1

CONQUEST

“Gitmo passengers!” the Air Sunshine representative called out, breaking the 5:00 a.m. silence of a largely deserted Fort Lauderdale airport. Miami and Fort Lauderdale are the only two airports that offer commercial flights to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station for anyone with a military entry clearance. My flight left from the city named after forts the U.S. military built around 1835, during wars to displace the Seminole people and other remaining indigenous communities from Florida. Most of the passengers on the flights to “Gitmo” are civilian contractors and family members living on base with Navy personnel.a Lawyers and journalists representing or writing about people held at the prison can also gain permission to visit. Thanks to this $500 flight, I was joining a group of U.S. and European journalists for a multiday tour.

Responding to the call to board the plane, ten tired passengers quickly got in a line. We had been waiting in front of the Air Sunshine ticket desk since our check-in at 3:30 a.m. sharp, in the bowels of the airport, where small commuter airlines offer flights to places like the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. Most of the other passengers in line that morning were civilian base employees returning from vacation. Some were family members, including a young girl carrying a pink and brown camo bag.

A redheaded pilot appeared and told the line to follow him. We passed through a single door and stepped directly onto the tarmac. In front of us was our white thirty-seat, two-propeller plane, decorated only with its tail markings. Suddenly I realized that, while check-in had involved being weighed on a scale to ensure a proper weight balance for the plane, we were flying to the world’s most infamous base without passing through a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) security screening.b Minutes later we were in the air above the bright lights of Fort Lauderdale, heading out over the ocean and into the pitch-black sky toward Cuba.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Guantánamo,” the Air Sunshine pilot announced a little after 8:00 a.m., toward the end of our three-and-a-half-hour trip. The flight felt strangely like riding a school bus, given that everyone shared a single final destination in common. When we stepped off the plane onto the airport’s tarmac, the air was hot and thick with humidity. There was a spotty drizzle in a place that almost never sees rain. From the tarmac about all we could see was a fence about six feet high, topped with another three feet of razor wire, lining the airport’s perimeter. I followed the rest of the plane’s passengers, who seemed like they knew what they were doing, and walked into a large hangar to get in line.

One by one we approached a rickety wooden desk. We showed our passports and security clearance paperwork to a Filipino man wearing a polo shirt emblazoned with the name BREMCOR. The latest in a line of military contractors at Gitmo, BREMCOR was hired to run much of the operations, maintenance work, and daily life in a ten-year Pentagon contract, potentially worth $128,052,773.¹

Before we entered the tiny airport terminal next to the hangar, Navy guards finally made us go through a security screening. Inside the terminal Sgt. Fred Ortiz, a Public Affairs officer, greeted me.c Sergeant Ortiz was wearing the Navy’s digital-patterned blue camouflage (or BDU, for “battle dress uniform”). He was around six feet tall and two hundred pounds, with a broad head and face. He said to call him Fred. He told me that he or someone else from Public Affairs would be with me every waking hour until “wheels up” on my return flight to Florida. The only exception would be in my room at the Navy lodging hotel. They did this, Fred said, “as a courtesy.” The surveillance didn’t surprise me, given the pages-long list of rules I had to agree to follow to get permission to visit the prison.

While Fred and I waited for a ferry to the other side of the bay, where most of the base is centered, he told me was born on one of Cuba’s neighboring islands, Puerto Rico. Fred noted that Puerto Rico’s seizure by the United States was entirely a “strategic, military decision.” U.S. troops launched their invasion of Puerto Rico from Guantánamo Bay not long after they arrived in 1898. In April of that year, the United States declared war on Spain after the mysterious sinking of the USS Maine provided a pretext for intervening in the Cuban Revolution. (The explosion that catastrophically damaged the Maine is now widely assumed to have been an accident, not Spanish sabotage. The Cuban government has long suggested that the U.S. government likely caused the explosion to justify intervention.)² Planning its invasion, the Navy decided that Guantánamo Bay would make a good coaling station and base for future operations. Others also saw the long-term advantages of Guantánamo. “The fine harbor there will make a good American base,” wrote the New York Times.³

After the U.S. military quickly defeated Spanish troops, U.S. officials offered Cuban leaders thinly disguised U.S. rule in exchange for Cuba’s official independence and the withdrawal of U.S. troops. It was an offer Cuban representatives couldn’t refuse. As part of the deal, the two sides signed a lease giving the U.S. military “complete jurisdiction and control” over forty-five square miles of Guantánamo Bay—more than twice the size of Manhattan. Tellingly, the “lease” had no termination date. Effectively, Cuba was ceding territory. “We regard the [Cuban] coaling stations as ours,” stated President Theodore Roosevelt.⁴ The United States agreed to build a fence, prevent commercial or industrial activities within the base, and pay a meager yearly fee of $2,000 in gold coins. Under Fidel Castro’s rule, Cuba’s government stopped cashing checks, worth around $4,085 each; for years the uncashed checks apparently went directly into Castro’s desk.5

When the two governments updated the Guantánamo Bay agreement in the 1930s, it stipulated that Cuba could never force the United States to leave: the lease can be terminated only if both governments chose to do so or if the U.S. military chooses to leave. Renters everywhere wish they had such eviction-proof leases.⁶ In other words, the “lease” for Guantánamo Bay is a fig leaf, an attempt to obscure colonial occupation and de facto U.S. sovereignty. In a 1953 history of the base, Gitmo’s then commander, Rear Adm. Marion Emerson Murphy, wrote plainly, “Guantánamo Bay is in effect a bit of American territory, and so it will probably remain as long as we have a Navy, for we have a lease in perpetuity to this Naval Reservation and it is inconceivable that we would abandon it.”⁷

Once the Gitmo ferry arrived, Sergeant Ortiz and I got on board for the two-mile trip across the bay. On our right the water stretched over the horizon toward Jamaica, as the main part of the base slowly came into view. At the ferry landing the sounds of Filipino Tagalog and the lilt of Jamaican English and Patois carried across the parking lot from some of the hundreds of imported civilian contract workers on base. Sergeant Ortiz’s Public Affairs colleague, Sgt. Jim Green, met us with a large white passenger van. We climbed into the van, its air conditioning on full blast in the Cuban heat, for a tour of the base.

The most well-known and notorious of U.S. bases overseas, the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station makes most people think of its high-security prison created by the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney administration in 2002.^d After the administration launched its so-called global war on terrorism, the prison became an international symbol of the administration’s policies of brutal torture and indefinite detention without trial. Since the emergence of images of orange jumpsuit–clad prisoners being held in what were initially outdoor prisons, the facility has imprisoned around 780 individuals, aged thirteen to ninety-eight. Most were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time: more than 85 percent of about 700 detainees transferred out of the prison were not suspected of committing terrorist acts.8

To the surprise of many, the prison occupies a tiny corner of the base. While some may know the base’s undulating fence line walling off the rest of Cuba, as seen in the Jack Nicholson movie A Few Good Men, few have seen the vast majority of the base. Ironically enough, it offers a good picture of bases worldwide. Like most bases, Gitmo resembles a U.S. town, in this case plopped down on the Cuban coast. Since at least the 1950s, military leaders have designed most bases abroad to look something like idealized versions of suburbia.⁹ Gitmo, like many other bases, features suburban-style housing developments with names like Deer Point and Villamar. They have wide, looping roads and cul-de-sacs lined with single-family homes featuring driveways, garages, and spacious backyards dotted with grills and play toys. Almost everywhere teams of workers—often low-paid Filipinos—keep expansive lawns meticulously groomed. Using racialized language reflecting the racial hierarchy on base and the racial organization of labor, some military personnel call these men “lawn ninjas.”

Most bases, like Gitmo, have schools, hospitals, movie theaters, gyms, golf courses, yoga studios, bowling alleys, entertainment centers, fast-food and other restaurants, barber and beauty shops, post offices, chapels, and other places of worship. Along the main two-lane road through the center of base known as “downtown,” a sun-bleached set of McDonald’s golden arches stands above most of Gitmo’s landscape. (The McDonald’s, along with the other shops and stores, violates the ban on commercial activities in the original base agreement.) Like many bases, Guantanamo Bay is on prime waterfront property, meaning the base enjoys gorgeous, uncrowded Caribbean beaches.

