REDISCOVERING GUANTÃNAMO
On the afternoon of April 29, 1494, Guantánamo Bay bustled with activity. Hunters from a village up the Guantánamo Valley gathered food for a celebratory feast.
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Using traps, nets, hooks, and harpoons, and perhaps working from canoes, the hunters were having a good time of it. Within a few hours, they had hauled in roughly one hundred pounds of fish, which they set about preserving for the journey home. Meanwhile, a second group of hunters pursued alligators that made their homes along the banks of the rivers that fed Guantánamo Bay. They, too, were enjoying a good day, and before long the bay was perfumed by wood smoke from fires sizzling with fresh fish and alligator meat hung from wooden spits.
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An ordinary day at Guantánamo became memorable sometime in the midafternoon, when three large vessels topped by billowing white sails appeared off the entrance to the bay. News of the foreign fleet's return to the Americas had preceded it to Cuba, borne by fleeing villagers from nearby Hispaniola.
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With scarcely time to conceal themselves, the hunters withdrew into the hills and bushes bordering the bay, leaving their game roasting over the fires. Aware of the strangers' advantage in weaponry, the hunters could only watch as the strangers disembarked and devoured the fish, all the while eschewing the alligator, the more precious delicacy in local circles.
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With their stomachs full, the strangers set out to explore the surroundings,
as if to identify if not thank the people who had so amply provided for them. Still, the hunters shrank back, until finally appointing an envoy to find out what the strangers wanted. Moving forward, the envoy was met not by one of the newcomers but by a fellow Arawak speaker whom the strangers had snatched off one of the Bahama islands.
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Convinced at last that the strangers had stopped at the bay for only a quick visit, the hunters abandoned their hiding places and approached their guests with caution and generosity. Never mind the hundred pounds of fish, the interpreter was assured; the hunters could recover that in a matter of hours. There followed an exchange of gifts and pleasantries, after which the strangers reboarded their vessels and went to bed, the better to rise early, set sail, and finally put to rest the impious notion that Cuba was an island and not the continent of Asia.
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The people who discovered Columbus helping himself to their dinner that day had preceded him by nearly a millennium. The TaÃno, as Columbus's unwitting hosts are known today, were themselves recent arrivals in eastern Cuba.
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They had been beaten to the bay by still earlier discoverers, who began to harvest Guantánamo's resources as early as 1000 BCE.
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Guantánamo's first discoverers hailed from the west, hopping over islands, now submerged, that once connected Central America to Cuba via Jamaica some seven thousand years ago.
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These so-called Casimiroid people found in Guantánamo a cornucopia of flora and fauna with no one to compete for it. The Casimiroids exploited Guantánamo Bay more as a hunting ground than as a home. For them, the bay comprised part of a larger ecosystem that met the requirements of Stone Age living. From the mudflats and mangrove-lined terraces of the outer harbor, the Casimiroids took shellfish, fish, and game, and materials for the simple tools that facilitated their hunting and scavenging. Along the streambeds and river valleys that fed the inner harbor, they drew water and collected wild fruit and vegetation. Theirs was a difficult, prosaic life. Their impact on the Guantánamo Basin was negligible. The vast bay easily absorbed their sparse population, and for their first two thousand years in Cuba, they had few if any rivals.
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As the Casimiroids were wending their way toward Guantánamo, another peopleâhorticultural, sedentary, ceramicâbegan to stir deep in the Orinoco River basin of South America. These were the ancestors of Columbus's TaÃno hosts. What set them in motion is anybody's guess, but sometime after 2000 BCE they took to the sea, riding a branch of the South Equatorial Current along the northeast coast of South America, over the equator, to the base of the Antilles archipelago. Over the next two thousand years, they migrated up the archipelago from island to island, all the while appropriating cultural elements of the Stone Age peoples they displaced. By the late first century BCE, they had arrived at Hispaniola, where TaÃno civilization reached its zenith several centuries before Columbus. The TaÃno first crossed the Windward Passage from Hispaniola to eastern Cuba around 700 CE. There their westward progress stalled, their assimilative powers outmatched by the guns, germs, and steel of the conquistadors.
