An enthusiastic guest, Cooke was also a generous host. In March 1935 a yacht named
Cachalot
, with nine family members aboard, radioed the U.S. naval base for permission to ride out a March northeaster in Guantánamo Bay. Permission granted,
Cachalot
was scudding along Cuba's bleak southeast coastline when it was met by a friendly naval escort dispatched by Commander Cooke. Just before dark, Jane Hartge remembers,
Chachalot
entered “the huge bay studded with warships of every size and armor”â“war clouds were rising across the world” at the time. Never mind the threat of war; as
Chachalot
bobbed gratefully at her “designated anchorage in the midst of all this pomp and circumstance ⦠alongside came a gleaming brass and macramé spangled âbarge' with invitation from the commanding officer and his lady to our âparty' to come ashore for cocktails.” As so often at Guantanamo, cocktails led to more cocktails, then to dinner and an outdoor cinema, at which Cooke and his guests were greeted like royalty, with “the entire audience standing.”
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In times of crisis, Cooke's generosity extended to his Caribbean neighbors. A few months after
Chachalot
's visit, Cooke had just completed a Navy Day address when he was handed an urgent telegraph from his bosses in Washington, D.C.:
COMMUNICATE DIRECT WITH CHARGE DAFFAIRES US EMBASSY AT PORTAUPRINCE AND ASCERTAIN EXTENT OF ASSISTANCE REQUIRED
PERIOD STATE DEPARTMENT STATES THAT FOOD SUPPLIES AND MEDICAL ASSISTANCE ARE NECESSARY PERIOD FURNISH ALL POSSIBLE ASSISTANCE UTILIZING WOODCOCK AND INFORM OPNAV OF GENERAL CONDITIONS AND ASSISTANCE REQUIRED BEYOND YOUR FACILITIES.
On October 23, a slow-moving hurricane churned up the Windward Passage after inundating Jamaica and claiming the life of an eleven-year-old boy. The day before,
The New York Times
reported “heavy rains in Haiti” and described communities across the region hunkering down. At the Guantánamo naval station, residents were ushered into hillside bunkers, while Cuba evacuated the towns of Caimanera and Boqueron.
Washington followed developments in the waters south of Cuba closely. That very day, President Franklin Roosevelt was returning from a fishing trip aboard the presidential yacht
Houston
, just hours ahead of the mounting storm. President Roosevelt was not the only one scurrying for cover. Aboard his three-hundred-foot steamer
Alva
, William K. Vanderbilt was making desperately for Fort Pierce, Florida, in the company of his wife, Rosamund, his daughter, Muriel, and
Alva
's forty-two-person crew. With means of escape, the president, the commodore, and U.S. base personnel were all spared when the hurricane came ashore in the vicinity of Guantánamo Bay. But Haitians living on the southern peninsula, west of the capital, Port-au-Prince, weren't so lucky. On October 25, news reached the naval station of flooding in Haiti accompanied by “great loss of life.” Someone broached the idea of outfitting the Guantánamo station ship USS
Woodcock
for emergency relief, but no orders followed, and the base continued on with its work.
Then came the tales of horror, of whole villages washed down the Grand Anse River, of thousands of bodies flushed out to sea near the town of Jacmel. In the Anse Valley, Cooke later reported, “the floods came up about midnight October 21â22, and filled the valley floor from twenty to seventy feet, sweeping houses, people, chickens, hogs, cattle and goats out to sea.” Survivors were found clinging to trees, having “lost everything including their clothes.” In one village, eight out of four hundred inhabitants survived. With the Haitians' homes went all means of subsistence. Wells were contaminated, sewage exposed,
crops ruined. Had there been any medicine in the worst-hit villages, there was scarcely anyone left to administer it. In some towns, nobody remained to bury the dead.
It took five days for the scale of the calamity to register in Port-au-Prince. With roads impassable and electrical and telegraph lines cut, the southwest peninsula was completely shut off. News of the disaster reached the capital only after a cargo ship sailing up the Windward Passage encountered a raft of bodies and debris bobbing off the Haitian coast.
