In 1921, Corey was gently reprimanded by the base commander for mistaking the navy for its ships rather than its men. One way of reading Billard's piece, some forty years later, is that the navy is not just its men but also its women. They remind us what we're fighting for. A year after Billard's trip to Guantánamo Bay, another journalist asked the Defense Department why in the world “Navy wives and children remain in such a political hot spot as Guantánamo Bay.” Government policy, came the reply; the military “encourages dependents to accompany servicemen to foreign posts,” so long as their presence is consistent with “combat readiness.” (In 1962, over half a million servicemen's and civilian employees' dependents resided abroad.
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) In short, the military expected wives to stand by their men. At Guantánamo, Billard suggests, this is exactly what wives do. In yet another photo, taken alongside a monument at McCalla Hill (where the U.S. Marines first came ashore in June 1898), an officer, clad in dress whites, tosses his child playfully into the air while his wife, no less primly dressed, stands statuesque, one arm resting on a ship's cannon, confidently guarding the scene.
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In 1961, no less than in 1930, not everyone found the bay completely to their liking. “For some,” Billard observes, “living within the confines of the seven-foot-high chain link fence is like being in an idyllic prison campâa sort of âcomfortable claustrophobia,' as one seaman's wife described it.” With only two stores to choose from, it was “the same old thing day after day.” With real work to do, navy officers seemed to find the base less constricting than their wives. One pilot compared the base to an island paradiseâ“Hawaii with Cubans.”
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Other articles repeat this tableau with other accents. A year after the
National Geographic
piece,
Parade
published a feature on Nell Schwarzenbach, a typical navy wife coming to terms with tense U.S.-Cuban relations at the base.
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“Mrs. Jeanelle Schwarzenbach, 23, a quiet, attractive mother of four, wakes up every morning threatened by
the guns of a hostile, U.S.-hating Cuba,” journalist Ed Kiester wrote less than one year after the Bay of Pigs.
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“Her husband, Lt. (j.g.) Hart “Irish” Schwarzenbach, 25, is a Navy jet flier guarding our isolated naval base here against Fidel Castro's possible aggression.” Thus the image of the U.S. naval base as an innocent and embattled enclave in Cuba is updated. “Only two miles from Nell Schwarzenbach's kitchen, we watched sullen Cuban militiamen itchily finger their Red-supplied rifles as they patrolled the barbed-wire-topped fence dividing the base from Cuba proper.”
Despite the mounting incidents of U.S.-Cuban hostility at the fence line, “Navy wives like Nell Schwarzenbach are cool and relaxed. Life perks along perfectly normally. Only the vaguest trace of uneasiness gives away what many must feel.” In fact, rumors of a pending military conflagration at the base are overblown, Schwarzenbach reports. “The fact is, you could live here for weeks and never give a thought to an attack.” What's Schwarzenbach's life like? Well, not so “different from life in a suburb of, say, Akron, Ohio. She lives in a four-bedroom, concrete-block, ordinary-looking ranch house, which sits on a street with five other identical ranches.” The Schwarzen-bachs' eldest child attends the local nursery school; their younger children “play in a backyard that might be anywhere.”
Though “Navy old-timers” refuse to see Castro's rise as a threat to Guantánamo's “soft living,” Kiester's article attests, the backdrop of U.S.-Cuban political tension is palpable. What accounts for it? No U.S. action, to be sureânot the Bay of Pigs invasion, not ongoing CIA efforts to destabilize the current political regime and even assassinate Castro, not long-standing Cuban grievances over what remains America's enduring imperial presence on the island. No. Simply Castro's unaccountable, utterly capricious “threat to reclaim the area” for Cuba.
