The World War II expansion created the footprint of office buildings, warehouses, jetties, airstrips, magazines, and residential neighborhoods still visible today. The base that Cuban labor built in World War II now stretches for three miles from the southwest corner of Windward Point along the southeast shoreline of the outer harbor, past the many jetties that extend their fingers into the bay, and on toward the salt flats that mark the northeast corner of the base. The new construction included thousands of temporary housing units but also comfortable, if modest, stand-alone suburban-style homes. Back from the shoreline and extending up into the hills, streets were laid and neighborhoods planted that in the rainy season, when water turns the hills from brown to green, resembles suburban California.
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On July 30, 2007, the U.S. House of Representatives passed Resolution 121, calling on the government of Japan “to formally acknowledge, apologize, and accept historical responsibility in a clear and unequivocal manner for its Imperial Armed Force's coercion of young women into sexual slavery, known to the world as âcomfort women,' during its colonial and wartime occupation of Asia and the Pacific Islands from the 1930s through the duration of World War II.” Japan's abuse of Korean, Chinese, and Filipino women forced into sexual slavery is well documented and needs no amplification here.
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But how many of the U.S. representatives who voted for the resolution know that, since at least the time of Prohibition, the U.S. Navy condoned and later colluded in a sex traffic of its own in the Cuban towns around Guantánamo Bay? Cuba, like other countries, has a long history of commercial sex; the extracurricular activity between U.S. servicemen and local women in the towns around the naval base in the 1920s only mirrored that between international clients and professional call girls in major cities throughout the “island paradise,” especially in Havana, at the same time.
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Critics may object that the case of Japanese comfort women bears no resemblance to the good old prostitution common around overseas military bases since time immemorial. But that judgment may be better left to Cubans.
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By all accounts, an industrialization of the sex trade paralleled the wartime expansion of the naval base. In 1943, Doug White, an enlisted man stationed in Puerto Rico with the Naval Radio Service, was marooned at Guantánamo Bay while awaiting passage back to the United States. Though he has forgotten the name of the place, White visited the little town beyond “the Cuban land gate, which was open to all servicemen” by this time, and where “there was a street solid with bars and bordellos.” Sailors such as White had
to run the gauntlet of posters and warnings about venereal diseases to reach the border, but once there, it was a daily circus until the gate closed at 10:00 p.m. The street was mud, the bars loud, the broads filthy, the rum watered and grossly unsanitary. It was impossible to walk on the street without being snatched into a bar or show, which was usually a front for more pleasurable pursuits in the back room. Awaiting your return, just inside the gate was a building of attended
cubicles. Whether you had dallied or not, you were made to strip and shower, then were sprayed, scoured, powdered and salved for any souvenirs you might have collected during your Cuban charge.
White visited Guantánamo Bay as part of a convoy crew during World War II. Convoy crews lived “a grueling existence,” he remembers, with “six hours on duty, six hours off, for weeks on end, with a day off only at their destinations, usually Rio or Guantánamo.” No doubt the men “greatly appreciated the recreation available both on and off the base when they reached it.”
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Late in the war, William Mills, a twenty-year-old ensign and gunnery officer, traveled to Guantánamo Bay aboard the USS LSM-104, an amphibious landing craft. While at Guantánamo, Mills visited Caimanera. Mills remembers the naval base as “ordinary,” the quarters as “quite comfortable, with full recreational facilities such as swimming pool, officers' club, etc., all heavily used.”
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Meanwhile Caimanera lived up to its reputation, Mill reports, “as a large-scale brothel for accommodating âour boys' in ways Mother never intended. Many of us enjoyed it, some fully and others only as a curiosity we'd never seen before.” Mills was among the few to admit that he had spent a night at Caimanera. (“Yes,” he volunteered. “Once.”)
