Yankee Come Home: On the Road from San Juan Hill to Guantánamo

contigo

Prologue

San Juan Hill is a steep ridge, with a crest so narrow that in many places the difference between climbing up and starting downhill is just a single step. Tall and abrupt, it offers a hell of a view, though the panorama is broken up by unruly flowering trees and run-down apartment blocks. In the north, clouds pile up against a steep mountain wall separating the city of Santiago from the rest of the island of Cuba, which stretches northwest for hundreds of miles without quite reaching the Florida Keys. To the south, a wall of lesser mountains screens the Caribbean Sea, but I can taste salt in the wind. East is a plain carpeted with jungle scrub, tilled fields, and hectic clusters of cement-block houses. And when I turn west, toward the lowering sun, lesser ridges fall away like echoes, carrying this city of red tile roofs down to a great bay.

It’s the kind of cityscape that could be an artwork in itself, like famous views of Florence and Siena. But Santiago de Cuba is no museum town, primped and groomed by money and fame. Fine old mansions and church towers dignify the view, but everywhere there’s evidence of gross decay and disrepair, of scabby whitewash and fallen façades. Run-down factories, hospitals, and apartment towers loom like modernist wrecks run aground in a sea of antique tile. Real ships cross slate-blue Santiago Bay, rusty freighters headed for the container port or smoky industrial plants on the far shore, in the stretching shadow of the Sierra Maestra.

Santiago can’t afford to be as pretty as she really is. A beauty down on her luck, Santiago is the capital of old Oriente Province, one of the world’s most storied regions, home to Cuba’s most revered spiritual, cultural, and revolutionary traditions. From its hidden Afro-Cuban religions to the hideouts of Fidel Castro’s guerrilla army, the history of Oriente Province is fabulously rich in suffering, hope, and defiance. Made over by prosperity, the crumbling city would ravish our eyes; in her workaday travail, she wounds our hearts.

San Juan Hill is studded with obsolete cannon and heroic statues, reminding me that even the most poignant landscape looks ominous through gunsights. Militarily, this ridge is the key to the defense of Santiago de Cuba. It’s open to attack from the plain to the east, lower and more vulnerable than the mountains to the north and south, but as defensible as many other hills that fights have made famous, from Bunker Hill in Massachusetts to Khe Sanh in Vietnam’s Central Highlands. Any landward assault on the city has to win this ridge. The victors can direct artillery fire onto the city below and the bay beyond, sinking any warships in the harbor or chasing them into the open sea.

That’s what happened here in the summer of 1898.

The United States of America sent its armed forces on a crusade to avenge a spectacular act of terrorism and help an oppressed people win freedom. Yankees remembered the battleship Maine’s mysterious destruction in Havana Bay by blaming Spain and invading her last great New World colony, Cuba. Joining forces with a Cuban rebel army that had been defying Spain for years, U.S. troops fought a brief war that began with the Marines’ landing at Guantánamo Bay, just fifty miles east of Santiago. The new base at Guantánamo supported a naval blockade that trapped the Spanish fleet in Santiago Bay while the U.S. Army landed troops on the beaches of Daiquiri and Siboney, somnolent villages only ten miles from here. Yankees and Cubans marched inland together, skirmishing with the Spanish rear guard at a crossroads called Las Guasimas. Their thirty-seven-day campaign climaxed with the U.S. Army’s assault on the fortified village of El Caney and the storming of the eminence known locally as la Loma San Juan. No longer safe from land-based artillery, Spain’s Atlantic fleet sortied from Santiago Bay to be annihilated by America’s recently created world-class navy. Defeated on land and at sea, the Spanish signed their surrender under a tree just a little ways downslope.

Americans back home rejoiced—only to find that the real war had just begun.

Most Americans had understood the war as a selfless quest, a mission of honor and mercy, but the nation’s leaders turned the crusade for "¡Cuba libre!" into a global land grab. The U.S. expeditionary force became an army of occupation. Former Spanish imperial possessions—Puerto Rico, Guam, the vast Philippine archipelago—became American colonies. Martial glory faded into years of counterinsurgency, profiteering scandals, torture, and massacres. The embarrassing war was willfully forgotten—along with its warning about the consequences of acting imperially.

