My Year in Cuba

In the early 70s, I spent a year in Cuba, albeit restricted mostly to the base at Guantanamo, aka Gitmo.  I say mostly because I accidentally swam beyond our base boundaries a few times while spearfishing on the reefs.  We still had Cuban workers on base who commuted through the gate and lived in and around the city of Guantanamo.  We also had a Cuban village on the base for those workers who managed to cut all ties with their homeland.  My roommate, Matt Hernandez, was a Mexican American who facilitated our acceptance at their off-limits after-hours club/restaurant on the base.  This club and its counterpart in the Jamaican village were preferable to the EM (enlisted men’s) club on the base that catered more to drunken fleet sailors wanting to let off steam.  I spent most of my time at the EM club wearing a hard hat carrying a billy club on Shore Patrol duty.

I enjoyed the Cuban food and company and managed to even attend their illegal cockfights.  I never understood the “entertainment value” of watching two roosters fight to the death but I was amazed at the gambling activity associated with the events.  The owners would walk around the ring holding up their prize rooster and would take verbal bets from participants in the crowd.  How they kept track of all those bets was the amazing part.  At the end of the match, the winning and losing owners would either pay off or collect their bets.

The fighting pit is larger than it appears because it was
dug down with more seating under the tin roof.

The climate in Guantanamo was like south Florida except that it almost never rained.  There were two seasons, hot and damned hot.  There were only two leisure time activities on the base and, for those who didn’t enjoy skin diving, there was only the consumption of alcohol.  Some would argue that there were also picnics and sunbathing, but I would counter that both of those activities involved large quantities of alcohol.  Luckily, alcohol was cheap.  A fifth of Smirnoff Vodka was fifty cents.  A bottle of cold duck was twenty-five cents and beer was about ten cents a can.  Next to the soda machine in the barracks, there was a similar machine that sold cans of beer.  Since alcohol was sold without federal taxes, all domestic (US) liquor was cheap.  I was cursed with a taste for scotch and it still had foreign taxes.  A fifth of scotch like Dewar’s White Label ran about five dollars.

As an E-5, I was allowed to ship my car down to the base without transportation charges.  After I got my orders to Cuba, I prepped my 1963 Buick Skylark convertible by painting it with a base coat of both zinc chromate and red-lead boat bottom primers to prevent rust.  I topped that off with several coats of blue enamel.  I can only assume that somewhere on the base that car still exists, even if it doesn’t run.  Since none of my friends had cars, I was a popular guy.

We would use the Skylark for regular weekend runs to the beach and I enjoyed the fact that I didn’t have to walk up and down from the Gold Hill barracks to work at the commissary.  Matt and I would also drive down to the boat docks and rent a small boat to go fishing.  But wait, isn’t fishing another leisure activity?  No, as anyone knows who has ever fished, fishing is just another excuse to drink.  We were no different.

That's younger me standing above a popular beach.  The concertina wire
(lower left) marks the divide between the base and Castro's Cuba.

I remember a nighttime fishing excursion that involved the significant consumption of alcohol where we did particularly well.  We had managed to boat several snapper and grouper that we placed in the center seat baitwell.  What we didn’t realize was that the baitwell leaked into the surrounding bay.  Soon I had hooked into something quite large.  Now I don’t remember what pound test was provided on the rental rods and reels we used but suffice it to say that that monofilament line could have been used to tow a small destroyer.  I fought this denizen of the deep for quite a while and managed to get it next to the boat.  I grabbed the gaff and pulled about a five-foot hammerhead shark into our 12’ skiff.  The shark was not amused with this turn of events.  He managed to convey to us his displeasure with a series of “I don’t want to be here” flips and flops about the boat.

The shark was not the only one not amused as I saw Matt move to the bow with a look on his face that told me he didn’t want to be here any more than that shark did.  I know it was the alcohol talking but he even threatened to swim back to shore to get away from our new guest.  I glanced down at Matt’s hands gripping the gunwales about a foot above the waterline.  There, just beyond his left hand, I also saw a large dorsal fin from a fellow member of the Sphyrnidae family.  I pointed at the fin just as this much larger relative began to scrape along the side of our now too-small floating conveyance.  Matt looked, saw the fin just inches from his hand, and then yelled something that only dolphins and sonar operators could hear that told me I needed to start the motor.

