Guantánamo Bay is located at W 75°9' longitude and N 19°54' latitude, about three quarters of the way along Cuba's southeast coast, running west to east. Southeast Cuba is extraordinarily rugged. Comprising roughly one fifth of Cuba's territory, it boasts more mountains than the rest of Cuba combined. The Guantánamo Basin is the notable exception in the region. Its 250-odd square miles lie at or close to sea level. Backed by the sea and surrounded by mountains, the basin resembles a vast amphitheater, with the bay itself at center stage.
Guantánamo Bay is very young geologically. It assumed its present shape as recently as 6000 BCE. The principal agent in Guantánamo's creation was water. Since first arriving at the Bahama Banks forty million years ago, Cuba has been repeatedly inundated by and drained of seawater, a result of fluctuating global temperatures and the rise and fall of the Cuban landmass. Flooding seas littered coastal Cuba with marine terraces, inland lakes, and seabeds. Ebbing seas produced erosion, the source of river valleys, basins, and bays. Guantánamo is the sum of these geological processes, of the wearing away of old terraces and seabeds by erosion and the subsequent drowning of the hollows and cavities the erosion left behind.
Officially Guantánamo Bay extends ten miles long by six miles wide and measures between thirty and sixty feet deep. But practically speaking, it consists of two discrete bodies of water, an inner and outer harbor, connected by a narrow strait. The inner harbor is large and shallow. It has a smooth, billowing shoreline and resembles a good-size lake. The outer harbor is ragged and irregular. Smooth to the west, it is rough to the east, and its north is strewn with cays. The contrast between the two harbors derives from their different physical composition.
The inner harbor rests atop an old tidal flat that yielded easily and evenly to erosion. The outer harbor is lined by fossilized coral terraces, harder and more defiant of erosion. Where there is fossilized coral at Guantánamo, there will be found the cays, coves, and promontories that comprise the outer harbor (home of the U.S. base); where coral is absent, the shoreline will be smooth and uniform, as along the lower western shore of the outer harbor and throughout the whole of the inner bay.
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Individually distinctive, the two harbors combine to create a coastal environment of wondrous diversity. From the sea, Guantánamo stands out among the world's great bays for its accessibility. Some bays are so camouflaged by the surrounding countryside that it is possible to sail right past them without noticing. The harbor entrance at Santiago de Cuba, for instance, is so tortuous and cluttered that it has confounded sailors for centuries. By contrast, Guantánamo's entrance is deep, uncluttered, and virtually impossible to miss. Now nearly two miles wide, it sits within a wide gap in the mountain rampart of southeast Cuba detectable far out to sea.
The narrower a harbor entrance, the more vulnerable approaching vessels to the whims of those who call the harbor home. The mouths of many Cuban harbors are not only narrow but sheer, affording hosts the advantage of significantly higher ground. Again, Santiago de Cuba comes to mind, where Morro Castle commands the harbor from high atop an imposing bluff; again, Guantánamo presents a striking contrast. Windward Point, the southeast corner of the bay, rises four hundred feet above sea level, but not until a half mile from the coast. Meanwhile, Leeward Point remains flat for several miles, barely reaching thirty feet above sea level. Guantánamo's broad mouth would make it a challenge to defend in the years before modern weaponry. Conversely, ships that dared not test the welcome at Havana or Santiago would find Guantánamo Bay an open and inviting place.
On approach, Guantánamo Bay appears not only welcoming but vast. Beyond the entrance to the bay, the Guantánamo Basin seems to stretch out indefinitely, making the bay feel much larger than its sixty square miles. Once inside the bay, visitors confront a wealth of possible destinations, further adding to the sense of scale. Immediately inside Leeward Point, moving clockwise around the bay, is a channel
two hundred feet wide and a mile long that is both the estuary of the Guantánamo River and the passage to secluded Mahomilla Bay. The Guantánamo River is brackish well before it meets the bay, but it is navigable far upstream, thus connecting the outer harbor to the Cuban hinterland and providing its only access to freshwater.