Not much escaped our deliberate amnesia. Ask an American today about 1898 and you’re likely to recover just three names: the USS Maine, Theodore Roosevelt, and San Juan Hill.

I’m standing on San Juan Hill because a couple of those names figure among my earliest memories. When I was a little boy, my great-grandfather Thomas O’Brien told me he climbed this ridge as a Rough Rider, running along at Teddy Roosevelt’s stirrup. Papa O’Brien was a five-year-old’s hero, and that’s all I needed to know—but now I need to understand what his war was really all about.

I’m here in the last month of 2005 because, fifty-three miles to the east, there’s a Cuban bay that’s been a U.S. naval base since 1898. Guantánamo is back in the news, this time as an international symbol of power unchecked by law, a synonym for torture.

And I’m here because my stepson is standing guard behind a machine gun on the perimeter of an air base in Iraq. I’d like to understand why his war seems too damned familiar.

I’m here because patriotism has begun to feel like grief. Back home, we Americans can’t talk honestly about the wars we’re fighting now—not without fighting each other. So I’m traveling across old battlefields, trying to connect our present to our past.

The statues and cannon all around me are fixtures of a historic park, a battlefield monument that has seen better days. There are breaches in the retaining walls that terrace its steep slopes. The narrow cement walkway threading the crest, lined with colored stones and artillery shells, breaks down, here and there, into ankle-twisting chunks. Tiled birdbaths are cracked and dry. Some guns are rusty, and the outbuildings downslope—little picnic pavilions and shelters—are graffitied, weatherbeaten, and weary.

Nevertheless, it’s a high and breezy open space, a luxury in a city with a chronic housing shortage. Daytimes, the park is a playground for kids from the neighborhood’s anthill apartment blocks. As evening draws near, the park attracts young lovers, whose murmured conversations and preliminary caresses stake claim to roofed-over picnic tables and choice spots under broad-kneed trees.

The battle fought on this hill was likewise an intimate affair. For all its modernity—the newfangled machine guns and telephones, the debut of moving-picture propaganda—the War of 1898 was a drama as character-driven as the Iliad or the Bayeux Tapestry narrative. Just as Troy’s fate hung on Achilles’ sulking and England’s on Harold’s lousy luck, so the monuments on San Juan Hill remind me that here Lieutenant John Parker dashed to the rescue with his Gatling guns; there, elephantine General William Rufus Shafter snubbed his ally General Calixto Iniguez Garcia, the old man with the Cyclopean bullet hole in his forehead; up this slope charged the Rough Riders’ impetuous Colonel Roosevelt, straight on into the White House.

Intimacy also describes the battle’s crucial result: the tortured intimacy of an unstable ménage à trois. America entered the war as Cuba’s ally, but signed a peace treaty with Spain that passed Cuba from one colonial master to another. Then, for the next half century, yanquis and Cubans, betrayer and betrayed were joined in unequal embrace, a bought-and-sold marriage coupling selfish power to abject access. The eventual, inevitable divorce was so ugly, its radioactive anger almost burned the world down.

The century-old tragedy memorialized in the park on la Loma San Juan is familiar to almost every santiaguero in the city below. They can name its heroes and villains, explain their motives and passions, quote the telling lines. They know all about that antique double-cross because they live with the ongoing consequences.

Yanquis do, too. But few of us know how what happened here transformed our nation.

Most of us norteamericanos know nothing about the conflict we alone call the Spanish-American War. But everywhere I go in old Oriente, I see our past and present influence, especially along the roads that run east from San Juan Hill all the way to Guantánamo.

The crowds at Guillermon Moncada Stadium remind me that yanquis helped establish the supremacy of la pelota—baseball—in Cuban sporting life. It’s easy to hear the American jazz still inspiring son de Oriente, the regional musica tipica made world-famous by the Buena Vista Social Club. Monuments everywhere recall the legendary deeds of Cuban heroes, of Antonio Maceo, José Martí, and Frank País; in plaques, statues, and thickets of bright, new barbed wire, Oriente also reflects the best and worst of yanquis such as Teddy Roosevelt, Clara Barton, and Dick Cheney.

