GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba -- Both the beer and popcorn were green on St. Patrick's Day at the Bayview Club, not far from a huge outdoor cinema where several dozen sailors sat under the stars watching Mel Gibson play a con man in "Payback."
A few miles away, U.S. Marines, two to a watchtower, listened through the night for Fidel Castro's Frontier Brigade while watching for would-be exiles in the minefields.
Over at the enlisted members' Lateral Hazard bar, an unmistakable wail lured a sailor's wife to the dance floor. "You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain," howled Jerry Lee Lewis. "Goodness gracious, great balls of fire."
"Gitmo," formally called the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, is this hemisphere's last outpost against communism. Forty-five square miles of U.S.-controlled territory on the eastern end of Cuba.
"I thought I'd be able to pick up Cuban, er, I mean Spanish, even better," says Marine Pvt. Thomas Martin, who has spent three months guarding the 17.4-mile barbed-wire fence armed with an M-16 assault rifle. "But no one speaks Spanish here."
He says you get more Spanish back home in Miami. The only two expressions Martin can remember learning since coming here are "Manos arriba" (Put your hands up) and "Alto!" (Halt!) -- phrases to shout if a Cuban appears near his 5-foot-square observation watchtower.
Gitmo is home to fresh-faced sailors and veteran military men, newborns and even a 99-year-old Cuban exile.
The base serves as a forward platform for Navy operations in Latin America, assists in drug interdictions and is an offshore immigration center. The base has an airstrip and harbor, firing range and -- since Castro cut off the power and water in 1964 to try to rid his island of this imperialist intruder -- electricity and desalination plants.
The base also has a civilian-run McDonald's, a bowling alley and dusty nine-hole golf course, elementary school for service members' children and minimall with a barbershop and beauty parlor.
'Like a small town'
"It's like a small town. Everyone knows everybody. There's one store, one movie theater and one club -- one of everything," says Master-at-Arms Amanda Davis, 21, a Navy policewoman.
The installation also offers a night school, scuba diving and offshore fishing. A weekly barge brings supplies from the United States -- everything from fresh fruit and vegetables to first-run movies to feed the base and fend off the creeping sense of isolation that comes with life in what Navy Capt. Larry E. Larson, the base commander, says is the lone U.S. base "located on Communist soil."
"I just wish there was more to do down here," says Davis, an Oregon native. "There's just not a lot of Navy down here. It feels like our mission is gone."
Since Larson arrived two years ago from the Naval War College, the former test pilot has presided over a campaign of cutbacks and downsizing -- in keeping with a militarywide austerity kick caused by the collapse of the Soviet empire.
When he arrived, about 6,000 people -- civilians and military personnel -- lived and worked in about 1,890 buildings, ranging from World War II-vintage pump houses to bachelors' quarters. The budget was $41 million.
The population now is about 3,500 and dropping. By October, Larson plans to operate out of 900 buildings, and cut the budget to $24 million and the population to about 2,500.
More and more of the work formerly done by sailors and Marines is being channeled to private contractors, who hire foreigners at lower wages. Gitmo's population includes scores of Jamaicans and Filipinos working as janitors and driving the ferries and tugboats that are the harbor's lifeblood.
Since about 34,000 Haitian refugees trying to reach the United States were housed here in 1991, Gitmo also has served as an offshore U.S. migrant detention center -- a mechanism that lets U.S. officials harbor boat people without offering the entitlements that setting foot on U.S. soil might bring.
Check isn't cashed
Larson says his job is a cross between commanding an aircraft carrier -- an isolated self-contained world where people can come and go only by airplane and boat -- and being a "small-town mayor."
"I run the power plant. I manage trash collection. I repair buildings. I also have a Navy mission," he says. "I oversee the schools. I make sure people get fed."
And, once a year, he orders the Department of the Navy to cut a rent check for $4,085.
Under an endless, unbreakable lease negotiated with a friendly Cuban leadership in 1934, the Navy agreed to pay $2,000 in gold annually -- equivalent to $4,085 at today's rate -- for the rights to the base. The check is sent by diplomatic pouch to Havana, where, according to local lore, it lands on the desk of Castro.
Cuba hasn't cashed the checks for years.
Yet Gitmo is also part of a carrot contained in the fine print of Congress' embargo-tightening Helms-Burton Law, which offers to renegotiate the lease or return the land -- after Cuba becomes a democracy.
Meantime, day-to-day routine rarely changes -- for the Americans or the 160 or so Cubans who work and live here.
Some, like 73-year-old Astor Barnes, are part of an ever-dwindling contingent of day laborers who pass through the only gate that opens to the other side each workday.
Barnes, who began working at Gitmo in World War II, is called a "commuter," one of dozens of Cubans whom Castro allowed to continue working as machinists or other laborers by day, earning much-coveted U.S. dollars -- and returning to their homes in Guantanamo City or surrounding towns by night.
In the 1960s, they numbered around 100. Today, after deaths and retirement, 18 are left.
"I get good wages. Working conditions are good here," Barnes says shyly as he emerges before dawn from the Cuban side.
Strip search
He left his home in Guantanamo City two hours earlier, took a bus and then stripped naked at a Cuban checkpoint before donning work clothes and moving to the U.S. side. Here, a Marine hands him a base ID before he boards a shuttle bus. Once he was a carpenter; today he works in the Navy Exchange.
Other Cubans at the base include 60 or so detainees, kept in an off-limits section of the camp. These "migrants," as the military calls them, were picked up by the Coast Guard at sea or came through the barbed wire seeking asylum. Their fates are in the hands of the State Department and Immigration and Naturalization Service.
The largest group are the "exiles," about 75 aging Cubans who, like Barnes, were day workers but chose in 1964 to live permanently on the U.S. side when Cuba cut off water and electricity. Expecting a short-term stay, officials authorized the men to work for wages when able and receive food and housing.
Doctors at the 11-bed hospital describe the Cuban exiles as an increasingly geriatric population. Seven are failing so that, three times a day, the Navy delivers meals to their homes.
The eldest exile is 99-year-old "Mr. Campbell," whom the doctors see from time to time. Says Dr. Bruce Bohnker, a Navy captain, he gets his own meals.
He turns 100 in October.
Pub Date: 3/26/99