Military leaders’ hope has been to make it as easy as possible for troops and family members to cycle between bases around the globe and to quickly feel at home. The generous amenities are also a kind of costly taxpayer-funded employment benefit, in addition to salaries, free universal health care, GI Bill educational benefits, pensions, and an array of other benefits designed to keep people in the military. The on-base perks have become especially important since the end of the draft in 1973, after which Pentagon leaders have had to work harder to ensure a labor supply. (People in the U.S. armed services are laborers, even if their work is usually obscured with the language of “service.”)

The amenity-rich lifestyle is particularly pronounced at Guantanamo Bay because military personnel and their family members can’t leave—that is, they can leave only by flying back to the U.S. mainland. Since the Cuban Revolution of 1959, military personnel have been unable to cross the fence line. On base people ironically describe being “locked down.” Many refer to the base itself as “the island.” Until recently the only people allowed to cross the fence line were a handful of Cuban workers who had been working on base for decades, commuting to and from the city of Guantánamo on a daily basis. The last two such employees retired a few years ago, choosing to remain on the Cuban-controlled side of the fence. A small number of Cuban employees long ago chose to live on the base permanently. This generally meant permanently separating from Cuban family members and friends. As non–U.S. citizens, they can’t move to the United States. As traitors to Cuba (in the view of the Cuban government), they can’t return home. As a result, Guantanamo Bay is probably the only military base in the world with an assisted-living facility. The Cuban employees live in a kind of stateless netherworld reflective of the base’s ambiguous legal status.

In many ways Guantanamo Bay feels surreal—as if it is both in the United States and not in the United States, both in Cuba and not in Cuba.10 This is true of many bases. Most are insulated worlds unto themselves that one never has to leave. Air Force personnel can be deployed to city-sized Ramstein Air Base in Germany and never step foot off base; lederhosen and other German souvenirs are even on sale at the Ramstein mall. In other ways Gitmo feels more like a gated community, or perhaps a country club or one of the colonial plantations that once ruled the island: the base features stark segregation and inequities between U.S. military personnel and the low-paid Filipino and Jamaican guest workers who do most of the cleaning, cooking, and everyday maintenance to keep the base running.

This is not unique to Gitmo. On most bases overseas there’s a class of people called “third-country nationals”—the citizens of countries other than the United States and the host nation—who keep bases running. Often they are citizens of the Philippines, a former U.S. colony. At the other end of the colonial base hierarchy, officers are disproportionately white Euro-Americans. While much of the U.S. and global economy remains hierarchically organized by race and ethnicity, the sharply colonial nature of the labor system on base contributes to the feeling that the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station is a place that’s not just out of place but also out of time. Admittedly, that feeling may have been particularly pronounced because my tour of the base stopped at the tiny, little-visited museum to Gitmo’s history, tucked within a sixty-foot-tall, copper-domed lighthouse along the Caribbean coast.11

Sergeant Green pushed open the small wooden door to the lighthouse keeper’s cottage, which is now home to the museum. As fluorescent lights flickered on, we walked into a room filled with dusty bric-a-brac, its walls lined with photos dating to the days of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders capturing Cuba. Along the windows sat an old glass-bottle collection. A natural history museum–style display of local flora and fauna featured taxidermy snakes, birds, and banana rats. A copy of the menu for December 22, 1903, listed “slum” (beef stew) and coffee for breakfast; beef, potatoes, and gravy for lunch; “apple (dried) sauce” and “salt horse” (salted beef) for dinner.¹²

As I walked into the museum’s last cramped room, I saw a glass case with a collection of base yearbooks, much like one would see in a high school. The cover of one read “1494/1964.” I asked Fred about the 1494 reference. He said it was the year Christopher Columbus landed in Guantánamo Bay on his second voyage to the Americas. This was news to me. Somehow, though, it made sense that Cristóbal Colón landed in a bay that reveals so much about the United States as an empire. Somehow it wasn’t surprising that the base celebrated the beginning of the colonization and conquest of the Western Hemisphere.¹³

