Growing Up At Guantanamo Bay

By Keith Edwards

There was this story that all of the American kids who lived on GTMO knew — the Cubans didn’t map their minefields. We’d heard it from someone’s brother, who’d heard it from one of the Marines stationed along the fence line, who’d seen it with their own eyes. Prisoners were marched out of a gate on the Cuban side and into the no-man’s land between one country and another until . . . Boom!

It was an urban legend, of course. But the subtext was apparent, even as a kid: Americans would never be so cruel as to treat our prisoners that way.

The U.S.’s uneasy presence at GTMO traces back to 1898, when the bay, located at the southeastern end of Cuba, served as a beachhead during the Spanish-American War. When Cuba gained independence from Spain after the war, the U.S. began leasing the land that would become the naval station in 1903 (for the prime sum of only a bit more than $3,000 a year). The Cuban government only ever cashed one rent check, refusing to do so after the Revolution in 1959. The landmines went in shortly thereafter.

In the 1960s, Castro threatened to kick the U.S. out, but also recognized that if he did so, it could serve as a pretext for war. Since then, the Cuban government has put up with the U.S. in a manner that can best be described as begrudging.