As the sun drops onto the spikes of the Sierra Maestra, I stand alongside a statue of a Yankee soldier. Geographically, San Juan Hill is a height of land, a watershed boundary. In a hard rain, drops that fall on one side of the statue—behind us, on the east side, toward the plain over which he and his fellow soldiers marched to fight for "Cuba libre!"—will eventually trickle through the dirt lots around houses and shanties, down to a creek that joins a little river making its quiet way to the Caribbean Sea.

However, raindrops that fall in front of us—on the Santiago side—will spill down through the city and pour into Santiago Bay. That’s the prize for which this bronze Yankee’s battle was fought. The capture of San Juan Hill drove the Spanish fleet from the bay and made us Cuba’s masters.

This narrow-spined ridge with its bittersweet view is the divide between one United States of America and another. La Loma San Juan is the hill we climbed as a republic and descended as an empire.

Chapter 1

FALSE FLAGS

We were trying to lie our way into Cuba. It wasn’t working.

We were a feminist women’s community chorus from northern New England, a fundamentalist Christian preacher from Nigeria by way of Birmingham, and me, a journalist in disguise.

We were supposed to have left Jamaica three hours earlier, but the Commies wanted their money up front and the reverend was tapped out. The diva was frantic, the chorus was clueless, and the graybeard rasta who’d been watching us all afternoon nodded as if he could have told me: When you start from a lie, every step is a betrayal.

And we were all lying, more or less. Under the embargo, most U.S. citizens can either be honest or travel to Cuba. Some sneak in through Canada or Mexico. Others say and do whatever it takes to squeeze through one of the embargo’s licensed loopholes. For example, a feminist chorus might strike a deal with a fundamentalist pastor licensed to lead missionaries to Cuba. And a freelance writer anxious to see Guantánamo might turn missionary, too.

Maybe some of us crossed our fingers, for lies or for luck. Yet here we were, grounded in Kingston, all our accommodations with truth as tangled as the vines and flowers woven into Ileana’s wild nylons.

Ileana was Cubana Airline’s go-to girl at Kingston’s Norman Manley International Airport. The job title on her name tag, Sales Manager, symbolized the peculiar marriage of Marx and marketing forced on Cuba since the Soviet collapse. She embodied, as well, the island’s refusal to equate professionalism with prudery: Though the nylons and short skirt spoke for small-c cubana flair, from there on up Ileana looked every centimeter the corporate cadre in her blue blazer, thin smile, and cinched-back bun. Her rigid bearing did more than her few words to press the airlines’ demand: Unless the Reverend Esau came up with another U.S. $1,100, our charter to Santiago de Cuba would never fly.

"Lo siento, Ileana told me: Sorry about that. But she didn’t bother backing her lie with so much as a polite moue of sorrow. She wore the turned-to-stone face that Cuban officials often use on unofficial Cubans and uppity Americans. There is nothing I can do."

Still, I kept her talking, putting my artless Spanish to the trip’s first test as I tried to understand just how much trouble we were in.

Lots, it seemed. Without a trace of sympathy, Ileana explained that Jamaica collects a head tax on departing charter passengers. Cubana would owe the money to Jamaica, and the airline had no intention of fronting the Reverend Esau Onyegoro’s Overwater Missions such a sum.

I turned to ask Esau, in English, You don’t have this charter-tax money? I tried to keep my pitch level, expressing nothing at all like surprise or accusation.

No, William. Esau’s shoulders slumped, a curve as soft as the contours of his kind, fleshy face. We had all the arrangements made weeks ago, he said, lowering his voice until he was sure that only I could hear him through the departure lounge’s high babel. "Then the Cubans switched the date, and it was too late to change your flight here. So I booked overnight rooms in Kingston, an unexpected expense, and that required a nonrefundable deposit.