Cristóbal Colón landed his ship, the Santa Clara, formerly named the Niña, in the bay he called Puerto Grande. Once ashore he and his men found a feast in the midst of preparation. Fish, iguanas, rabbit-like utias, and other food were still cooking over the flames. No one was in sight. The local indigenous people who had been preparing the meal had disappeared into the surrounding forest. The sailor and his crew were ecstatic at their discovery. Foreshadowing events to come across the Americas, they decided to help themselves to the feast.14

Two years earlier, on the night of Christmas Eve, 1492, on Colón’s first voyage to what he and other Europeans would call the “new world,” Colón ran his ship, the Santa María, aground. He and the other men on board found themselves on the island now called Hispaniola, in today’s Haiti. The ship was lost, but Colón ordered the construction of a fort using the vessel’s splintered timbers. It became the first European fort in the hemisphere. Colón had heard the island was rich with gold. He named the fort La Navidad—Christmas.

The local Taino people welcomed Colón and his men. They gave the visitors masks and ornaments of gold and wood. They even helped in the fort’s construction, “little dreaming,” as Washington Irving’s largely mythic biography of Colón notes, “that they were assisting to place on their necks the galling yoke of perpetual and toilsome slavery.”¹⁵ Before departing for Spain Colón selected thirty-nine men—many apparently intrigued by the Tainos’ peaceful way of life—to remain at the fort. He charged them with finding the island’s gold, mines, and spices and promised to return in a year on his second voyage.

Colón returned with seventeen ships and 1,200 men intent on conquest. The fort was in ashes. He found the bodies of some of the men on the beach.¹⁶ Some say the sailors mistreated the Tainos, and the locals killed the men in revenge. Others say there was an insurrection among the men. Before sailing off in search of China, only to find Guantánamo Bay and other parts of nearby islands, Colón created a new fort, Santo Tomás. The fort was in the interior of Hispaniola and would serve as a base for further colonization. Colón and the military garrison enslaved and killed hundreds of locals and took their gold. The ruins of Fortaleza Santo Tomás can still be seen in grainy photographs from as late as 1893. Archaeologists continue to explore the site today. A 2017 excavation discovered as many as nine indigenous sites nearby. The authors remarked on the lack of prior “discussions and understanding of the functioning of Fort Santo Tomás and its impact on the indigenous” peoples of the area.¹⁷

Before Colón’s arrival and his fort, there were likely one million or more Tainos. By 1510, there were fifty thousand. Ten years later there were fifteen thousand. By 1530, five thousand remained. By the midpoint of the sixteenth century, less than sixty years after Colón’s arrival, weapons and disease had wiped out all but a few hundred Tainos.18 The horrific rate at which people died is hard to fathom.

For millennia military bases have been a foundation for imperial conquest and control over foreign lands and foreign peoples.¹⁹ “Empires have required outposts beyond their homeland, places from which they could project their awesome and frequently gruesome power,” writes former Air Force officer and academic base expert Mark Gillem. “These outposts have existed to support the implementation of power.”²⁰ Bases have been known by many names throughout history: fort, fortress, garrison, stronghold, castle, camp, citadel, cantonment, installation, facility, and outpost, to name a few. The Egyptian Middle Kingdom positioned military strongholds on the borders of its empire. Throughout antiquity fortified cities were the norm across the fertile Middle East, from Babylon to Troy to Jerusalem. The Greek word acropolis, associated today with the hilltop home of the Parthenon in Athens, originally referred to mountaintop citadels of the kind that appear from Masada in Israel/Palestine to Machu Picchu in today’s Peru.²¹

Rome was itself an acropolis. During the expansion of its empire, the Roman military built temporary “Caesar’s camps” for marching soldiers and castra stativa, or permanent stone and wood bases of operation, to the outer reaches of its empire. Some Roman fortresses later provided foundations for the castles built by the Norman invaders who conquered England in 1066.²² William’s army quickly erected a castle in Hastings soon after crossing the channel separating England and France. After marching from the castle to their victory at the Battle of Hastings, William’s Norman nobles built another base, Pevensey Castle, within the walls of a fourth-century Roman fort.²³ The Tower of London, today one of Britain’s iconic symbols, was originally William the Conqueror’s military and administrative headquarters following his army’s conquest.²⁴

