased postcards in large quantity for their own albums and to mail to their families in the United States. As a result, there are a fair number of Guantanamo Bay area postcards in circulation within today’s collectors market. Because these postcards are cheap, I do buy them. However, I find that the early twentieth-century Guantanamo Bay region images are the most boring images and simultaneously the most problematic of their time. Therefore, allow me to present to you my conspiracy theory: both U.S. and Cuban popular audiences simply did not want to deal with the complex issues posed by the U.S. Naval presence in Guantanamo Bay. For audiences living on and in close proximity to the base, it was easier to render it as unexciting.
Even after arranging “to rent” the land from Cuba in 1903, the U.S. Naval enclave long remained one of the sleepier points of debate between the United States and Cuba. Indirectly, the postcards incriminate a substantial number of people who wanted issues surrounding U.S. presence in Cuba to remain unprovocative. The images evidence that most media producers and audiences wanted visually saccharin images of the Guantanamo Bay region featuring banal subjects with limited information.
As part of this dryasdust sort of representation, the majority of surviving postcards sent from the Naval base depict Caimanera, the small Cuban fishing town nearby. For six decades, Caimanera provided limited off-site entertainment for U.S. Navy men as well as a significant number of the Cuban nationals who worked on the naval base. In a fairly repetitive fashion, the early twentieth-century Caimanera images are relatively barren landscapes that sometimes feature a few cooperative local people. These individuals held their poses for a coordinated bit of time as the cameraman used cumbersome glass plate negatives to shoot the scene.
Among dozens of postcards of the region in my collection, only one postcard identifies a photographer by name. In that one example, the card states that a “W. B. Houston” contributed the image. That image shares a composition in common with most Caimanera and Guantanamo Bay postcard images, so it is within reason that Houston photographed a sizable portion of the few dozen images available. Wallace B. Houston served as the U.S. Consular agent in Caimanera during the 1910s. There’s not much known about Houston in available records. Houston appears to have been a fairly quiet consular official during an unremarkable period of shared, peaceful history between the U.S. and Cuba. Arguably, his bland marketing strategy of the base appears to have been effective.
For these images, the horizon line almost always lies at the midline of the print. A contemporary photo editor now knows that repetition of a midline horizon (a literal “flat line”) will bore a viewer fairly quickly, especially when looking at images in succession. Moreover, the colors added during the printing process are subdued. Wooden homes, supported by stilts, stand at the shoreline and these repeated architectural shapes have yellow or white exterior walls, with a few pinks added to tone down the transitions. It is pretty enough, but there’s no “Wish you were here,” implied in these scenes.
One image above, labelled “Cuban Girls, fishing at Caimanera,” attests to the seamless way in which Guantanamo Bay’s large seafaring presence blended into the scene. There is a large ship in the distant background, and the buildings to accommodate these vessels sit even further back beyond the village. The young, harmless, non-descript schoolgirls are physically larger than a ship requiring dozens of crewmembers. Throughout the postcards available, the numerous U.S. sailors present in Guantanamo Bay are barely a footnote in an image serving to define the region.
This silent presence of the U.S. Navy is unsurprising. As an unspoken rule, military bases do not seek to call much attention to their existence. No doubt, these placid images provided audiences back in the United States assurance that the base was a routine, wholly normal residence for work, or, rather, military training. Even when appearing in a postcard, the target range for shooting is unspectacular and not in use. As another unspoken rule, the postcards do not provide enough information to map out the historical base. The semi-professional photographic images made on the base largely highlight entertainment facilities, such as the baseball field, or show badly cropped images of the early tent residences.
It is important to note, however, that farther afield, the sailors venturing out of Guantánamo Bay did attract critical attention. Better photographers and much more creative postcard printers made note of the United States seamen in Cuba. In Guantánamo City, more than forty miles away from Caimanera, the off duty seamen congregated in groups in public places and permitted casual portraits in a public park. Otherwise, postcards that featured no regional affiliation frequently suggested the sailors were pests seeking to court Cuban women. In the early 1900s through the 1910s, postcards portray Cuban women as standing behind bars with these international suitors standing outside. One Tennesse-based printer pointed to sexual predation by these sailors known for “Foraging in Cuba.” Below, in one image, the sailor is shown sucking on the teat of a goat, while a male goat charges at him from behind. Such images from outside of the immediate Guantanamo Bay area posed far greater resentment and anxiety about the U.S. Naval presence. Following similar arguments by historian Louis Perez Jr., it stands to reason that this was not just about sexual predation, but as a metaphorical reference to the nation of Cuba as woman whom other nations continually attempt to coerce.
In the past few years, a number of museums have put on major exhibitions about The Postcard Age that feature how postcard production and circulation actively changed modern photography and media. But those exhibitions are fairly resolved and neat and do not discuss Cuba. There’s a long voyage ahead to reconcile political and cultural ties between the United States and Cuba with respect to Guantanamo Bay. In large part, I suspect it will involve facing the issues that several generations worked so hard to cover up and, if you will, rendered flat. I suspect that Vicki Gold Levi and Emilio Cueto, with their beautifully organized collections of Cuban cultural materials, would also agree.
Feature image: Guantánamo Bay –Loma Sur, Caimanera, South Hill. Collection of Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami.
Unless otherwise noted, images discussed in this essay are in the author’s collection. All rights for these images are reserved.