Questions about the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base’s future remain unanswered – will its prisons ever be closed? Will it ever be returned to Cuba? – and President Obama’s time is running out. Former detainees, lawyers, human rights activists and journalists have worked long years to keep the Base’s detention centers in the public eye; and from the perspective of the arts, poets, photographers and courtroom sketch artists have represented its cells, communal spaces and military courts for detainees.
What we have heard and seen of the Base over the past fifteen and a half years has come primarily from within its perimeter: from people detained or on assignment there, approaching Guantánamo from distant black sites or airstrips as the isolated, dis-located and legally anomalous entity that initially made it such a fitting site in the “War on Terror.” But the Base is not an island (and nor is it in outer space, as the Bush government is reported to have desired). It is in Cuba, where its presence registers both physically and symbolically, even though there is no legal passage between the country and the Base. The Base’s watchtowers, lights and physical structures are visible from the border towns of Caimanera and Boquerón, and from the lookout tower at Malones. The history of its lease and uses are central to the anti-imperialist rhetoric that both Castro presidents have maintained to the present day. Both insist that its occupation is an act of aggression, and Raúl has demanded its return as a condition of restored diplomatic relations with the U.S.
How, then, has the Base been seen and represented from the Cuban side of the fence-line? Do we find Guantánamo, the Base, in contemporary Cuban writing and art? Very little, if we look to Havana, indisputably the country’s cultural epicenter: the U.S. is much more present there as Washington or Miami than as Guantánamo, 900 miles away. The Base is hardly a ubiquitous theme even in the cultural production of areas closer to it. But there are writers and artists who, over the years that the detention centers have operated, have offered their own representations of the Base, although they have never been permitted to enter it. Their perspectives differ from those of the detainees, lawyers, journalists and artists who have experienced its prisons and other spaces first-hand. Human rights abuses are not their principal theme, but they reflect with ambivalence on the Base’s presence in far-Eastern Cuba and its connections to human life, loss and suffering.
Some writers explore the peculiarly local history of migration that has evolved around the Base. After the Cuban Revolution, following its heyday as an employer of workers and consumer of insalubrious services from neighboring towns, the Base’s gates were closed and the border came to serve officially as a symbol of Cuba’s heroic defense against the forces of imperialism. More covertly, it became an escape route for residents of the Guantánamo area, who made often fatal attempts to swim to the Base across Guantánamo Bay. Stories of these attempts circulate informally and have formed a common plot line for recent fiction from the region. For example, the “Brigada de la Frontera” – the élite military unit formed in 1961 to ward off attacks from the Base – is the subject of a story by writer and journalist Leandro Estupiñán Zaldívar. Titled “Abducción” (“Abduction”), it features a soldier on the lookout for illegal border-crossers. The landscape and solitude of the border make his weak and tired mind fear the presence of aliens, such that the story calls into question the figure of the border guard as an invincible defender of indisputably Cuban territory. Lawyer and independent journalist Roberto de Jesús Quiñónes, who lives in the city of Guantánamo, writes in the story “La fuga” (“The Escape”) of two friends recently released from a Cuban prison who plot to reach the Base. Their attempt to find freedom ends, as many such attempts have, when one friend is blown apart by a hidden landmine. The characters in “Vida tropical de Aparicio” (“Aparicio’s Life in the Tropics”), by Guantánamo writer and doctor Regino G. Rodríguez Boti, trace the same marshy, dangerous terrain, but are caught, returned to Cuba and incarcerated in conditions harsh enough to recall those at the Naval Base. In these stories, the Base is not a distant, dislocated anomaly but a symbol of possible freedom and frustrated dreams, with a powerful presence in the region and its history. (1)
The Base’s impact on the local economy comes to the fore in “El camino de la estrategia” (2013), a multi-media project by Guantánamo artists Alexander Beatón and Pedro Gutiérrez. It draws on oral testimonies and artifacts of long-time Caimanera residents to articulate a collective psychology of watchfulness and being watched. Surveillance towers are assembled from fishing nets in reference to the stagnation of the local fishing economy since the best waters of Guantánamo Bay were marked off limits. Traditional rocking chairs are immobilized against walls, referencing how Caimanerenses’ movements have been restricted because they live in a high security zone designated “the first line of defense against imperialism.” And yet although their lives have been hampered by proximity to the Base, residents’ oral testimonies relate how they have learned to live side-by-side with the enemy, sharing a space despite the hostilities that have divided it. “Convivencia,” or co-habitation, is the project’s conceptual framework, and it offers a way of thinking with, as well as against, the Base.
Pedro Gutiérrez and Alexander Beatón, from “El camino de la estrategia” (2013)
Although references to surveillance, incarceration and the illicit movement of people recur in local writing and art about the Naval Base, rarely is its post-9/11 use as a detention center addressed directly. The startling exception is Gitmo, a collection by the Guantánamo poet José Ramón Sánchez. Partially published in a small journal, La noria, that Sánchez co-edits, Gitmo is an expansive poetic project that reflects on the history and continued presence of the Naval Base in Cuba, through actual, borrowed and imagined knowledge of it. It draws from memories of a childhood in which light, sound and broadcast signals from the Base reached into the surrounding areas, creating illusions of both conviviality and worldliness particular to this region of Cuba; official documents about the Base’s creation and early history; reports and retrieved archives pertaining to detainees who have been held there; and the Spanish translation of Poems from Guantánamo, a book of detainee poetry edited by lawyer Marc Falkoff in 2007 and published despite many layers of censorship.
With this varied and often haphazard assemblage of sources, Sánchez creates what he has called “second-hand poetry,” drawn from experiences described and portrayed by others. “Second-hand poetry” allows for an empathetic reaching across the Base’s border: like metaphor at its most elemental, it puts one thing, or one self, in the place of another. The “other” of Sánchez’s poetry is most often the Base’s Muslim detainees – in whose cells, for example, he imagines himself in the poem “The Black Arrow. ” In lines so dense with numbers that they are hard to pronounce (a comeback to the political language that has engulfed the Base, easy to say but not to make sense of), the poem pictures detainees praying toward Mecca, and imagines what they would do if they were dis-oriented.
Ibrahim Al-Rubaish wrote his “Ode to the Sea” while detained as an “enemy combatant” at Guantánamo. Scanning the Base’s coastline, he asked, “Does Cuba, the vanquished, translate its stories for you?’ An answer might be that yes, Cuban writers and artists do tell their stories of the Base, its border, and the waters around it; but that few, other than José Ramón Sánchez, align those stories with the experience of detainees. It is Sánchez alone who asks – in all his work on the Base and the lives it has touched, and explicitly in the poem “Los quilos” – “How can you write about the Base/ without comparing yourself to its victims?”
NOTES
(1) Estupiñán Zaldívar’s story is published in ed. Caridad Tamayo, Como raíles de punta: Jóven narrativa cubana (Santa Clara, Cuba: Ediciones Sed de Belleza, 2013); de Jesús Quiñónes’s in El mar y la montaña [Guantánamo] 2 (2012); and Rodríguez Boti’s in La muerte del olvido y otros relatos (Guantánamo: Editorial El mar y la montaña, 2009). I address these stories in further detail in my article “Cuban Borderlands.”
FEATURED IMAGE: Screenshot from José Massip’s Guantánamo (1965).
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