“We were carried to Caimanera on Navy LCVPs [landing craft, vehicle and personnel],” Mills recalls, “where we stepped off already in the town. I recall only one main street, although doubtless there were others. The nighttime street was brightly lighted with raucous music on every hand and open-air âbars' lining both sides of the street.” Separating Caimanera's bars were “pro stations,” small canvas-covered cubicles “where several sailors simultaneously could enter and, concealed knee to neck from the street, drop the front of their trousers and inject the contents of a prophylactic tube into their urethras, said to be a surefire way, postcoital, to avoid VD. I think it was.” Mills doubted that these “remarkably clean” facilities could operate “so efficiently” without formal naval sponsorship. The booths were in “regular use, all in an atmosphere of business as usual.” They provoked no reactions from passersby. By night, anyway, Mills remembers Caimanera having few civilians other than the “working girls” and bartenders,
“all others being uniformed US Navy men.” Caimanera's “volatile mixture” was kept in check by Navy “SPs,” or shore patrols.
Once inoculated, the U.S. sailors “entered the bar, sat down at a table and ordered (usually) beer. Cuban prostitutes lined the walls of Caimanera's bars, usually seated on single chairs. The surrounding whores assessed their chances and chose accordingly to approach the candidate for business.” While not every sailor partook in this ritual, “enough did to maintain high occupancy of the âbusiness rooms.'” Couples retreated to “very small rooms lining the three inner walls, each with a single door and, inside, a single bed, washstand, and pitcher of water. Occupancy was for a limited time that could be enforced, for those who lingered, by a stern knock on the door by an old woman.”
The women, meanwhile, were “typical of their kind.” Mills describes “simple folk from a background of third-world [extreme] poverty who cope with a harsh life.” Many of these women “responded gratefully to even minimal courtesy or kindness. Contrary to popular opinion I've heard, most will respond sincerely to any credible romantic overture, and yes, that too happened more than you'd think with youthful American soldiers and sailors.”
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“When you're living in a foreign country,” observed Captain Roland Faulk, a navy chaplain well acquainted with the cultural economy of the Guantánamo naval base during the 1940s and '50s, “you want to protect your own troops and not become a victim of the host country's standards.”
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Thus Faulk joined the age-old debate about the relationship between supply and demand in the underground economy by blaming the other side. The occasion of these remarks was an unusually candid interview with the archivist John Mason about prostitution in the U.S. military. Where the navy condoned and indeed facilitated the sex trade in overseas bases, Faulk opposed it on pragmatic as well as moral grounds: not only was prostitution just plain wrong according to the moral code that Faulk had committed his life to defending, but the venereal disease that went with it incapacitated the men.
Visiting Guantánamo Bay in the mid-1940s, Faulk took his concerns
to Captain Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, commander of the USS
Missouri
, who, upon arriving at the bay, dispatched a liberty party to the Cuban town of Caimanera, just outside the boundary of the U.S. base. Caimanera, Faulk warned Hillenkoetter, “had only one purpose for its existence,” namely, “prostitution.” Like many officers in the navy, Hillenkoetter (later to become director of the Central Intelligence Agency) was unimpressed by Faulk's reservations. But Faulk was not to be deterred. Returning to Guantánamo for an extended stay a few years later, he confronted the base commander, Rear Admiral W. K. Phillips, about the local traffic in sex. “Why can't we put the place out of bounds?” Faulk asked Phillips. The answer was “quite simple,” Phillips replied. “We could put it out of bounds but up in Havana the Cuban government would go to our ambassador and lodge a protest. That protest would go back to the American State Department. The State Department would call the secretary of the navy and say, âWhat are you doing down there in Cuba? You can't do that.' And so the out of bounds would have to be lifted.” What was a proponent of personal responsibility and clean living to do? With Cuba impeding a collective solution, Faulk could only “leave it to the individual man. Preach against it, exhort against it, talk against it, persuade against it. That's about all you could do.”
