It was 1935, and the Guantánamo naval base had to go. So declared an American commission stocked with foreign-policy experts: the United States was pursuing less antagonistic relations with its southern neighbors, and an American base on Cuban soil, anchored by a lease without an end date, looked increasingly like an “anomaly.” Weren’t there enough defensible harbors on the United States’ own Gulf Coast, or on Puerto Rico? The commission wrote that the U.S. government should “seriously consider whether the retention of Guantánamo will not cost more in political misunderstanding than it is worth in military strategy.”
Where was the base? This was a trickier question than might first appear. It straddled both sides of lower Guantánamo Bay, roughly five hundred miles east and south of Havana, about as far from the capital as one could travel and remain in Cuba. The bay opened onto the Windward Passage, one of the hemisphere’s most trafficked sea-lanes, linking the Eastern Seaboard to the Gulf of Mexico, Central and South America, and, through the Panama Canal, the Pacific Ocean. In 1899, an American military planner, stressing the need for naval bases and coaling stations in Cuba, had called the island “an outer bar of the Mississippi.”
The terrain that rose above the bay—dry, sun-blasted hills, where cactus and scrub clung to outcroppings of barren rock—was hostile enough that Cuba’s Spanish rulers had taken their time colonizing the region. For centuries, Guantánamo had effectively been no state’s domain, a haven for pirates and slaves escaping both Cuba and Haiti, only a hundred miles across the Windward Passage at its nearest point. For them, Guantánamo had meant something like freedom.
The more perplexing question was where the base stood legally. By the late nineteenth century, U.S. commercial and military interests in Cuba and the wider Caribbean had deepened. When a Cuban uprising against Spanish control threatened to secure the island’s independence, American policymakers pursued military intervention, capitalizing on popular outrage at the mysterious explosion of the U.S.S. Maine, in Havana harbor, in February of 1898. In a nine-day battle for Guantánamo Bay, American soldiers, under Commander Bowman H. McCalla, and Cuban insurgents defeated the Spanish garrison. In June, the Cuban diplomat Manuel Sanguily wrote to a friend, “Now that they have seen Guantánamo, they will never renounce their control over it.”
He was not far off. The United States took possession of Guantánamo Bay through what might be called gunboat tenancy. While Cuba’s constitutional convention gathered in late 1900 and early 1901, Secretary of War Elihu Root listed provisions that “the people of Cuba should desire” for their constitution; these included granting the United States the right to intervene freely in Cuban affairs and access to land for naval bases. These demands went into the Platt Amendment, passed by the U.S. Senate on March 1, 1901, and submitted to the convention for adoption; the United States would withdraw its forces from the island only after the delegates incorporated it into their constitution. Cubans opposed the Platt Amendment in speech, pamphlet, and mass protest; Juan Gualberto Gómez, a delegate and a former general, charged that it would transform Cubans into a “vassal people.” Nevertheless, under pressure a divided convention adopted it.