U.S. Navy wants to maintain Gitmo

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — No matter what happens to America’s offshore military prison, this much is clear: This Navy base will remain open for years to come, and so probably will the McDonald’s, the Taco Bell and the golf course.

“We’re not going anywhere anytime soon,” declared Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey M. Johnston, who gets upset when people equate the closing of the detention center for suspected al-Qaida and Taliban figures with a shutdown of this 45-square-mile base.

The U.S. maintained this base long before the first detainees arrived in January 2002. U.S. Marines took Guantanamo Bay in 1898 in the Spanish-American War in a battle chronicled by author and correspondent Stephen Crane.

“With a thousand rifles rattling; with the field-guns booming in your ears; with the diabolic Colt automatics clacking ... and, last, with Mauser bullets sneering always in the air a few inches over one’s head ... it is extremely doubtful if any one who was there will be able to forget it easily,” wrote the author of “The Red Badge of Courage.”

Photographs displayed in the newly refurbished airport terminal trace some of Guantanamo’s more recent history — when it hosted tens of thousands of Haitian migrants, some of whom camped out on the golf course, in the 1990s; when access to Cuba’s water pipeline was severed during the Cold War and a desalination plant was brought in.

The base, which boasts a deep harbor and strategic location along the Windward Passage, now supports operations against drug trafficking and illegal migrants.

Johnston, Guantanamo’s public works officer who requisitions the $4,085 annual payments to Cuba to lease the base, described the military as a perfect tenant.

“We don’t bother the landlord. We don’t (complain) when things go wrong. We pay our rent on time,” Johnston said.

The Castro government disagrees. Cuban officials regularly refer to the U.S. military prison here as a “torture camp” and demand that the base be returned to Cuba. Cuba doesn’t cash the rent checks but cannot evict the Americans because the treaty granting the base remains in effect unless both Cuba and the U.S. abrogate it or the U.S. abandons Guantanamo.