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In fact, Faulk did more. Suspicious that the source of the problem was not indeed Cubaâthat the navy was “aiding and abetting prostitution” at U.S. bases around the worldâFaulk resolved to study venereal disease rates among the sailors at Guantánamo and elsewhere. Evidence from 188 cases of syphilis at Guantánamo led him to surmise that misguided naval policies were encouraging the spread of disease. A larger study later confirmed the evidence from Guantánamo. “One of the first things which caught my attention when I was Fleet Chaplain was the recurring rumor which I heard to the effect that Commanding Officers were requiring men going ashore in the Far East to take with them prophylaxis,” Faulk reported. Unable at first to trace the origin of that rule, Faulk discovered “that it was carried in a confidential Operation Order issued by the Fleet Commander.” Further investigation into naval involvement in prostitution proved “eyeopening.” While naval officials touted the benefits of prophylaxis, infection rates in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, for example, reached as high
as 1,780 infections per 1,000 men per yearânearly 2 infections for every sailor.
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There is no reason to think Guantánamo was any different. If anything, Faulk's study suggests that infection rates there may have been higher still. “Your [Cuban] servants are given regular health checks, including the Kahn blood test and chest X-rays,” a Guantánamo “Housing Information Manual” assured navy wives relocating to the U.S. base in 1958.
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Designed to screen individuals for venereal disease, the Kahn blood test would have seemed contraindicated for domestic servants unless the infection rate in eastern Cuba had been extraordinarily high. Just how that piece of information was supposed to comfort young navy wives is not clear.
Internal navy documents corroborate Faulk's hypothesis of the navy's abetting the sex trade. A classified security memo from 1952 remarks that “venereal disease control presents the major health problem encountered at the Base. The only off-Base liberty is in adjacent areas where an unusually high incidence of venereal disease is present, and where there is no choice of proper companionship with the opposite sex for the majority of personnel.” In contrast to the base itself, where sailors could choose from a variety of recreational activities, “the only form of entertainment available” in Cuban towns around the base was “drinking and girls.” Neither bad policy nor poor decision making was behind the alarming incidents of VD; rather, “low-cost liquor is the cause of 95% of venereal infections,” the memo alleged, “as men who, under the influence of alcohol, fail to take advantage of the prophylaxis available.”
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Faulk's testimony and the evidence from the security memo support Peter Grenquist's suspicion that the robust sex traffic he witnessed at the bay could not have proceeded without high-level support. A junior officer at Guantánamo in the early 1950s, Grenquist suggests that by the time of his visit, the epicenter of the sex traffic had shifted from Caimanera to Guantánamo City, some twelve miles up the Guantánamo Basin. Guantánamo City “had various informal brothels and young freelancers happy to service liberty parties from the base.” In order to distance itself from traffic, “the navy permanently stationed a
relatively low level second-class pharmacist mate and perhaps a couple of seamen assistants in the city to test the girls for venereal disease.” Assigned to Guantánamo City for shore patrol, Grenquist remembers meeting one “enterprising petty officer” whose control of the sex trade was so complete that “the navy had to remove him quietly from his czardom.” The word on the street: “graft was a factor.”
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Twice at Guantánamoâfirst as a sailor, later as a junior officer with the Fleet Training GroupâHal Sacks remembers Caimanera as “an exotic semitropical area.” The inhabitants had little to do and plenty of time on their hands. Children hung out in the streets until midnight; there were carts with roast pig on Cuban bread for five cents. There was “marvelous” Hatuey beer and “sensational” Bacardi rum. So, too, “great chicken, fish, rice, and beans.” Like Grenquist, as an officer, Sacks was assigned periodically to shore patrol, which gave him an intimate impression of the local nightlife. His headquarters were near the row of whorehouses that lined the harbor. His job was to chaperone, or “supervise,” the extracurricular activityâto make sure that nobody got hurt. “Sometimes there was a problem of guys not paying,” Sacks recalls, “sometimes somebody hit someone, including the Cuban women.” Sacks remembers that the more or less defenseless Cuban women were always grateful for his help.
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