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Like other navy wives featured in journalistic accounts of Guantánamo reaching back decades, Nell Schwarzenbach confesses to feeling a bit confined on the naval base. It can seem like a “sunny prison.” At Guantánamo, wives “feel cut off from the rest of the world. We get Sunday newspapers from the States and we read the base newspaper ⦠. But somehow we feel out of touch with what's going on back home, back there on the âbig green island.'” A few of
Schwarzenbach's peers are more “bitter.” If Castro is “such a great liberator,” one wonders, “why doesn't he liberate us?” But heck, these are just the offhand remarks of a few wives, and they can readily be ignored.
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The tension between the United States and Cuba is manifest not in the persons of the unflappable wives but in their Cuban maids, Kiester suggests. The rise of Castro inconveniences the maids, who are now subjected to harassment and searches as they move to and from their families in Cuba. The maltreatment of them also discomfits Nell Schwarzenbach. She and her husband sorely want to intervene, but “can do nothing to help. If we gave our maid food or extra money for her family, she would only lose it at the gate. All we can do is sympathize.” Maids bear the burden of U.S.-Cuban hostility in yet another way. During and just after the Bay of Pigs invasion, Castro unaccountably closed off access to the base.
In Billard's account, there's lots of talk about Castro invading the base. Nell Schwarzenbach has her doubts. “If he should attack, the U.S. would immediately strike back,” she says. “I don't think Castro would want to give us that opportunity.” Schwarzenbach is more right than she knows. At the time this piece came out, while Castro was doing his best to stay away from Guantánamo, Kennedy administration officials were contemplating the first of several staged attacks on the base, which might serve as an excuse to invade Cuba. Withal, Nell Schwarzenbach maintains her equilibrium. Underlying the tension and her friends' worried letters is a more fundamental fact: “Whether we're here or not, and whether we're in danger, or uncomfortable, or tense, or whatever, isn't really the important thing. Castro will still be here, and that's what they ought to be worrying about. Communism in our backyardâthat's the real menace.”
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On February 2, 1964, the U.S. Coast Guard seized four Cuban fishing vessels, manned by thirty-eight crew members, which had strayed into U.S. territorial waters while trolling off the Florida Keys. The vessels, loaded with radio equipment, appear to have been ordered into U.S. waters by Cuban authorities as a deliberate provocation. The United States was only too happy to take the bait. After returning seven teenagers
among the crew to Cuba, Florida officials detained the rest in Monroe County jail. In this, the age of rule by frat boys, Castro howled in protest, and the situation quickly escalated. On February 6, in a long-anticipated strike at the naval base, Castro shut off the water line connecting the base to the nearby Yateras River. By early evening the last drops of water trickled through the pipes at the base. At the time, the base held between fourteen and fifteen million gallons in reserve, enough, at the usual rate of consumption, to last approximately seven days. Meanwhile, two water barges headed to Guantánamo from Jamaica, while several water tankers prepared for duty along the eastern seaboard of the United States. Water on the base was instantly rationed. President Johnson announced that there was plenty of water to sustain naval operations at Guantánamo Bay. And he insisted that the United States would never be driven from Guantánamo. Meanwhile Castro, ever the generous defender of the meek and vulnerable, stated that he would permit water to flow for one hour a day to provide for women and children. By this time the Johnson administration had vowed to make the base independent of Cuba, which implied the installation of a desalination plant in the near future.
On February 8 a study group consisting of senior naval officers and representatives of the Joint Chiefs of Staff traveled to Guantánamo to assess the situation, examine the problem of Cuban labor on the base, and confront the challenges involved in making the base independent of Cuba. By February 10, pressure gauges at the naval base indicated that water was flowing to the base from the Yateras River, but naval officials declined to open the valves to accept it. Two days later, on February 12, 270 of the 2,400 or so Cuban commuters employed at the base were fired from their jobs. Naval officials had long had their eye on “security” risks among the Cuban labor force; these, along with a few recalcitrant workers and troublemakers, were the first to go. That same day, the navy announced that it would no longer permit dependents to accompany military personnel on tours to Guantánamo. Through a process of attrition, dependents would be gone within two years. “Suburban Living Is on Its Way Out as Gitmo Gears to Garrison Life,” reported the
Navy Times
.