We made a beeline back to the base exchange docks where we offloaded our cargo.  The snapper and grouper made it into our now ice-only beer cooler and Mr. Shark was placed on the hood of the Skylark.  We drove back to the Gold Hill barracks and I went up to retrieve my camera.  Matt waited by the car.  While I was in our room I saw something that was not to be ignored.  I didn’t know what I was going to do with my newfound knowledge, but I knew it was going to be big.

Downstairs we took picture after picture of the shark.  We had shark profiles, gaping shark, shark with Jack, a shark with Matt, shark on the hood as an ornament, you get the picture.  Then I asked Matt to grab one end of the shark and I led the way to the stairwell.  He asked why we were climbing up three flights of stairs with a dead shark.  I didn’t answer.  The questions continued until we got to our room.  Then Matt’s questions were answered in an instant as he asked another.  “You aren’t going to do what I think you are going to do?”  I just smiled.

You see our friend Roy, who worked in the commissary butcher shop, had been partaking of that other form of recreation.  He had come to visit and decided to wait.  He knew he was always welcome to our booze.  After all, alcohol was almost cheaper than water there.  He had obviously enjoyed more than his share and had passed out on one of our spare bunks.

We pulled back the sheet to see Roy in his boxers.  We then quietly slipped the hammerhead in next to him.  We tucked in the sheet to keep them both cozy.  Matt and I moved to the other side of the room and continued with our own libation.  We waited a couple of hours in vain for Roy to wake up.  He must have been really plowed.  Eventually, Matt and I went to bed.

The spare bunk from the story would be across the room
from the foot of my bunk.

Early the next morning as dawn broke, we were awakened to the terrified New England accented screams of Roy.  I saw him on the floor at the foot of my bed twisted in the sheet, covered in fish slime, and locked in a loving embrace with the dead shark.  He was screaming and twisting and getting further entangled with the sheet.  I was quickly dressed and out the door with Matt on my heels and Roy’s screams fading into the hallway behind us.  My trusty Buick made for a quick getaway.

My only surviving picture of Matt and Roy

We drove around for a while.  Our main mission was to avoid Roy.  He was a mad sailor with a hangover who smelled like dead fish.  We managed to dodge him for a couple of days.  When the inevitable confrontation happened, Roy was surprisingly calm.  It seemed he didn’t remember much about that night and couldn’t explain what happened.  His main comment could have only come from an old salt who had been a regular at some of the more disreputable sections of the Philippines.  He related how he had often awakened to see some less than attractive ladies of the evening in his bed, but nothing held a candle to waking up in bed with such a foul stench and finding a bed partner with only one eye looking back at him.

For those who might ask about the fate of the shark, he was buried in a shallow grave in a field near the base chow hall.  Foul smells from that building were not unusual.

My only other remembrance of note from my time in Gitmo involved the open-air base theatre.  There was a large stage and a projection screen in front of a large concrete slab with chairs.  As I said, it almost never rained.  At the rear of the slab was a projection booth.  Behind the projection booth was a large banyan tree.  It was at this outdoor venue that I saw Bob Hope’s Christmas show and whatever movies made it through Navy censors and budgets. 

The projection booth and banyan tree would be
behind the scaffold at the right.

We would pull up at the rear of the seating area next to the projection booth.  With a full cooler and the Skylark’s top-down, we would drink and watch the movies.  The only thing that makes this all noteworthy is the Banyan tree.  You see, the base Jamaican workers had unrestricted travel between their island home and the base.  On those trips, all manner of homegrown agricultural products would be brought back to the base.  The Jamaicans would climb the Banyan to watch the movie.  Before the opening credits would roll there would be a large blue cloud surrounding that huge tree.  Occupants sitting in open convertibles could enjoy the second-hand residual effect of that sweet-smelling smoke.  Luckily, we brought snacks too.