Once alerted to the crisis, the Guantánamo naval station sprang into action. On Monday, October 29, the
Woodcock
, laden with rice, beans, and disinfectant, cleared Guantánamo harbor, Commander Cooke himself at the helm. Arriving in Haiti the next morning, the
Woodcock
offloaded supplies at the port of Jeremie, near the mouth of the Anse River, then proceeded on to the capital. In Port-au-Prince, Cooke was met by Haitian government officials, including the sister of President Sténio Vincent. After welcoming the Haitians aboard, the
Woodcock
set off to deliver lumber, medicine, and other necessities to the stricken villages. By Friday, November 2, Cooke and his crew had returned to Guantánamo Bay, their humanitarian mission complete, in its wake a palpable feeling of goodwill.
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Â
By the eve of World War II, Cuba was suffering through a nearly two-decade-long cycle of personality-based politics, in which capricious and self-serving individuals retained power by means of favoritism and intimidation. In 1925, Cubans elected Gerardo Machado president. An industrialist and former general in the Liberation Army, Machado ran on a reform platform, advocating, among other things, tariffs to promote Cuban industry, new infrastructure, and improvements in education and health care. Without the effects of the Great Depression, Machado's attempt to diversify the Cuban economy would have been difficult; despite the falling value of sugar production worldwide, sugar remained the primary source of Cuban capital. But the Depression ravaged Cuban sugar, robbing the new government of the resources required for political and social reform. When Machado
responded to the inevitable strikes and antigovernment protests with violence and rigged elections, Cuba succumbed to armed conflict. Underemployed youths, intellectuals, professionals, and students faced off against an increasingly powerful army. The outcome was never in doubt, but the effect was insidious. The government resorted to political repression and physical brutality to crush the dissidents. The rebels hit back with kidnapping, assassination, and terror.
So long as the unrest did not threaten American businesses, U.S. administrations were happy to sit back and do nothing. By 1933 the violence began to erode profits, forcing President Roosevelt to dispatch the diplomat Sumner Welles to Cuba to try to reach an accommodation between Machado, now a dictator, and the old political elite. Machado agreed to a U.S. demand to restore at least the trappings of constitutional government. Meanwhile, Cuban Communists, labor activists, and others denounced U.S. meddling. As the unrest continued, the United States asked Machado to resign. He refused, but ultimately fell victim to further chaos generated by a general strike. Amid the political and social upheaval, the United States tried to orchestrate the appointment of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes to the presidency. This time Cubans said no, and greeted the elevation of Céspedes with violence against officials of the old Machado regime.
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In place of Céspedes, Cuba's enlisted officers and university students elevated Ramón Grau to the presidency, along with the radical labor activist Antonio Guiteras as prime ministerâthis, in direct defiance of U.S. officials, the Cuban officer corps, Cuban political elites, and, above all, the presuppositions of Platt. If unlikely to last, the Grau-Guiteras coalition was unequivocal in its insistence that Cuba determine its own political and economic fortune. The economy would be geared toward national production and consumption. Labor would be granted, among other things, a minimum wage, an eight-hour workday, worker compensation, collective bargaining, and a requirement that at least 50 percent of the labor force be Cuban-born. Perhaps most important, the new government promised land reform.
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Despite remarkable successes in advancing much of its reform agenda, the opportunistic pairing of Grau, a moderate, with Guiteras, a radical, could not last. Difficult to maintain under any circumstances,
the coalition collapsed after four months in office, the victim of U.S., Cuban Army, and conservative opposition, as well as militant labor activism. The U.S. government never recognized the Grau-Guiteras government. Instead, Ambassador Welles tapped Fulgencio Batista to take over the reins of government. A sergeant in the Cuban Army, and one of the leaders of the enlisted officers' coup, Batista impressed U.S. officials with his ability to neutralize the old officer corps while clamping down on labor unrest. Here was a man the U.S. government could work with.
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And work with Batista (and his puppet, President Carlos Mendieta) the United States did, abrogating the now nettlesome Platt Amendment in May 1934 in exchange for an open-ended lease of the Guantánamo naval base. Though less coerced than the original lease, the new lease was hardly negotiated between equal partners, as U.S. officials would later claim. It came on the heels not only of the U.S. elevation of Batista to power but also of passage of the Jones-Cooligan Act, which pledged the United States to a large annual purchase of Cuban sugar. In short, Batista could hardly have said no to the naval base, even had he wanted to.