Just past the estuary lies Hicacal Beach, three miles of coarse sand carved from the delta of the Guantánamo River. Most of Guantánamo Bay is sheltered from the prevailing southeast wind by the hills of Windward Point. Hicacal Beach is decidedly not. It meets the prevailing southeast wind, brisk by early afternoon most days, squarely on the nose, taming its often boisterous waves and deflecting them harmlessly up the channel. The most exposed territory in Guantánamo Bay, Hicacal is also the most dynamic. Reshaped by tides and passing storms, its fertile and abundant seabeds suggest the benefits of its buffeting by wind and sea.
From its foot inside Leeward Point, Hicacal Beach arches sharply north and east, directing incoming traffic toward the opposite shore. The eastern shore of the outer harbor is a peninsula roughly six miles long and tapering from five to three miles wide as it frames the southeast corner of the bay. Down the spine of the peninsula is a range of hills, nearly five hundred feet tall, that dominate the outer harbor and the nearby Cuban coastline. At the base of the hills, along the outer shore of the peninsula, lies a broad, flat terrace, current site of the U.S. prison camp. Along the inner shore of the peninsula, old coral terraces protrude like fingers into the bay. Roughly thirty feet high, these terraces range from several hundred yards to half a mile long, creating a succession of natural coves and jetties. The terraces proliferate across the top of the outer harbor, too, where some take the form of islands. Here the terraces tend to be long and the coves deep; a few reach inland for nearly a mile. The net effect of this diverse seascape is a prized refuge and an explorer's paradise: behind every promontory a little cove, within every cove a beguiling shoreline.
Past the old coral terraces at the top of the outer harbor lies the opening to the inner harbor, a broad, uncluttered expanse notable less for its topographical interest than for its geographical orientation. If the outer harbor belongs inexorably to the sea, the inner harbor is indisputably Cuba's own. It sits at the foot of the Guantánamo Basin, an
ancient drainage system laced with rivers and streams and tied to the rest of Cuba by a ribbon of fertile plain. In contrast to the inhospitable terrain that surrounds the outer harbor, the land framing the inner harbor is irrigated, arable, and hence suited to human habitation. Rich salt deposits line the shoreline; the harbor itself fairly boils with fish. But it is as a link to the outside world that the inner harbor is most significant. Communication is cumbersome in this rugged corner of southeast Cuba, making access to the sea a condition of its economic and cultural vitality.
In sum, the two harbors are complementary, their differences felicitous, at least so long as traffic between them remained open and unfettered. Together, they sustain distinct yet interdependent worlds. Divided, their value depreciates, as, landlocked the one and exposed the other, each becomes merely the sum of its individual parts. Since 1898, when the United States first occupied the outer harbor in the Cuban Spanish-American War, the U.S. naval base has effectively cut the bay in two.
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Magnificent in its own right, Guantánamo Bay occupies a strategic geographical position in Cuba, the Caribbean Basin, and the Western Hemisphere. Paradoxically, Guantánamo's significance within Cuba derives from its isolation from the center of Cuban social and political life. Six hundred miles distant from the capital, Havana, and surrounded by mountains, Guantánamo has functioned historically as Cuba's safety valveâa land of exile and refuge accommodating marginalized people from within Cuba and across the Caribbean basin.
Guantánamo's role in Cuba is a function of the island's natural history. Tectonic boundaries tend to be mountainous. Plate collisions cause tectonic folding, and volcanoes are common along plate seams. Scientists call the process of mountain formation orogeny, and southeast Cuba is a case in point. The region consists essentially of two large mountain chains, the fabled Sierra Maestra and the no less formidable Nipe-Sagua-Baracoa Massif. The Sierra Maestra rises just west of Guantánamo Bay and runs 180 miles down the coastline to Cabo Cruz, southeast Cuba's westernmost tip. Pico Turquino (6,476 feet), Cuba's tallest peak, commands the middle of the range.
Slightly lower than its rivals in Jamaica and Hispaniola, Pico Turquino is comparable in height to New Hampshire's Mount Washington (6,288 feet) and North Carolina's Mount Mitchell (6,684 feet), the highest elevations in the eastern United States. For much of its span the Sierra Maestra climbs straight out of the sea, which lends it extraordinary grandeur. Its status is enhanced by the celebrated people who have sought the sanctuary of its caves and copses over the centuries, starting, it is said, with Hatuey, and continuing through the runaway slaves, insurgents, revolutionaries, and counterrevolutionaries of more recent days.
