USA, Cuba, and Guantanamo Bay - 26 August 1994

Who is Guantanamo? asked a shrewd old Englishman, who confesses to knowing nothing about American history but has such a gift for asking the simple root questions that he's given name or as he would say of anybody an Eskimo an Arab, his Christian name, ought to be not Jason but Socrates. No, a young American student broke in, you mean don't you who is Geronimo? That threw the old man for a moment and is mouth fell open, it didn't have time to close before the student moved in brashly and said "Geronimo was the last of the great Indian warriors, an Apache, I think you mean what is Guantanamo?" "That's what I meant," said the un-flapped Englishman.

In the weeks since the second exodus of Cuban boat people confronted President Clinton and the people of Florida with an invasion of illegals that the United States can neither repel not contain, I've not heard a single American ask about nor a newspaper or television programme explain the most peculiar status of Guantanamo, which is the place the United States coastguard is shipping the refugees who've been intercepted on their way across the 100-odd mile stretch from the north coast of Cuba to the top of Florida, but Guantanamo is in Cuba isn't it? Yes indeed, it is a city of by now about 200,000 on the south-east coast of Cuba, it has a large well sheltered bay, one of the largest in the world, close to the Windward Passage and it links the Atlantic to the Caribbean and Panama, a strategic base, therefore, of the first rank, which has been occupied by the United States navy since 1903.

At the turn of the century, the United States finally entered Cuba's war of independence from Spain and defeated the Spanish fleet and shortly thereafter established by treaty with the new nation of Cuba a naval base that ever since has been strengthened and expanded - fortifications, airfields, submarine base the lot. The moment the war was over, the problem came up of the future relations between the United States and Cuba, nothing new in that.

All the central and South American countries that during the 19th century came to wrest their independence from Spain or Portugal, they had to define a relationship with the giant of the north. All these freed countries might in indignant moments call Uncle Sam the bully of the North but they shared a vital need with him – they wanted no more European assaults on this hemisphere – and the United States had worked out a doctrine and treaties and, where there were no treaties, there was a firm understanding that if any European power came sailing in with the idea of conquering any part of south Central America - except places like the Falklands, British Guiana, harmless little exceptions - the United States would intervene.

Right into my time, whenever there was uprising, a coup south of the Texas-Arizona border, the cry went up from the newspapers "send in the marines" and they went in and stayed in some countries for years - Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua - so that most Americans forgot they were there. The protection of these Central American countries for their own good and, let's face it, for their sugar and coffee workers was standard American policy, sometimes the marines grumbled at not knowing where they might spend the next few years once the president made a speech before despatching them to Nicaragua reminding them that the protection of our little brown brothers to the south was a mission and a duty in a speech that inspired a popular song, "he may be a brother to big Bill Taft but he ain't no friend of mine".

For a time the Cubans flushed with the idea of independence from one great power hated the imposed protection of another, but as I say there was always the fact that if any nation had any idea of American conquest, the United States was pledged to intervene.

In 1934, however, the Cubans managed to have the United States repeal the actual treaty that laid down the conditions of Cuba's dependence on America, so like the other small independent nations once owned by Spain, Cuba managed its own ups and downs and found a government, usually a dictator, that the United States could, as we say, live with. Until 1959, when there appeared and conquered the rebel Fidel Castro. He became a special case because he was a declared Marxist and more than any other ruler below the Rio Grande, he was thought of in Washington in those days as a special threat not with his own resources, but the first guess of the Eisenhower administration that Cuba would become a ward of the Soviet Union turned out to be correct. Within one year Castro signed a $100 million credit with the Soviet Union and received the first shipment of Soviet arms.

It took almost 30 years for some Americans to concede that Cuba was heavily if not totally dependent on the Soviet Union for a going economy. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, we learned the massive scope of the Soviet subsidy, which was withdrawn and has put Castro's - what he calls perfect - society into a state of desperate imperfection. The thousands of people taking the great risk of escaping in their inner-tube and packing-case rafts may and do have various reasons for fleeing, though not so various. From the coastguards' examination of the thousands already detained either in camps in Florida or at the Guantanamo base, the obvious reason for leaving bangs like a drumbeat, food, clothing, soap, toilet paper the barest necessities are giving out for too many.

Now Castro says it's all the fault of the United States for maintaining a trade embargo for the 30 years since he Castro came in. From the beginning, the United States said it would lift the embargo the day Castro held a national free election and he promised one for the spring of 1961. We're still waiting for it.

The Cuban ambassador to the United Nations was on a television panel last Sunday and he declared to the shock of the sitting American pundits that Cuba had had an election in I think he said March of 1993 a national election; it's a startling bit of news that never wafted north. And it came out a day or two later though that technically the ambassador was correct there was a motion put up to the regional managers - gauleiters, proconsuls or whatever they're called - asking for a vote of confidence in the following candidate for prime minister, Fidel Castro. The vote was overwhelming.

As I speak, the United States coastguard fortified with cutters brought from the North Atlantic and the Great Lakes is dashing back and forth across the intervening sea stopping and turning back and rescuing and for the time being interning these escapees at the Guantanamo base. It is large, as I said ,but not boundless and its calculated that by the end of next week Guantanamo will have taken all the thousands it can feed and maintain.

Remember, the refugees come in all shapes and sizes and ages very many of them, not only babies, are in dire need of medical attention. The examining inspectors dread a reputation of what happened with the last infamous boatloads that Castro threw out many criminals, many people somewhere between listlessness and madness.

Well, President Clinton is being both praised and blamed for reversing the 28-year-old policy of admitting first documented relatives of family already in the United States, Florida mainly, of admitting escapees who could be fairly defined as political refugees and rejecting what are called on paper economic refugees, which means in life the most pathetic and perhaps most needy, the very poor and sick with no papers, no legal rights. Everybody now is being turned back or picked up and the reason is surely plain, though the administration is fudging it with much florid rhetoric about hoping to bring democracy to Cuba as well as Haiti. The reason is dreadfully simple; there are too many boat people. Mr Clinton is the first president who watching the southern borders of the country from California to Key West engulfed in a flood tide of illegal immigrants 9 to 10 million is the latest guess for the past five years.

The first president who has to defy the proud policy of a century give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses and say hold, enough is enough. What to do. The administration is begging with not much response, other Central American nations to take in the surplus human load. If Guantanamo fills up with its sea-borne refugees, Castro could recall his troops who patrol his inland fences and let swarms of people climb, run or storm the base by land. The secretary of defence, anticipating this move has warned that it would be regarded as wait for it, an unfriendly act.

The first obvious act of relief that occurs to most people is to let the Cubans in to states, less populous and less populated with Cubans than Florida. However, Mr Clinton is probably the first ex-governor to shun that idea. As Governor Clinton of Arkansas, he generously took in several thousand Cubans and precipitated a nasty riot. I'm afraid the sad unspoken truth today in America - certainly in any state that touches an ocean or a foreign border - is give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses but not in my backyard or front yard, either.