Farewell Fidel! But We Left Our Detainees At Guantánamo Bay...

If you're lucky, through the telescope you may also see US soldiers frog-marching prisoners...

Appropriately enough, the United States' 100-year lease ran out a few years back and now the existence of the base itself is in violation of international law.

By Citizen Correspondent The Disinformation Company

Date Posted: 03/19/08

Reader Rating:

With the resignation of Fidel Castro, we'd like to take the opportunity to remind you of the most famous of all the Cuban bays, lovely Guantánamo Bay. The following is an excerpt from Martin Cohen's NO HOLIDAY: 80 Places You Don't Want to Visit... where author Martin Cohen visits exotic locations (80 of them!) but with a different aim than the usual travel book: to seek out the suffering and injustices, not to skirt them. We will see the dark red waters of "Murdering Creek" in Australia, silent testament to the ongoing genocide of the world's oldest people; queue up to see not museums and art galleries, but the more sinister monuments of politics, like the academy of terror funded by the CIA at Fort Benning in Georgia; and visit the poisoned shores of the Aral Sea revealing an abandoned biological warfare center...

NO HOLIDAY 32: Guantánamo Bay, Cuba - The Most Famous Of All The Cuban Bays

How To Get There

For years and years, you used to be able to just wander in and out of the US Navy Camp on the South Eastern tip of Cuba. But that all changed after the Revolution. Nowadays Americans are not even allowed to visit any part of the island—at the risk of a $10,000 fine. Those who really want to see Cuba have to employ a "roundabout route" (like maybe fly to Pakistan and join the Taliban). But for non-Americans, the easiest way to see Camp Delta is still to go to Havana and then down to Guantánamo Town, notable for its French-style architecture. There, for a couple of US dollars, they can hire a driver for the day, and be driven up a steep rough road to the Loma Malones observation point. This is a little rock shelter under a canopy, complete with a tourist-standard public telescope.

What To See

And from the little observation refuge, it should be possible to see far below, set amongst one of the wildest and least hospitable landscapes of Cuba, a kind of Wild West fort, complete with wooden stockades and watchtowers flying the Stars and Stripes. If you're lucky, through the telescope you may also see US soldiers frog-marching prisoners, clad in their famous orangey-red jump-suits, from their cells to the interrogation rooms.

The land surrounding the bay is dry and baked by the sun, and there is a fringe of cacti to the northwest, a relic of Fidel Castro's attempts, in the early 1960s, to discourage Cubans from fleeing to capitalism. The inhabitants of the base call this the Cactus Curtain, a sly reference to the more famous Iron one.