But then the Cubans changed the date again, the reverend marveled, haplessly. They say they can fly us today only! And the hotel won’t give me our money back.

There was something wrong with Esau’s story, but I could see that we were losing Ileana. Switching back to Spanish, I asked her whether our Cubana plane was here in Kingston, waiting for us.

Quizas. Perhaps.

Was it ready to fly?

I can’t say.

Was there a time after which it would leave Jamaica, with or without us?

Certainly. She walked away, the florid nylons twining into the crowd. Turning back, I caught the reverend watching, too.

When America meets Cuba, you can never tell who’s lying. Considering their shared centuries of snarled double crosses, it’s safe to assume the dishonesty is mutual.

At that moment, for instance, I was wondering whether there really was such a thing as a Jamaican departing-charter head tax. And was it really $1,100, or were Ileana and the man I could see her consulting with—a sharp-featured, short guy in an ill-fitting Cubana jacket—angling after an off-the-books bonus? Who could I ask, and what would it matter? Catching the Cubans out in a fib might set the facts straight, but it wouldn’t get us to Santiago.

And what about Esau? How had he managed to screw this up? Was he less than competent or less than honest? Problem was, we needed the Reverend Onyegoro a lot more than he needed us.

The chorus—the earnestly named Feminine Tone—wanted to sing at Santiago’s Eighth International Choral Festival. The chorus’s Cuban-born founder and director, Maricel Lucero Keniston, wanted to see her aging aunts in Santiago and Havana. And I was hitching a ride on my way to Guantánamo, via San Juan Hill and other shrines of 1898’s splendid little war.

We all needed Esau, because in 2005 there were damned few ways an American citizen could legally visit Cuba.

The forty-four-year-old trade U.S. embargo doesn’t actually prohibit travel to the island. We Americans don’t like to think we can’t go where we please. We do, however, respect the tabu mojo of money. So our government allows us to journey to Cuba at will—but forbids us to spend a single dollar while we’re there. We may not legally buy a meal, a souvenir, or a bed for the night without a license from the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

There used to be a lot of OFAC licenses out there.

Though the embargo has been in effect since before the Bay of Pigs invasion, and various U.S. and Cuban actions—from the 1962 missile crisis to proxy wars and interventions in the Congo and Angola—kept tensions uncomfortably high well into the ’80s, the undeniable logic of talking to your neighbor kept OFAC permits multiplying through the years. Tens of thousands of Cuban expatriates and Cuban Americans were allowed to visit island family. Businessmen, journalists, and other individuals could get one-off permissions, and OFAC granted hundreds of institutions the right to send travelers wholesale. Colleges sent students and faculty; arts organizations sent dance troupes and string quartets; sports associations, basketball teams and fencers. Charities sent aid workers; churches, missionaries. By the end of the Clinton administration, tens of thousands of active OFAC licenses made Cuban travel something less than common but more than rare.

The 2000 Bush campaign had implied that a George W. Bush administration would normalize relations with Cuba, but that was before far-right Miami Cubans helped GOP operatives disrupt recounts of disputed Florida ballots, sometimes breaking into election commission offices to scatter chads to the winds. Such favors helped get Bush appointed president, and his administration got tougher with Cuba than any since Nixon’s.

Decades’ worth of OFAC licenses were revoked or not renewed. First to go, understandably, were the permits of de facto travel agencies—many based in Canada—that had long worn the fig leaf of cultural exchange facilitation to sell package tours. Soon, however, even businesses and universities with long-standing—and diplomatically useful—connections to Cuba lost their licenses. The process accelerated after 9/11, and by November 19, 2005—the day the chorus got stuck in Kingston—licenses were almost impossible to obtain.

Only one loophole had been slow to close: faith-based travel. And not just any faith. Mainstream Christian organizations, which had provided the lion’s share of practical aid to Cuba for decades, were shut out at the recommendation of the administration’s new Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba. (The appointment of a study group for Cuba policy seemed ominous; the recommendations of a Committee for the Liberation of Iraq became policy with the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.) But fundamentalist organizations such as the Reverend Esau Onyegoro’s Overwater Missions, were still in the Cuba business, shepherding yanquis down for a week or two of ennobling early-morning labor, painting churches or laying cinder block, followed by long afternoons and evenings trying not to take too much pleasure in Paradise.

