Gitmo’s fence-line meetings: A bit of amity amid the hostility

This story is part of a weeklong Yahoo series marking one year since the opening of relations between the United States and Cuba.

Robert Buehn, the newly appointed commander of the U.S. naval station at Guantánamo Bay, sat in a drab, olive-colored tent at the northeast portion of the sweltering 45-square-mile base.

It was 2000, a couple of years before terror suspects would be swept up and transferred to a makeshift and largely lawless prison here, earning it international infamy. The base was still a sleepy naval outpost best known for its appearance in a Tom Cruise movie, and Buehn, a Floridian, had chosen to command it in part because he thought he’d feel comfortable being surrounded by water.

But there was another unexpected perk of the job. Every month, Buehn was tasked with carrying out a small slice of diplomacy between two nations whose relationship had been marked by enmity and mutual suspicion for generations. He would meet with a Cuban military officer in an opening in the minefield between the base and Cuban territory. On this day, Buehn and a couple of his colleagues met with a Cuban brigadier general named Jose Solar Hernandez, who was also a member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. It was Solar’s turn to walk through the gate and meet on the U.S. side; next month, Buehn would venture a few paces into Cuban territory for the meeting.

image

The fence at the now closed Camp X-Ray, which was used as the first detention facility for al-Qaida and Taliban militants captured after the Sept. 11 attacks at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba. (Photo: Charles Dharapak/AP)

Just 50 yards from the 30-foot-high fence, as watchful Marines stood guard in nearby observation towers, the men, all in uniform, chatted through translators about a coordinated fire drill they would perform on the fence line, to prepare for a potential brush fire. But it was hard for Buehn to concentrate because he was sweating so profusely. The humid, dark tent was intentionally spartan, Buehn said, designed by his predecessors to send a message that the meetings were not friendly get-togethers.

“It was miserable in there; it got so hot there,” Buehn said of the tent. “And it was dark. Where I was sitting in the center, I was farthest from the AC.” Buehn was a sweaty mess by the end of the meeting. “I don’t want to sit here looking nervous because I’m not — I’m just hot,” he recalls thinking.

So after that day, Buehn upgraded the conditions of the meeting, moving it from the bare tent to an air-conditioned conference room in a nearby Marine building that he had remodeled. The Cubans quickly followed suit, closing in the open-air concrete building they had used for the meeting before on their side and installing air conditioning in it. Both sides also began serving refreshments for the first time — coffee and then juice. The Cubans began offering pastries.

“We kept one-upping each other,” Buehn recalled.

These so-called fence-line meetings, which still take place each month, are a small oasis of amity and diplomacy in the otherwise perennially contested territory of Guantánamo. Now the U.S. and Cuba are beginning to open up their relationship after 50 years, though Raúl Castro has repeatedly said the continuing U.S. presence at Guantánamo is one of the main remaining barriers to normalization. For its part, the Obama administration has said in no uncertain terms that returning the base to Cuba is off the table. So the base continues to be a symbol of the fundamental discord between the two nations, even as it’s also the stage for some of the only regular communication between them.

The remote southern-Cuba base wasn’t always so controversial. A 1903 treaty with Cuba gives the United States the right to rent the land for a small yearly sum in perpetuity. But Fidel Castro stopped cashing American checks for the base in the 1960s, saying he wanted the Americans out — or else. Both sides seeded the no man’s land between them with thousands of land mines, turning the remote strip of tropical territory into the largest active minefield in the world.

image

U.S. Navy Capt. Robert Buehn, base commander, during a press conference at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo, Cuba. (Photo: Joe Skipper/Reuters)

In 1964, Castro cut off the water supply to Guantánamo, and President Lyndon B Johnson retaliated by firing the 3,000 Cubans who worked on the base, strangling the flow of U.S. dollars into the country. Gunfire occasionally broke out between the elite Cuban Frontier Brigade soldiers and the U.S. Marines who guarded their respective sides of the 17.5-mile-long fence. The opposing forces settled into an uneasy and silent standoff for the next 30 years.

The first fence-line meetings began in 1994, when Marine Corps Gen. John Sheehan reached out to the Cubans on the other side of the fence, offering to provide a map of all the U.S.-placed mines, according to historian William LeoGrande, who described the negotiations in his book “Back Channel to Cuba.” Tensions were high at this time, as more than 30,000 Cubans had fled the country on makeshift rafts and headed to Florida en masse. President Bill Clinton ordered the rafters intercepted and sent to shelter on the base while they formally requested asylum. Sheehan’s gesture prompted the Cuban commander to request a face-to-face meeting. Even when tensions were high between the two countries — such as when Cuba shot down two unarmed Cessnas, killing three Americans, in 1996 — the meetings continued.

Those involved in the little-known line of diplomacy over the decades say the meetings are almost exclusively used for Cuban and U.S. military leaders to hash out local issues and to prepare for potential crises — not for political negotiations between the two estranged countries. A State Department official attends every meeting, but as far as the Guantánamo commanders could tell, no statecraft took place.