Within twenty years Norman elites, with the help of forced labor, constructed some five hundred castles, and perhaps as many as one thousand, to control English territory and stamp out rebellions. The Normans “built castles far and wide throughout the land,” reported the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1067, “oppressing the unhappy people, and things went ever from bad to worse.”25 English castles subsequently played key roles in state administration and in the conquest and subjugation of more territory in Ireland, Scotland, and parts of France.²⁶

Elsewhere around the globe one finds similar histories. The Arab and Berber armies of the Umayyad Caliphate built fortifications during the eighth-century conquest of Iberia, or what became known as al-Andalus. In the thirteenth century the Mongol Empire established bases in Korea and Vietnam to invade Japan and Southeast Asia. The Chinese Ming Dynasty’s “eunuch admiral” Zheng He used bases as far as East Africa and the Persian/Arabian Gulf to dominate trade routes in the Indian Ocean in the fifteenth century. Around the same period, in the Mediterranean Sea, major regional powers Venice and Genoa jockeyed with the Ottoman and Spanish Empires for control of strategically located bases and, with them, control over regional trade.²⁷

The pursuit and protection of profit making through trade were central to the function of bases. Especially in the cases of Venice, Genoa, Portugal, and the Netherlands, bases were often colocated with entrepôts and other kinds of trading posts. The British East India Company, one of the main mechanisms of British colonization, “made extensive use of bases in order to pursue trade in far-flung overseas areas.”²⁸ In the years prior to and following Colón’s first voyages, the major European powers started competing for bases across much of the globe as keys to building colonial empires. Throughout history “fortifications have been a key tool by which contending empires and rival nations have sought to gain an advantage over foes.”²⁹ The Portuguese were the first to deploy their military and economic power on a global basis. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Portuguese bases could be found in, for example, the Azores, Cape Verde, São Tomé, Recife, Zanzibar, Mombasa, Goa, Timor, Macao, and Nagasaki. “Both the Portuguese fleets and its bases were deeply involved in economic activity,” explains foreign bases expert Robert Harkavy. “Many bases were also feitorias, ‘factories,’ trading posts, and hubs for a variety of economic functions. Portuguese warships convoyed ships involved in commodity trade. Bases/entrepôts in West Africa in particular served also as slaving stations, as they would subsequently for the Dutch, French, and British.”30

Map 5. Major European Bases in the Americas since 1492.

European empires built hundreds of forts, castles, armories, garrisons, and other military bases in the Americas. Particularly significant installations are depicted here. Place names are generally from European conquerors. Key source: Harkavy, Strategic Basing.

In the Americas Colón’s first two forts, Navidad and Santo Tomás, were followed by more Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British forts. From Canada to the Carolinas to Chile, the remains of these fortresses have often become tourist destinations. Although rarely intended this way, the bases are unintentional monuments to once powerful empires and the role forts played in the colonization of the Americas. In the case of Spanish colonial Cuba, Guantánamo Bay became a strategic colonial hub. “It served as a portal for the trade of enslaved Africans,” Amy Kaplan explains, “and in the nineteenth century, Caimanera, one of its port cities, became the end point for the railroad that transported sugar and molasses from the plantations of the region to be exported abroad.”³¹ The Spanish monarchy created other fortified settlements in Florida and San Juan, Puerto Rico. Bases in Cartagena, Havana, and the Canary Islands were important nodes in shipping silver from the colonies to Spain—“perfectly illustrat[ing] the role of bases in relation to trade.”³²

On the North American mainland, France established the first bases: Charles Fort near Paris Island, South Carolina, in 1562, and Fort Caroline on the Saint Johns River in Florida, in 1564. English settlers built bases first in North Carolina in 1584 (Fort Raleigh) and later from Virginia to Massachusetts and well beyond. Within a month of arriving at Jamestown in 1607, immigrants at the first continuous English settlement on the continent felled trees and stripped the trunks of bark to build a basic triangular fort.³³ In 1664 English military forces took over Fort Amsterdam, near the southern tip of Manhattan, as Dutch officials surrendered their New Amsterdam colony. British bases would appear across much of northern North America, including in Boston, Plymouth, Oswego Bay, and Baltimore, during Britain’s battles with Spain, France, and American Indian nations for control of the continent.