To the east of Guantánamo Bay rise the foothills of the Nipe-Sagua-Baracoa Massif. The great massif sprawls in a sideways V shape one hundred or so miles from Guantánamo Bay to Punta de MaisÃ, then back to the high plains over BahÃa de Nipe. Less magnificent than the Sierra Maestra, its effect on Guantánamo is more constant. Green, luxuriant, expansive, the Nipe-Sagua-Baracoa Massif is a jealous sentinel, at once protecting the bay from wind and weather while simultaneously cheating it of meaningful rainfall. Few roads connect the great massif to the rest of Cuba. Relatively few people live there. Among these few are said to be the final remnants of Cuba's TaÃno people.
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Remote from the heart of Cuba, Guantánamo enjoys a front-row seat along the Windward Passage, one of the hemisphere's busiest sea-lanes and an integral link in the circum-Caribbean communication system. The passage takes its name from the breeze that blows in off the Atlantic between Cuba and Haiti, hurtling crews and cargo into the heart of the Caribbean basin. From its perch along the passage, Guantánamo affords access not only to the Antilles archipelago and the Gulf of Mexico, but also to coastal Central and South America and the Pacific Ocean, via the Isthmus of Panama.
Fifty-five miles wide, the Windward Passage is exceptionally deep. The passage marks the eastern end of the Cayman Trench, a 1,000-mile-long gash in the Caribbean floor formed by the easterly lurch of the Caribbean plate, which separated Cuba from Hispaniola 40 million years ago. At its deepest, the Cayman Trench plummets over
25,000 feet. The Windward Passage plunges only about one-fifth that deep, but it does so vertiginously, dropping from 60 feet at the mouth of Guantánamo Bay to 1,500 feet a mile out, to 5,760 feet within 25 miles. Ships and cargo lost in the passage are lost forever. More than merely menacing, however, the passage is a boon to Caribbean ecology, allowing nutrients from deep ocean waters to ventilate and replenish the Cayman and Yucatán basins. The passage also proved a benefit to the U.S. Navy and its submarine training program, which has enjoyed the rare luxury of deepwater access just minutes out of port.
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The Windward Passage is Guantánamo's ticket to ride. No sooner had the North and South American plates separated from Europe and Africa than temperature and wind and their constant companion current conspired to reunite the hemispheres in an oceanic conveyance system that laid the foundations for the modern Atlantic world. To a considerable degree, that world revolves around Cuba and Guantánamo Bay.
The system draws its energy from the sun. Due to the tilt of the earth's axis, the sun strikes the earth more directly at the equator than at the tropics and poles. When hot air rises over the equator it leaves behind a vacuum of low pressure that draws in cooler, more pressurized air from the tropics in the form of wind. This is the source of the trade winds, the steady easterly breeze that blows between latitude 30° and the equator in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. The trade winds blow east to west, thanks to the eastward rotation of the earth, which bends prevailing winds to the right north of the equator and to the left south of it, a result of the so-called Coriolis effect.
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But the trade winds are only part of what makes the Atlantic world go round. There is no limit to the amount of sunshine that warms the equator, but there
is
a limit to how high hot air can rise through the earth's atmosphere: approximately ten miles. At that point the rising air hits an atmospheric ceiling called the tropopause and is propelled toward the poles by still more air behind it, where it begins to cool. This equatorial air can go only so far toward the poles due to resistance from air already there. The air pressure thus increases just as its temperature drops, returning the air to the surface of the earth. This happens, north and south, at approximately latitude 30°, creating bands of high pressure known as tropical highs. Much of this highly
pressurized air gets sucked back into the vacuum of low pressure over the equator, but not all of it. Another band of low pressure at 60° draws some of the cold, dense, highly pressurized air still closer to the poles, again in the form of wind. This wind, too, is bent to the right north of the equator, and to the left south of it, generating west-to-east winds this time, the so-called westerlies, a source of weather systems on the North American continent.