All of this didn’t quite explain why the twenty-four members of a women’s choir recruited from blue-state Vermont and red New Hampshire’s bleeding-heart enclave in the hills around Dartmouth College—most of them agnostics, Unitarian Universalists, lapsed Christians, Green Mountain Buddhists, or avid self-taught pagans—would put their dream of attending Santiago’s International Choral Festival in the hands of a Birmingham-based fundamentalist minister whose church proclaims the literal truth of every word in the Bible, from the six-day Creation to Revelation’s encrypted disasters.

Nor did it explain why the Reverend Esau, whose church’s view of women stresses the subordinacy of Adam’s lost rib and the wiles of the Whore of Babylon, would put his license on the line for a choir devoted to one-world feminist anthems and traveling with its assorted hyphenated spouses, children of first marriages, and lesbian life partners.

How had these antitheses made even a moment’s common cause, gotten even as far as this breakdown moment in Kingston?

The answer was Maricel.

Maricel Lucero Keniston was born in Santiago de Cuba, a few weeks after her father disappeared. Oscar Lucero Moya was, according to survivors of the Revolution’s bleakest days, one of Cuba’s boldest revolutionaries, a leader in the fight against dictator Fulgencio Batista’s U.S.-supported kleptocracy. Comrade-in-arms and biographer Renán Ricardo Rodríguez describes Oscar, just thirty years old in 1958, as a hero, unforgettable, valiant and already battle-wise.

Oscar didn’t live to celebrate Batista’s flight to Miami, just ahead of the rebels’ entrance into Havana, or join the street parties on January 1, 1959, when Fidel Castro declared the triumph of the Revolution from a balcony overlooking Santiago’s central plaza. By then, Oscar had already been missing for months, arrested by secret policemen on April 28. His body was never found. Searchers learned, however, that Oscar never told his torturers a thing, never gave up a name, never endangered his comrades, the Revolution, or his hope of a just and free Cuba. The Revolutionary government declared Oscar Lucero Moya one of its martyred Heroes of Silence. Schools are named after him; children write poems in his memory.

Born into the Revolution’s dawn, Maricel grew up a hero’s daughter. A picture in Ricardo’s biography of her father shows the infant frowning during a 1959 ceremony unveiling a memorial bust of Oscar. Tragedy’s limelight shone on the martyr’s daughter, a petite, dramatically wide-eyed little girl, projecting expectations and promising a favored place in revolutionary society. But it didn’t protect her as the Revolution turned avowedly Communist and militantly atheistic. Even the family of a Hero of Silence couldn’t get away with open adherence to its Baptist faith, which seemed to go hand-in-hand with criticizing Castro for breaking his promise of democracy. Perhaps it was the last flicker of the martyr’s halo that allowed Oscar’s widow, Blanca, her new husband, and their family to leave Cuba safely, when Maricel was eight.

Blanca was done with Cuba, but she had no sympathy for the rightists in exile in Miami, either. She raised Maricel in New Jersey, speaking English even at home, deliberately avoiding Cuban foods, culture, and concerns. Maricel turned out to have a lovely soprano singing voice, a real gift, but never heard a Cuban rhythm growing up, never even a Spanish melody.

When Maricel, forty-one and living in Vermont, was completing her master’s in voice at Dartmouth College, she took a class with Hafiz Shabazz, a Philadelphia-born musician of Jamaican heritage who had steeped himself in music of the African diaspora. Only then, in the course’s routine study of Afro-Cuban rhythm and the island’s melodic son, did she hear music that brought back the sounds and sensations of her childhood—and all the feelings that went with them.

Maricel finished her master’s work focusing on Cuban classical music. She founded a women’s community chorus with a repertoire rich in Latin American songs. And she found the courage to tell Blanca that she was traveling to Cuba, going back one way or another, to see her father’s family and recover something of all that had been lost.

