Guantanamo Bay Cuba - Photo Journey (2003 & 2004)

Antillia Majora: NEW VIDEO - Travel Log Navsta GTMO

New: Where Torture Happens

Latest: Looking forward to looking in the rear view mirror: The Road to Shame - Guantanamo Camps

GTMO Light House

I was at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (GTMO –"git-mo") in August of 2003, for about two weeks as part of a team of three performing seagrass and coral reef surveys for the Navy. Guantanamo Bay is in itself an amazing place for its natural essence.

It hit me as both very real and very surreal at the same time. It is a place of national history, like Pearl Harbor, a name out of history books in school.

It is a place of stark and rich natural beauty, presenting scrub desert, mangroves, marshes, a bay, a winding river, hills, seaside cliffs, sandy and pebbled beaches, distant mountains, wide seagrass beds, and thriving coral reefs.

And it is a place of our daily headlines: the place of "detainees."

I was there in August 2003, several months (apparently) after the mass suicide attempts. But we and most everybody else did not know that at the time.

I was there at a time before the issue of detainees and torture had been raised to a widespread degree in the consciousness of Americans or the press.

In the short time I was there I heard from more than one soldier (off-duty) about harsh treatment and torture tactics. There was a certain glee in the telling of the stories, which in itself is more than a little disturbing. I heard of some of the physical treatment, of the use of big guards to intimidate prisoners. I heard about how the inmates sometimes "threw their feces at guards ... ". I heard how Barney (the big purple dinosaur) kid's videos/music were played non-stop to the inmates. I was in GTMO again in February of 2004 as part of a two-person team working on terrestrial natural resource mapping. During this one-week trip, I heard similar stories of the harsh treatment of detainees.

One incident during a February trip, conducting terrestrial surveys, captures the odd atmosphere well: Our survey team (two of us) had been driving around trying to find one of our GPS mapping sites. We had been given the description that it was near the "Pink Palace" and roughly where that was. I had missed a turn and lost the car I was following to get there and had pulled over to get my bearings. A military police car pulled up to where I had parked and the MP questioned what we were doing. I told him our business and asked directions to the 'Pink Palace'. He looked at me very nervously and questioningly. He had to go back to his vehicle to look over our paperwork and call in for verification and instructions. While we were waiting, I thought of the whole silliness of the situation:

Being there, in Cuba, with Castro several hundred miles or so that way, west, over mountains, the Mig fighter jet of the cold war era Cuban pilot who defected by landing at the air field over there across the bay, terrorist detainees over there on the cliffs overlooking the gleaming blue Caribbean waters, and me sitting here in this white 1980's clunky square government beater of a car being questioned because I couldn't find the Pink Palace so that we could map the rare vegetation habitats of the US Naval base. [The Pink Palace, it turns out, was where detainees were supposedly to start to be seen for their trials at that time (that plan, along with many others, has changed since then)].

To make it even goofier, consider that I was looking for a building called the "Pink Palace" on a US Naval Base while sitting next to a gay colleauge and friend (no, I'm not homophobic) at the Naval Base where the movie "A Few Good Men" (about gays in the military) took place with Jack Nicholson giving the now famous lines: "You Can't handle the Truth!!!" ... Jack Nicholson being an officer in a court while saying that line and the actual "Truth" being the least likely thing coming out of Gitmo... Just plain kookiness!!!

It has been disturbing... hearing about it in the media; though more frustrating and not quite as surprising since I had heard about some of it while I was there. Part of the frustration was in hearing the down-playing and the denial that the Bush administration was doing and continues to do ...

A while back, the AP news service published two news stories I had seen about a Navy paralegal who had heard similar stories from off-duty soldiers while at Gitmo. The Pentagon put a gag order on the story and I haven't seen or heard anything more about it since; though recent news stories have corroborated the playing of Barney music non-stop to the detainees and documentaries have corroborated and filled in other parts of the unfolding story...

In the end,
in the long run,
at the end of the day,
when it's all said and done,
when the sweet eyed iguanas and aloof vultures have looked on with indifference
and then scurried off into the scrub or taken flight on feathered wing...
What is it we expect of ourselves?
Whom do we Choose to be?
Lately, it sadly seems like not much...
The lowest common denominator...

But then, that's nature... isn't it? (but don't we, as 'humans' usually expect more from ourselves?)

Cactus scrub at seaside cliffs

Heron on seaside coral cliffs

Humvee transport/escort amid seaside cactus scrub

Tiny barrel cactus in ancient conch fossil

Seaside Patrol

Cliff edge & rocks at Cuzco Beach

Weathered, aged, worn

Wings in the rocks (fossilized coral cross-section in coral cliff)

Vulture on rock sunning atop seaside cliff

Contractors constructing 'detainee' cages

GTMO church and mall (mall in foreground) at dawn

Sea turtle patters over Pebble Beach pebbles

Sea trutles hatch under tree at foot of cliff at Pebble Beach (Can you find them all...? There are 18 & 1/2)

Beach huts at Windmill Beach (letters on hut read: "DO NOT FEED IGUANAS" )

Grafitti Hill: "Don't ask don't tell... But spray paint it on the sides of the hills!!!"

Sunrise over hills of Cuba, Pink Palace*, and fast patrol boat (*Pink Palace was where 'detainees' were to be 'tried' at one point)

Fossil coral head in fossilized reef cliff face

Fossil coral formation (this one is about 14 feet high) in ancient up-lifted reef cliff, Phillips Park (much of GTMO seaside is made up of up raised fossil reef cliffs - some are 60-80 ft above sea level).

Roots of fig trees twist and support into and over ravine

On the rocks, weathered smooth, drifted tree

Runway & Hills of Cuba

Arrival at GTMO airport

Over GTMO airport

Palm forest over edge of mangroves and Guantanamo Bay with hills of Cuba beyond. (Many mangroves along the bay's edge had died for undetermined reason. New sprouts had just started to emerge and grow in mud).

Forbidden fruit??? (really hard to get at, at least)

Vulture soaring over cactus scrub, marsh, and flood plain. Hills of GTMO beyond (Stephen Crane and John Paul Jones Hills; burned patches seen in fore and mid ground from recent fire).

Hutia (banana rat) (Family Capromyidae) in dead mangrove tree.

Beach dive - coral reef survey site, Hidden Beach

Wooden stair access to Hidden Beach, Leeward (All Dive and Survey gear was hauled down and then back up these stairs... as sweet eyed iguanas and aloof vultures indiferently looked on...)

Leaving GTMO over a rainbow

Nature is ...

Nature does ...

What is it we expect from ourselves?

Whom is it that We choose to be?

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SEE this NEW VIDEO: "Travel Log: Navsta GTMO" Music, Imagery, and Words of Wisdom

(see Antillia Majora I - Photolog: Naval Station Guantanmo Bay, Cuba - of nature and people)

(see Photolog: Marine Life - Scuba Diving GTMO Cuba)

(see also: Impressions from Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba)

New: Where Torture Happens (click image below)

While up on the ridge with a military detail assigned to take us there, we were told not to take photos of the facility. We were not restricted from taking photos of facilities that were not part of the Detainee Complex.

The Road to Perdition: