The Birds of Guantanamo

[donsu]

http://www.counterpunch.com/crumpacker07152004.html

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The city sits at the upper end of Cuba's largest and deepest bay. There's also now a nearby tourist attraction called the "mirador" (the US marines call it "Castro's bunker"), which is a small café on a mountain on Cuban land where you can have a sandwich and look down through a telescope on the US naval base surrounding the bay near its entrance to the sea. Since the revolution the occupied territory has been barricaded and land mined by the US military, preventing any contact between the two sides, but before the revolution there were some mutually beneficial connections. Some Cubans found good paying day jobs on the base and US sailors and marines used the city as their whorehouse.

Through the telescope you can see the defenders of our nation playing at their water sports and fields in the tree-shaded base town. Several kilometers to the east in the desert is a large, windowless structure where they torture the Talibanis, and further south, a smaller structure where they keep the Haitian, Cuban and Dominican balseros they catch in the Florida Straits. No birds, except a few vultures circle above the town. On the other side of the bay is the airstrip where the huge, black US military planes refuel, the ones which now circle Cuba day and night beaming on to Cuban TV the same propaganda, commercials and cultural trash our Rulers use to anesthisize us. Apparently to them communication no longer means dialogue, rather it means imposing their voices and images on others.

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In the late afternoons after the washing is hung out, I like to rest on Augustina's flat roof and watch "las palomas." The teen age boys catch them, make homes for them on the roofs, and train them to carry inter-barrio messages (telephones being few and far between). They have a good life: comfortable homes, plenty of grain, they do useful work, and in the late afternoons they soar above the barrios in freedom in groups of a dozen or two, catching the fresh breezes from the bay, sometimes dropping down to taste the delicacies of the occasional mango tree.

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When I leave Guantanamo, I often find myself wondering how and why it is that the human spirit, like the palomas, sometimes soars above its harsh condition. I think it has something to do with the idea of real community--where relations among people are governed by law, justice and equality rather than power. Maybe this is the road to real freedom, and maybe it's why only birds of prey hang out around the military base.
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