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Under Batista, the Cuban Army replaced the old political class as the true force in Cuban politics. Once aligned to labor radicals, Batista crushed the militant labor movement in 1935, assassinating Antonio Guiteras as he attempted to leave the country. Which is not to say that Batista was anticommunist or antilabor. An army man, Batista couldn't stand disorder. Indeed, he needed the backing of organized labor and even the Communist Party to legitimate his rule. In 1938 he approved the reemergence of the old Partido Comunista de Cuba as the Partido Unión Revolucionario (PUR), which collaborated with the government in exchange for control of Cuban trade unions. For the next eight years, Cuban presidents maintained close relations with PUR, relying on its support to bolster fragile governing coalitions.
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Batista endorsed much of the political agenda proposed by nationalist parties since the 1920s, including the establishment of a national bank, a program for agricultural diversification, profit sharing in the sugar industry, land distribution, and the advancement of public health and education. In 1940, he summoned a constitutional convention to which all parties were welcome. The convention led to the restoration
of constitutional democracy in Cuba, and produced two consecutive legitimate and undisputed elections in Cuba, utterly unprecedented, the first of which Batista won.
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U.S. influence remained strong in Cuba throughout Batista's rise and consolidation of power, though it was subtler, less overt than in had once been. The sugar industry recovered during World War II, thanks partly to the continued trade reciprocity with the United States. At the same time, the Cuban labor movement began to flourish, with labor managing to pass a series of modest reforms focusing on employment protection, evidence of the fragility of Cuba's ruling coalition.
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Â
For nearly two decades between the end of World War I and the saber rattling that preceded World War II, little changed at the naval base besides the cast of characters and the establishment of new social diversions for officers and their families. The war altered this. In 1938, President Roosevelt appointed a commission to examine the nation's state of military readiness. The so-called Hepburn Board, named after its chairman, Arthur J. Hepburn, picked up pretty much where Admiral Mahan's Navy Board had left off over a generation earlier: the United States was vulnerable to German incursion in the Caribbean, among other places. The board recommended developing the nation's defenses throughout the Caribbean and especially at Guantánamo Bay.
In the summer of 1940 the U.S. Navy hired the private contracting firm Frederick Snare Corporation, based in New York City but with offices scattered throughout Cuba and Latin America, to undertake a $37 million upgrade of the naval base. The project included an independent and fully functioning marine base, new airstrips on both sides of the bay, ammunition magazines, a school and chapel, and still more recreational facilities. The work was undertaken with great urgency. By 1943, when the work pace eased, some ten thousand Cubans, Jamaicans, and West Indians labored on the base alongside four thousand U.S. servicemen and civilians. The vast labor force transformed life not only at the base but also in the local Cuban communities as workers throughout eastern Cuba showed up seeking work.
From the start, labor relations between Snare and the Cuban labor force, now enjoying the benefits of its enhanced status, were fraught with conflict and charges of exploitation against a private contractor that claimed immunity from both U.S. and Cuban labor standards and laws. The U.S. military and Snare executives saw only radicalism and eventually communism in the escalating complaints. For nearly a decade the navy successfully resisted calls from Cuban workers to allow labor representation on the base. By 1950 the navy gave in, partly to neutralize a growing Communist presence in the region.
Meanwhile, as the Hepburn Board predicted, the Caribbean Sea became a theater of submarine warfare, with Germany targeting not only merchant ships bound for Europe in the North Atlantic but also commercial traffic between the Panama Canal and the port of New York. In February 1942 alone, Germany sank 28 Allied vessels comprising some 93,000 tons of shipping. That year 257 ships went down in the Caribbean alone. A year later, the numbers began to improve as the naval base became the linchpin in a convoy system that stretched from the Panama Canal to New York. In 1943 only twenty-two ships were sunk; the following year a mere two. During the war, commercial and naval traffic through the bay dramatically increased, with Guantánamo becoming a bustling seaport second in volume of traffic along the eastern seaboard only to New York Harbor itself.