Guantanamo at work - Cuban boat people - Column

National Review, July 10, 1995 by Wm. F. Buckley, Jr.

From time to time Admiral William J. Flanagan Jr. needs to pop down to Guantanamo to see that all is in order there, so that he can return to Norfolk to attend to his other duties as commander-in-chief of the United States Atlantic Fleet. The trip to the naval base in Guantanamo Bay is three and a half hours on the admiral's busy turboprop, a P-3 Orion with a range of 14 hours, which permits the admiral to reach the furthest corners of his command.

At this moment, Guantanamo is primarily a logistical headache. We wrested it from Cuba a few years after the Spanish - American War, and in 1934, under a treaty accommodation with Cuba, it became the property of the United States for as long as we choose to hang onto it. But then this was also the case with the Panama Canal Zone, which under the relevant treaty became ours forever, but pressures mounted and, in the late Seventies, we yielded to Panamanian nationalism. Fifteen years later, the Canal is secure, and the Republic of Panama deteriorates. For a few years, until his huffs were absorbed by other problems, Fidel Castro deplored Guantanamo's occupation by the United States, but beyond sequestering it -- the North East Gate to the 42-square-mile enclave is rather like Berlin's Checkpoint Charlie -- Fidel lets it alone, and nowadays has reason to be glad it is in operation. Gitmo, as they call it, was a critical base during World War II, a U.S. salient into waters infested by German U-boats. (``If you could see an aerial map of the seabed of this part of the world -- it looks like buckshot had been dropped over the whole surface.'' The reference is to the millions of tons of ships sunk by the U-boats.) And, during the Cold War, Gitmo guarded the critical passageway for South American oil headed for the United States and Europe. But now Guantanamo is in the news primarily because of Cuban and Haitian -- pause: The reflex is to call the 15,000 men (predominantly), women, and children ``refugees.'' But to call them that is in effect to certify that they fled Cuba (and Haiti) because they feared political oppression. It is not established, in every case, or for that matter even in the majority, that persecution was the motive that brought these 15,000 to the boats from which they were picked up and taken to the safe haven of Guantanamo. Under the circumstances, protocol calls them ``migrants.'' But they refer to themselves as balseros, i.e., ``raft people.'' Boat people. As of May 1, it wasn't known what would happen to the thousands of Cubans in Guantanamo. They wanted access to the United States, and sponsors had been lined up who guaranteed they would not become public charges. But immigration pressures, and anti-immigration pressures, mounted, and the result was paralysis. Until May 2, which date will be celebrated by the grandchildren of the refugees/migrants/balseros -- because that was the day President Clinton's deal with Fidel Castro was announced. Clinton would admit the Guantanamo Cubans into the United States. In return, Castro would a) clamp down on emigrational initiatives, and b) receive back those Cubans who escape the government net, and return them, unharassed, to the homes they had risked their lives to leave. I asked Jose Ferrer, who is the ``captain'' of Village Alpha -- a concentration of twenty or thirty large tents sheltering several hundred Cubans on the hot, dry, unlovely soil of Guantanamo -- whether in the future he might leave America to return to a post-Castro Cuba. ``No,'' he said -- because ``after Castro there will be another Castro.'' Did he mean Castro's brother, Raul? Well, yes. But if not he, someone else. ``They are too well protected to perish.'' Jose Ferrer, tough, muscular, diligent, served as a lieutenant in the guard division of Castro's Cuba. He worked most directly under General Ochoa, who, not long ago, was executed by Fidel, for the sin of becoming too popular with the troops. What goes on in Guantanamo, under the close supervision of a commander-in-chief who moans over the drain on his budget ($1 million per day), is one more humane enterprise by the United States -- rescuing thousands more from life under a totalitarian dictatorship. The cost of doing this reaches beyond the admiral's budget. For the first time -- ever -- we are committed to returning refugees to the land from which they hoped to escape. But that capitulation doesn't contaminate the means or the ends of the Joint Task Service that is superintending the liberation of 15,000 men, women, and children who, up until May 2, had all but abandoned hope.