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On February 16, amid further dismissals of Cuban workers, the Cuban government accused base officials of stealing water above and
beyond the one-hour, 114,000-gallon limit Castro had agreed to furnish for women and children. In fact, the base had not accepted any water since the initial shutoff, and the accusations and counteraccusations triggered a showdown between Castro and the base commander, famous in Guantánamo circles for providing the United States with its first “victory” over Cuban communism.
The base commander at the time of the water fight was a man named John D. Bulkeley, a decorated war veteran admired for evacuating General Douglas MacArthur and his family from Corregidor in March 1942 in the face of the Japanese advance, and promoted to vice admiral by John F. Kennedy. Kennedy himself was behind Bulkeley's assignment to Guantánamo Bay. Guantánamo, everybody in the navy knew, had the reputation of being the place where the navy sent senior officers before putting them on the shelf. Neither the president nor Bulkeley saw his new assignment that way. “That rascal Fidel Castro had been harassing our naval base at Guantánamo in every devious manner that he and his henchmen could think of,” Bulkeley later recalled. “So Bobby Kennedy told me [privately] that the president wanted me to go down there and take charge of the base, stand up to Castro, and show âthat bastard with the beard who's boss in this part of the world,' as he put it.”
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Bulkeley arrived at Guantánamo with all the confidence of a man who could never imagine why Castro could possibly resent an American colony on Cuban soil. “Gitmo is sure as hell not going to be another Pearl Harborâfor Castro ⦠or anyone else,” Bulkeley told a journalist shortly after his arrival. “Nothing fazes this man,” the press reported dutifully. “Castro's going to find out he'll have his hands fullâjust like the Japs did.”
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Nineteen sixty-four was an election year, and when news of the water fight broke out in the United States, President Johnson and presidential candidate Barry Goldwater competed to out-bluster each other. “If Castro thinks he can blackmail the Johnson administration out of Guantánamo,” Johnson is said to have remarked, “he has totally misread his adversary.” The United States must “be firm,” Goldwater countered. “Castro's action has made the United States the laughing stock of the world ⦠. Our flag has been spat upon and torn to the ground, and as an American I am sick and tired of it.” The next day,
Goldwater boasted that he would be happy to lead the U.S. Marines in a charge on the Cuban pumping station, so long as “Castro [himself] promises to be” there.
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Kennedy had personalized the conflict with Cuba. Johnson, Goldwater, and Bulkeley were only too happy to join the fray, notwithstanding Kennedy's lack of success in undermining the Cuban dictator. As the water fight escalated, one Guantánamo staff member recalled that “all of us around the admiral felt that, if it could be arranged, Bulkeley would like nothing better than to meet Castro in a one-on-one, no-holds-barred barroom brawlâwinner take all.”
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Meanwhile, the U.S. press service clamored for access to the naval base. Initially the Pentagon said no; such meddling was not in the “national interest.”
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Restricted access to press, civilians, and other prying eyes is partly what made the naval base so valuable. But the vacuum of U.S. news out of Guantánamo played right into Castro's hands. Beginning on February 16, U.S. Navy secretary Paul H. Nitze complained that news accounts out of Cuba accusing the base of stealing water were “gaining some currency in the US.” Wasn't there something base officials could do to counter Castro's lies? Grant access to the U.S. press corps, came the obvious reply. Within days, more than a dozen reporters descended on the naval base. Bulkeley played the press like a fiddle. On the evening of February 17 he gathered a group of reporters and base officials at the northeast gate, where the water pipe from the Yateras River entered the naval base. There, amid flashing cameras and great fanfare, he excavated a large square of earth down to the Yateras pipeline, removing a thirty-eight-inch section. The U.S. pipeline was dry; accusations that the base was stealing water were a lie. Asked if superiors in Washington had ordered him to cut the pipe, Bulkeley replied no: he had simply informed the Pentagon that he planned to cut it unless otherwise directed; after all, Castro had called him “a liar.”
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