In the American imagination, Columbus's so-called discovery of America in 1492 represents a watershed second only to the birth of Christ. In the eyes of Columbus and his royal sponsors, the mission to the Orient was merely a logical extension of the
reconquista
, the centuries-old (and vastly expensive) effort to drive the Moors (and Jews) from Spain. Only in hindsight can the expulsion of the Moors in 1492 be taken for granted. At the time Columbus was charting his journey west, the success of that battle could hardly be assumed, and Spain's newly consolidated kingdom of Aragon and Castile wanted nothing so much as funds sufficient to finish the job. Promise of access to lucrative Oriental markets induced Castile's queen Isabella to sponsor an audacious navigator from Genoa.
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On the Iberian Peninsula, the rise of Aragon and Castile was achieved by the creation of what were in effect colonies established in the wake of the retreating Moors. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella granted rights to their most trusted and valued lieutenants to rule over these new colonies in their names. But there were only so many such grants to be won at home, and after 1492 the
Orbe Novo
beckoned to a cohort of second-tier conquistadors flush from the heat of battle, no less ambitious for fame and fortune, and no less committed to the project of making the world safe for Christianity than the royal favorites themselves. Columbus was more sailor than warrior, but warriors
accompanied him on his several voyages to the Americas, where violence became the Spaniards' stock-in-trade.
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Columbus's brief sojourn at Guantánamo signaled the beginning of a cataclysmic social and economic revolution that permanently transformed not only Cuba and Hispaniola but North and South America, Europe, and Africa besides. The islands and continents that Columbus and his successors “discovered” at the end of the fifteenth century were worthless without a labor force. Spain was merely the first in a series of aspiring European and North American empires that defended the enslavement and annihilation of millions of indigenous inhabitants and imported Africans on the basis of putative cultural and racial differences. The contradiction between the universalism latent in Western theology and philosophy and the West's historic treatment of Indians, slaves, and countless “others” inspired a long argument about just who was fit to be counted as a “human being,” an argument that continues to this day (women? indigenous Americans? African slaves? stateless enemy combatants?). But all of this was unimaginable upon that first encounter at Guantánamo Bay.
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No doubt Columbus's impatience at Guantánamo Bay suited the TaÃno hunters just fine. With the admiral on his way to China, they were free to complete the task that had brought them to the bay. Compared with their cousins on Hispaniola, they had gotten off easily that day. At Isabella, Columbus's headquarters across the Windward Passage, the psychological and physical demands of conquest had begun to take a toll on the Europeans, with one of the first formal incidents of Spanish-on-TaÃno violence recorded earlier that same month.
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A local Indian had allegedly stolen a Spaniard's clothes; as punishment, one of Columbus's lieutenants cut off the ear of a TaÃno vassal, taking into custody the responsible cacique and several members of his family. Columbus wanted to teach the Indians a lesson by cutting off all his prisoners' arms, but a TaÃno ally dissuaded him. Nevertheless, a precedent had been set, and over the course of the next twenty years, the Spanish so brutalized Hispaniola that within a single generation there remained scarcely any TaÃno left.
Cuba, meanwhile, enjoyed what can only be called a grace period,
its inhabitants going about their lives as if they could avoid their neighbors'fate simply by ignoring it.
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When Spain finally turned its attention to Cuba in 1511, it did so with brutal efficiency. To pacify Cuba, the Crown selected Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, author of spectacular atrocities in the Spanish conquest of Hispaniola, including the burning alive of eighty-four TaÃno caciques assembled at the village of Xara-gua in autumn 1503.
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Velázquez arrived in Cuba with a vengeance, indeed, in hot pursuit of a cacique named Hatuey, who had fled across the Windward Passage rather than submit to Spanish authorityâa capital offense.