And she’d done it, first on her own and then again and again with the Feminine Tone in tow, despite her mother’s fear and the Cuban government’s official hostility to returned traitors. The Feminine Tone had traveled under a cultural exchange license in 2001, when I’d accompanied it as a newspaper reporter. On that trip, I met Kathleen, a birthing nurse and FemTone alto. Kathy and I were married in 2002; this trip, she was staying at home with the teenage daughters of our blended family.

Maricel had returned to Cuba as often as she could through the Clinton years, and when the Bush administration started denying family contact and cultural exchange licenses, she’d redefined the chorus’s travel to fit other OFAC categories, such as faith-based humanitarian aid. This 2005 trip was her sixth. Maricel’s determined planning and unyielding energy had brought her—and the chorus and its friends, all of us—to within a puddle jump of Santiago.

Now everything depended on Esau, but he seemed to want to depend on me.

I don’t know what to do, William, he said.

Can’t Overwater Missions wire you the money?

I don’t think so. No, we don’t have that kind of money, he decided. It’s project by project, you see? And this mission, I’m already overextended trying to help you people. William, I am overwhelmed.

I patted his shoulder, but I was thinking less-than-comforting thoughts. The reverend felt overextended, overwhelmed? Already? Wait, I reckoned, ’til the chorus catches on.

The Feminine Tone and friends were scattered around Norman Manley’s glass-fronted, swoop-roofed international departure terminal, camped in far corners and clumped along the walls, trying both to stay together and to stay out of the way. Stunned by successive transitions—a freezing midnight rendezvous with a charter bus in White River Junction, Vermont, the dawn-patrol bustle of boarding at JFK, the overly air-conditioned flight and the sucker punch of Jamaican heat as we’d stumbled across the dazzling runway—they’d been chatting or snoozing through the terminal’s afternoon hurly-burly, having somehow accepted on faith the notion that nothing was wrong, that tropical charters never leave on time.

I looked from group to group, trying to poll their faces. They were trusting souls, as willing and kindly a selection of citizens as I could ever hope to travel with. No one seemed acutely worried. No one was looking our way, wondering why the reverend looked so glum. But then, there was so much else to see.

The terminal was beyond busy, because for Jamaicans international travel is still much more than submission to the dreary indignities of being packed and shipped from point A to point B. Everywhere I looked, vignettes were unfolding, gaudy characters demanding our attention. Families cheered departing sons and daughters. Solo travelers opened their cell phones with urgent flourishes, shouted into the digital ether to help every involuntary eavesdropper appreciate the burden of being ceaselessly essential. Many wore travel costumes. There were men in wide-lapeled, bell-bottomed Shaft in Africa safari suits not seen elsewhere since Ali fought Foreman in Zaire. Lots of younger men affected U.S. B-boy styles at least a decade old, shuffling in pants baggy as unpegged tents, on laceless sneakers insecure as geisha sandals.

The women were self-confident and stunning in a variety of shapes, their earth-goddess and vixen roles equally convincing whether the actress swelled like a gourd or swayed like bamboo. One stout woman with processed hair swept back in an Elvis pompadour wore a motorcycle suit of zip-tight red leatherette. A short, powerful woman with an unusual, freckled-chocolate complexion emphasized her Nordic touch with bright gold-painted braids, hair twisted out into bullion swoops apparently solid as water buffalo horns. People got out of her way.

People were staying out of Maricel’s way, too. Esau had yet to tell her about the unpaid charter tax, but just an hour earlier he had reluctantly warned her of another difficulty: According to Ileana, Cubana was sending a plane that could carry only half as much luggage as we’d brought. A few giant steps from where I stood with my hand on Esau’s shoulder, the sparrow-boned soprano was clambering over our enormous pile of luggage, yanking heavy bags around with strength born of indignation, trying to decide which loads of donated clothing and medicine we’d leave behind in Kingston, to be lost or pilfered. Just then she was a force no one wanted to reckon with.