There are few better illustrations of the role bases have played in the rise and fall of empires and other major powers than the former key to the British Empire, Malta. For more than two thousand years, powerful peoples, kingdoms, and empires have sought to control the island at the center of the Mediterranean, south of Italy, as a naval base in an effort to control the entire sea and its surrounding lands. In that time Malta has been ruled or controlled by, among others, Phoenicians, Persians, Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, Vandals, Goths, Aghlabid and Fatimid North Africans, Normans, Genoese, Swabian Germans, Angevin and Aragonian and Castilian Spaniards, the Holy Roman Empire, the Kingdom of Sicily, the Knights of Saint John, and the Ottoman, Spanish, French, and British Empires (with a period of U.S. and Allied military control during World War II, prior to Maltese independence in 1964).

For millennia, in Malta and around the globe, rising powers frequently have usurped power from predecessors by displacing them from foreign bases. “The idea of empire or impulse of expansion seems to outlast specific polities or dynasties,” writes archaeologist of ancient empires Carla Sinopoli. “Later empires often build on the cultural traditions and strategies and infrastructure of rule of earlier polities.”34 Around the Indian Ocean, for example, from Indonesian islands in the east to Sri Lanka and India in the north to Hormuz and Aden in the west, bases first occupied by Zheng He’s Chinese fleet were later occupied by a succession of Portuguese, Dutch, and British military forces.³⁵

In 1769, at the isolated center of the Indian Ocean, a French lieutenant named La Fontaine led the first naval survey of Diego Garcia. “A great number of vessels might anchor there in safety,” La Fontaine reported to his superiors in France about Diego Garcia’s lagoon.³⁶ Two hundred years later, almost to the day, U.S. Navy Admiral John F. McCain (grandfather of the late Republican senator) described the same island with similar enthusiasm: “As Malta is to the Mediterranean, Diego Garcia is to the Indian Ocean.”³⁷ The U.S. Navy was soon building a major military base on the island. At the time, the U.S. and Soviet Empires were competing for supremacy around the Indian Ocean, including for bases in some of the same locations first occupied by Zheng He. Ever since, the U.S. base on Diego Garcia has played key roles in nearly all the U.S. wars in the Middle East.

There was nothing inevitable about these examples of imperial succession, of one empire replacing another at a base. Histories tend to make the past seem that way sometimes, as if history has a genealogy, with a biblical succession of one empire begetting another, begetting another.38 To the contrary, the process of replacement has almost always been a violent, deadly one. The death in war has often been obscured by the focus on the victorious emperors, kings, and “big men” of the past.

Centuries before the creation of the U.S. base in Guantánamo Bay, Cristóbal Colón’s arrival in today’s Cuba came at the start of a process whereby a succession of European powers would violently conquer indigenous peoples and lands, kill millions, and extract resources and wealth across the Americas. At times empires such as Colón’s patron Spain have secured foreign bases critical to conquest through diplomatic negotiations, usually involving some degree of coercion, threat, or bribery.³⁹ Most often empires have obtained foreign bases through conquest and occupation—so it is with the U.S. presence in Guantánamo Bay. The U.S. military seized the bay from Spain in 1898 through military conquest and has occupied it against the will of the Cuban people, revealing the domination at empire’s core.

As I left Cuba, I realized I needed to see how, a century prior to replacing the Spanish Empire in Cuba, a rising U.S. Empire replaced the British Empire in Boston and elsewhere in North America. In the first days of the American Revolution, British soldiers tried to prevent this imperial succession by holding on to their control of Boston from Fort William, a base on Castle Island in Boston Harbor.⁴⁰ After Gen. George Washington surrounded Boston with his newly formed army in the spring of 1776, the Redcoats retreated and the revolutionaries occupied the fort. Today the base, known as Fort Independence, is a Boston tourist attraction.⁴¹ Built in 1634, the base remained in continuous military operation until World War II.