The moon over Guantanamo Bay was full and the immense darkness was ornamented with stars everywhere I looked. My fellow midshipmen and I relished the night sky as we relaxed on the deck of our guided missile cruiser anchored in the stillness of the harbor. We were watching Greta Garbo perform on the large movie screen in front of us as we took in the soft Caribbean air.
Earlier that day we had toured parts of the naval base, which kept being referred to as "Gitmo." I suppose someone threw in the "i" to make the shortening of "Guantanamo" sound more phonetic. The base was enormously impressive with its sleek airfield, its array of antiaircraft weaponry, its regimented and impeccably dressed U.S. marines and its abundance of inexpensive and delicious Cuban cigars.
It was 1954 and I was on my midshipmen cruise during the summer between my junior and senior years. Papa Hemingway was living in the Havana area and Castro was somewhere in the jungle avoiding detection by the Cuban dictatorship. President Eisenhower had brought an end to the Korean War the year before. He knew the horrors of war and, unlike various of his successors, he knew whether and how to make war. The world seemed very peaceful to a 20-year-old.
We had arrived in the harbor in Havana the day before after being at sea for nearly a week. We were told that we could spend the day sightseeing there if we wished, but had to be back aboard ship by 9:00 that night.
About a hundred of us decided to tour Havana. There was nothing prearranged. We just had to stay out of trouble. We descended from the deck of the cruiser into small boats that took us ashore. As we arrived dockside, there must have been 30 taxis waiting for us. When three of my friends and I were ushered into one of the taxis, we instructed the driver to take us to where Hemingway lived. The driver looked puzzled as we kept saying "Hemingway, Hemingway," assuming he would finally figure out what we meant. We were wrong. Along with all the other taxis, he drove straight to the whore house section.
As long as we were there, we decided to inspect. We went from house to house, not to do business but just to gaze at what for many was a first exposure to another world. We had been given a lecture and shown a film aboard ship on gonorrhea and syphilis, and we very much had that in mind during our promenade. When our house tour ended, we got back in our waiting taxi and repeated Hemingway's name. We were immediately whisked to a cock fight where two assertive males ripped at each other until, I was told, one destroyed the other. It was more than I could take. I walked away before it was over.
While we were at the cock fight, the driver must have asked a buddy who spoke English what "Hemingway" meant. On our return to the taxi, he thrust his thumb upward and shouted the writer's name enough times so we knew that's where we were finally headed. Aside from having read Hemingway's work in class, my home was not far from Oak Park, Illinois where he grew up. Unfortunately, I never saw him because, by the time we got there, a number of other midshipmen had beaten us to his house. Hemingway locked his door and wouldn't answer our knocks.
To brighten our spirits, the driver immediately took us to the Tropicana night club. That, too, was a sight I had never seen before. The crystal chandeliers that hung from the gigantic, domed ceiling were adorned with near-naked women suspended trapeze-like from each chandelier. We stood there transfixed by what we were seeing, overcome by its garish splendor.
That was our prelude to Gitmo. We got back to the Havana dock in time and boarded one of the boats that sped us to our cruiser. We were completely exhausted. We crawled into our bunks and I immediately fell asleep as the ship pulled out of the harbor and sailed toward the blissful seclusion of Guantanamo Bay. The next day we took our tour of Gitmo. There were no prison cells or wired enclosures there, save for the few that housed a small number of enlisted men who had been court-martialed for overstaying their welcome in Havana. There were no foreigners, imprisoned or not, except the friendly Cubans who made their living working on the base. It looked just as Pearl Harbor must have looked momentarily after the sun rose the morning of Dec. 7, 1941 or moments before rush hour in New York and Washington on Sept.11, 2001.
Perhaps some day Gitmo will return to the peaceful stillness of my youth.