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By 1511 the Crown had introduced in Hispaniola a scheme of land and labor distribution called encomienda, a feudal system for the New World. By the terms of encomienda, Spanish colonists received land along with right to the labor of the Indians who dwelt upon it. Technically, the Indians owned the lots on which they lived, and if less than independent, they were not formally slaves. Until they ran away, that is, thus depriving the Spanish encomendero the means of making a living (and the Crown itself its reason for being in the New World). A TaÃno in flight from encomienda was for all intents and purposes a runaway slave, and no amount of hand-wringing by Bartolomé de las Casas and a whole order of Dominican monks could alter his or her fate.
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Hatuey landed in Cuba at Punta de MaisÃ, just across the Windward Passage from today's northwest Haiti. Punta de Maisà lacks a harbor, so Velázquez headed for Guantánamo Bay, hoping to corner Hatuey in the eastern end of the island and thereby stop the rebellion from spreading. For three months, Velázquez combed the mountains east of Guantánamo in search of a leader who knew his pursuer too well, and who aimed to avoid a face-to-face showdown at all cost. Cuban history is full of guerillas; Hatuey simply wanted to be left alone. But with eastern Cuba rallying around the TaÃno chief, Velázquez treated the region to a barn burning, razing villages, terrorizing women and children, and torturing local residents for information.
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Before burning Hatuey at the stake, Velázquez offered him the opportunity of redemption. When a Catholic father asked Hatuey if he wanted to be baptized into the Christian faith, Hatuey wondered why he should want to become a Christian when Christians were the
source of his undoing. Because Christians go to heaven and remain in the company of God, came the reply. Are you going to heaven? Hatuey asked. Of course, replied the father, like all who are holy. Then no thanks, said Hatuey, who had had quite enough of Christian company already. A match was struck, and the TaÃno resistance went up in smoke.
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Guantánamo's centrality in these early cultural encounters will be surprising only to readers who have forgotten their natural history. The genesis of this “Great Port” (Puerto Grande), as Columbus named it, dates back to the geological upheaval that splintered the supercontinent Pangaea some 180 million years ago, when, driven by upwelling magma along a rift that would become the mid-Atlantic ridge, “North America” pulled away from “Africa” and “South America.” At first the rupture left only a teardrop, an intimation of the Gulf of Mexico. But the drop became an ocean whose relentless expansion sundered Pangaea into bits.
Tectonic activity of this magnitude produces considerable flotsam. Off the western coast of the Americas sat chunks of the continental margin, as if patiently awaiting conveyance. Conveyance arrived, for some at least, in the form of the Caribbean plate. Originating in the Pacific Ocean, the plate moved north and east like a saucer. Along its starboard rim, like running lights, perched a volcanic island arc. This arc would become the islands of the Lesser Antilles. Nearby, on the leading edge of the saucer, rode pieces of future Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico, not yet in recognizable form. Hispaniola and Puerto Rico clung to Cuba's southern coast as the saucer shot the gap between the Americas, scraping off Jamaica from the Yucatán along the way. For several thousand miles, the saucer sped unimpeded toward the northeast. It slammed to a halt at the Bahama Banks, southern boundary of North America, where a combination of oceanic and upper mantle crust, continental margin, and island arc stacked up to produce the foundation of today's Cuba, one of the most complex geological conglomerations on earth.
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Toward the end of this monumental migration, Cuba sat along the southern rim of the North American plate, originally little more than a
chain of islands. Meanwhile, southeast Cuba, future home to Guantánamo, constituted a world of its own. In the immediate aftermath of the collision, it straddled the boundary of the North American and Caribbean plates, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico still firmly attached. But the forces propelling the saucer were unassuaged. With its passage northward blocked by the Bahamas, the saucer veered sharply east in a wrenching motion that nearly carried southeast Cuba out to sea. Southeast Cuba held as Hispaniola and Puerto Rico tore away, exposing a gap along the Cuban coastline that would become the setting of Guantánamo Bay.