“I don’t know if they gave any secret eye flashes to communicate what they had to,” Steve Blaisdell, the base commander between 2008 and 2010, joked about the State Department officer.

“My knowledge was they had other ways to communicate with the Cubans,” said Buehn. “I don’t think they would choose Guantánamo if they were to float a big trial balloon or something.”

When the Cubans wanted to send political messages to Washington, they tended to use the Coast Guard, according to LeoGrande. Cuban law enforcement and the U.S. Coast Guard have cooperated for decades in combating drug trafficking. Meanwhile, the 2014 talks between Cuba and the U.S. that resulted in the decision to open up the relationship were in part brokered by Pope Francis and took place in Vatican City and Canada — not Guantánamo.

image

Cuban workers are checked by a naval guard as they leave Guantánamo Bay naval station in 1961. (Photo: Jim Kerlin/AP)

In the fence-line meetings, the commanders coordinated joint disaster-preparedness exercises — and the Cubans occasionally granted permission for the U.S. to use their airspace for military or humanitarian reasons. Every year, the Cubans and Americans would jointly battle a staged fire near the fence. The Americans set ablaze a big pile of wood, and the Cubans sent over a giant Soviet helicopter from which to dump water and put it out. Cuban and U.S. medical personnel then treated faux injuries from the fire.

Buehn even went on a tour of Guantánamo City, 14 miles north of the fence, to see the burn-treatment unit in a local hospital in case U.S. soldiers ever needed to be sent there. At the hospital, the military men exchanged gifts. On the way back to the base, they swung around to a local tourist site, where Cubans gather to peer at Guantánamo.

The military-to-military camaraderie helped overcome the chasm in their politics, and they filled much of their meetings with pleasant small talk. Solar, the Cuban brigadier general, frequently talked about fishing and the local wildlife. Blaisdell remembers talking to his Cuban counterpart, a colonel, about the World Cup and baseball. Each side brought about four or five people, including two translators and the ever-present State Department official. The meetings had a matter-of-fact, soldierly vibe.

“They’re in uniform,” Buehn said. “We aren’t dealing with the ideological issues.”

But occasionally, the fence-line meetings did veer into more political — and tense — territory.

At one meeting, Solar told Buehn that the base’s radio station, Radio GTMO, could be heard on the Cuban side, in Guantánamo City. Buehn agreed to turn the signal down so the American station wouldn’t reach so far, potentially corrupting Cuban minds with American ideals.

“Even though there were other entities in our government who were probably beaming signals into Cuba all the time, like Voice of America, that wasn’t our purpose or our mission. We were really happy to turn it down,” Buehn said.

Blaisdell remembers that his counterpart, a Cuban Army colonel, occasionally broke from the logistical coordination and sports-based small talk to lecture the group on the perils of climate change. He talked about how wealthy nations had a responsibility to stop global warming, a message that seemed pointed at the U.S. “We just listened to what he said,” Blaisdell said, saying the Americans would nod silently until the colonel had finished.

Another hot-button issue was Cubans fleeing the country into the base, hoping to get permission to resettle in the United States or some other nation. Blaisdell recalls the relaxed mood shifting whenever his Cuban counterpart asked about a recent defector.

“We would acknowledge we had them, and they would read a statement saying this is not the way immigration is supposed to go,” Blaisdell recalled. “I would simply acknowledge I heard what they said, and we would move on. That was — tense isn’t the right word, but that was as serious a tone as they would take on things.”

“It wasn’t that uncommon for people to swim in,” Buehn remembered of fleeing migrants. Others made the dangerous journey through the minefield and over the fence. The commander would then contact the State Department and immigration services to take over the asylum-seeking process, and the base would provide the Cubans shelter in the meantime.

One time, a Cuban soldier defected.

“He jumped the fence and was walking down the street on our main road early one morning, and he had brought his AK-47,” Buehn said. The soldier turned himself in.

image

Towers overlooking a U.S. detention facility are silhouetted against a sunrise at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. (Photo: Toronto Star, Michelle Shephard/AP)

Solar pressed Buehn to return the soldier back to them. Buehn explained that he had nothing to do with that decision, which would be made back in Washington by immigration and State Department officials. Washington granted the soldier asylum, to Cuba’s dismay.

“What we wound up with was his weapon,” Buehn recalls. The Soviet-style AK-47 was rusting away on the base, and Buehn was worried someone might steal it as a souvenir.

“I sent the general an email and said, ‘Can we give this back to you? I don’t want it.’” The general replied that he did. “Our Marines took this weapon up to the gate and handed it back,” Buehn said.

It was a gesture of good will between two commanders.

Even though Buehn knew Solar was a hard-line Castro supporter, he liked him and looked forward to their meetings. Now Buehn says he thinks about his Cuban counterpart from time to time, and wonders what he’s up to.

“I know he’s retired now, but I would love to somehow find a way to go visit if he’s still alive,” Buehn said. “He would be at least 80 now.”

image

See more stories on this topic >>>