Esau knew how powerful Maricel’s moods could be. It was Maricel’s repeated, not-taking-no-for-an-answer calls to Overwater Missions, her relentless sales pitch (stressing the chorus’s spiritual interests, downplaying their diversity), and, finally, her impassioned recounting of her family story that had persuaded him to take the FemTone on.

You think you feel overwhelmed and overextended now? Just wait, I wanted to scold him, until Maricel realizes she’s not going home this time. Esau didn’t know from overwhelming. Not yet.

As for overextended, well, the reverend wasn’t the only one forced out on a limb by the crazy logic of U.S.-Cuban travel. Like Maricel, I’d been looking for routes that skirted our government’s increasing ill will. I’d recently published an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe accusing the administration of racial profiling and scaremongering at a Border Patrol installation on Interstate 91 in central Vermont. Maybe it mattered, maybe it didn’t, but when I requested a journalist’s license for this trip, OFAC turned me down. My application had been backed by Vermont’s top weekly; once again, I’d had support from the offices of Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy and Representative Bernie Sanders. Of course, Vice President Dick Cheney had recently told Leahy to go fuck himself—on the Senate floor, no less—and independent socialist Sanders was openly sneered at in Speaker Dennis Hastert’s House. Perhaps I’d had the wrong help.

For whatever reason, the same OFAC that had given me a journalist’s license in 2000 turned me down in 2005. This time only the Cuban government offered me journalist’s credentials. So I found myself taking a required phone interview with the tour-guide preacher Maricel had found, hoping to travel as a missionary.

I may have soft-pedaled my politics to the Reverend Onyegoro, but I had no trouble rationalizing my use of his faith-based license. I was traveling on faith alone, freelancing on spec, with no assignment to cover my expenses, but I had to get back to Cuba.

My need was irrational, undeniable. I wasn’t even sure when it had started.

Like billions of people around the world, I’d been horrified by the atrocities of 9/11, and accepted war in Afghanistan as a bleak necessity. But I couldn’t support an axiomatically endless war on terror, and I was sickened by revelations of kidnapping and torture at Guantánamo and a murky galaxy of secret prisons scattered across the continents. Like hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of our best friends overseas, I’d marched and waved protest signs in the run-up to the Iraq War, only to realize that the president and his advisers had no intention of letting protesters, the law, or mere truth get in their way.

In all this, though I may have been among the minority of my fellow Americans, I was hardly alone. Regardless of what we believed, our 9/11 fears and angers—deliberately stoked by administration officials, tirelessly fed by the news and entertainment industry—were still blazing away. The body politic was staring into the bonfire, enthralled by the constant flaring and dying of threats and rescues, the flame-colored alerts, sparkling shoe-bomber fuses, and mushroom-cloud puffs from smoking guns. Most of us were kept far too worried to risk turning our backs on the flickering show, to wonder what was happening in the shadows beyond the glare.

When the Global War on Terror began, I was working for a daily newspaper serving central Vermont and New Hampshire. If I questioned the war in editorials, op-eds, and book reviews, I was either preaching to the choir or angering people who just turned the page or canceled their subscriptions. The paper was kind to me as I reassembled myself after a difficult divorce, and more than patient with my antiwar vehemence, but I finally resigned.

I’d lost faith. Not in my smart and steady colleagues, but in objective journalism. Many fine journalists have been taught to abstain from voting, lest they contaminate their professional ethics by taking sides. Many more are careful to balance facts with opposing views, even at the risk of obscuring the facts’ import. But objectivity is meaningless if we have no perspective on our own fears and prejudices, if we can’t recognize the pervasive bias of our history and culture. After more than a century’s striving for objectivity, the news industry enthusiastically amplified the Bush administration’s most preposterous fabrications, from Iraq-Al Qaeda links to WMDs. If that’s objective journalism, then objectivity is irresponsible and immoral. I didn’t know whether I’d be able to put together a living’s worth of steady freelance work, but I wanted to be both a writer and a citizen, to get the facts straight and be free to do something about them.

If I could figure out what to do.

I had no illusions about the effectiveness of waving signs on street corners. To my mind, protest is a civic obligation, like paying taxes and voting. You do it whether your side is winning or losing, because democracy doesn’t work if the losers shut up and stay home. But the invasion of Iraq made civil debate almost impossible. It didn’t matter that the bungled occupation revealed the administration’s bad faith and incompetence; watching Iraq collapse into chaos and civil war only made most Americans all the more desperately insistent that we all support the troops.

Some were, understandably, more desperate than others.

For the Iraq War’s anniversary, I organized a roadside, lunch-hour protest on our region’s busiest box-store shopping strip. Not long after we’d set up, a driver jerked his pickup to the curb, rolled down a window, and screamed bloody murder at me and my sign and all the people standing there in the snow.

A gaunt black Irishman, he looked to be in his late forties, just like me. His face blanched by rage, he shouted his certainty that U.S. soldiers were dying in Iraq to save our worthless, cowardly asses, to stop Saddam from orchestrating another devastating attack on United States, like he did on 9/11, you stupid fucks. As he yanked the truck back into traffic we saw the yellow-ribbon magnets and the bumper sticker: Proud Parent of a Marine, silver letters and the golden anchor and globe.

He couldn’t know it, but he and I had something in common. By then, Kathy and I knew that her son Brendan—who’d signed up with the Marines in 2000 and started his five-year hitch in the summer of 2001—was on his way to Iraq. We already knew a little of what that father seemed to know, what so many of our neighbors and co-workers knew. It was a new way of fearing the news and its horrors, of resenting power’s careless lethality, of hating every kind of uncertainty and doubt.

I didn’t know what to do. But somewhere in there, somewhere between the invasion and the first release of Abu Ghraib torture photographs, I’d found myself thinking something as irrational as anything that angry father had come to believe.

I had to go to Guantánamo.

Maybe there was a story waiting there. The family legend of my great-grandfather Papa O’Brien’s Spanish-American War service had inspired me to read up on 1898 as a boy and again as a student of American history. I’d been to Cuba before and seen our forgotten legacy written not only on plaques and monuments but in ballparks and Baptist churches and bitter smiles. And in all the post-9/11 reporting on the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, I’d seen little or nothing about how the United States came to possess this corner of Cuba, the first piece of overseas real estate we ever took and refused to give back.

Maybe nobody was bothering to write about it because 9/11 was supposed to have changed everything, transcending history. Yet our response to the attacks had taken us right back to 1898, to the spot where we ditched our republican ideals for the charms of empire. Now America was using Gitmo to experiment with life outside the Constitution, beyond the reach of law, liberated from compunctions about torture.

It was spooky, the way we’d circled around on ourselves, the way Guantánamo was once again the place where we’re deciding who we really are.

Some people wait outside prisons when inmates are executed. Some stand by the gates of desert nuclear weapons sites, outside abortion clinics, in front of bishops’ mansions or corporations’ headquarters. Some of us need to see Ground Zero at Alamogordo or in lower Manhattan.

In late November 1963, some Americans drove cross-country for two days straight just to stand along Pennsylvania Avenue as JFK’s coffin rolled by. Their view of the procession may have been blocked by the crowd or their own tears. It didn’t matter. Being there was a compulsive act of witness to our loss, to national disaster.

Sometimes we don’t know what we’ve lost until we touch the scars.

My own government would make it hard to get to Cuba, impossible to visit the base. The Cubans might let me approach from their side, but how close? Perhaps I’d only be able to look through binoculars. It didn’t matter. I felt compelled to get as close as possible to Gitmo, just to see the place where my country was betraying itself.

I’m an old-school, peace-and-justice Catholic, gratefully dependent on faith and skeptical of institutional power. I’m pretty damned sure that Jesus commands us to comfort the afflicted and afflict those made comfortable by other people’s misery. I didn’t know what I’d see that would be worth writing home about, but in Cuba you can travel as a pilgrim travels, confident that the journey itself will be a revelation, that