The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  During Gitmo’s heyday, in the years before Castro came to power, Caimanera was quite a lively town, with several bars and brothels attending to the desires of American servicemen. During Prohibition, when drinking was not allowed on the base, Caimanera was especially active—and atmospheric. According to National Geographic’s reporter in 1921, “One thousand associated smells assail the nostrils when one climbs on [Caimanera’s] rickety boat wharf” to visit the town with its “sordid streets of one-story shanties.” Dogs and “naked gourd-shaped babies” predominated while a two-goat cart hauled water to the plaza for domestic use. There were “dark-skinned women dressed in flowing white, languidly fanning themselves as the ship’s barge puts in.” The bars were Sis’s Place, The Two Sisters, and The American Bar. These were open-air saloons, and the action was frenetic. The bartenders would “rain perspiration from their dark brows” as they prepared “the seductive daiquiri.” On Sundays, the town featured daylong cockfights. Beyond the bars, “down the dingy, dusty, sometimes flagrantly muddy street, with its weird multitude of vicious odors,” the National Geographic writer detected the symbolic aura of another continent: “All the way up the Guantánamo River the atmosphere has suggested Joseph Conrad’s African backgrounds. The dark currents, the violent green of the contorted mangroves that curtain the banks, the ‘Red Mill’ at which a sugar schooner bakes lazily in the sun and near which a solitary saloon is thrust invitingly forward over water—all have a remote and exotic air.” In such a setting, American soldiers could well imagine that they had truly taken up “the white man’s burden,” as Kipling had exhorted them to do in his well-known poem written on the occasion of America’s defeat of Spain in 1898—the victory that had delivered Guantánamo to the United States. In the poem, Kipling spoke of America’s “new-caught, sullen peoples / Half-devil and half-child.”

  The pre-1959 literature on Guantánamo Naval Base—primarily magazine and newspaper articles—usually gave Caimanera a lot of attention. For example, a 1927 article published in H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury described Caimanera as a “queer little village” where American officers drank daiquiris in “a rickety wooden building like a squat barn built on piles over whispering, greenish water.” At “a long, battered mahogany bar,” the sailors sang songs about life on the base with lines like “We’re sitting here so free swallowing Bacardi” and “Put your troubles on the bum, here we come full of rum.” Dogs scavenged the floor and a character named Peanut Mary stood in the doorway hawking peanuts and lottery tickets. (In American Mercury’s rendition, Peanut Mary is made to speak with some sort of southern black or perhaps Jamaican dialect.) Meanwhile, the residents of Caimanera were on the outside looking in: “A hundred grinning black faces at the wide glassless windows on the street side.” The Navy Wife, too, in her 1930 article “Guantánamo Blues,” ventured into Caimanera to describe Pepe’s Bar, “a small picturesque but smelly shed which might have been put together in a movie studio for a Mexican melodrama.”

  In 1958, when civic unrest during Castro’s rebellion put Americans in danger, Caimanera and the rest of Cuba became off-limits for Gitmo’s personnel. But in the years leading up to the closing of the gates, Caimanera was a riotous—and repugnant—place. Sailors who had been stationed at the base later recalled Caimanera’s muddy streets and wretched poverty. Shacks wobbled on stilts over the bay. Garbage and human waste drifted in putrid water. Atrocious smells predominated, venereal diseases were prevalent, typhoid a constant concern. Caimanera was “a large-scale brothel,” according to one sailor who visited in the 1940s, with girls available for the going rate of $2.50. The Navy operated an off-base first-aid station right in Caimanera, dispensing condoms and penicillin.

  Cuban discontent over the US presence at Guantánamo began the moment the treaty granting occupancy to the United States was signed. It continued through the decades and fed the ire of revolutionaries. Cuba had been prostituted to the United States both metaphorically—billions in profits from sugar production, casinos, and tourism left the country for the United States—and literally in places like Caimanera. The United States was always quick to point out that American investment had brought major improvements to Cuba, especially in terms of infrastructure. The base at Guantánamo, the argument went, was the economic engine for the region (a similar argument was made about the US naval base at Subic Bay in the Philippines). Many locals had jobs on the base—good jobs—and without those jobs the region would be mired in economic depression. Such arguments did not account for the huge social costs that Caimanera and nearby Guantánamo City were forced to pay. The sailors’ and journalists’ descriptions of the towns at the time suggest that seediness prevailed, that the wealth supposedly generated by the American presence never really trickled down.

  Certainly the vast majority of Cubans have seen little to no good in the US occupation of Guantánamo. Like the Filipinos who objected to the US naval base at Subic Bay, Cubans have longed desperately for an end to the imperial occupation. Fidel Castro called the base “a dagger in the heart of Cuba,” and there is every reason to believe that he spoke from the deep anguish of a patriot and not as a posturing propagandist (as many American officials were keen to characterize him).

  The wounds have been very real. Consider “Guantanamera,” the irresistible song that celebrates the charms of a young woman from Guantánamo province. It is probably the most famous, the most world-renowned piece of music to come out of Cuba (and that is saying something given how musically prolific the island has been), a universally recognized manifestation of Cuban culture. Americans never think of this, but many Cubans do: during the years when the song was gaining in popularity and earning international renown, there was a very good chance that any given Guantanamera was a prostitute entertaining American servicemen for two dollars and fifty cents.

  My view of Caimanera from the observation tower suggested that the little town was much better off now that it had no traffic with the base. It was relatively clean and sanitation was adequate. People were not rich but they were able to get by with dignity. Prostitution was a thing of the past. Life was tranquil and, by all appearances, pleasant enough. I doubted that anyone wanted to go back to prior arrangements.

  The sun was now setting and the people ambling the streets of Caimanera were receding into shadows. The bay waters flashed with silver. At that moment, I felt fortunate to have had the chance to visit this part of Cuba, fortunate to have had a glimpse of the base, fortunate to have seen this once notorious little town now so much changed from what it had been when the sailors and Marines hooted and howled and puked on its streets. Most of all, I felt fortunate to have had the chance to see, however distantly, a place of importance to Stephen Crane’s personal history and to the ongoing story of Cuban-American relations.

  In retrospect, my casual and pleasant visit with its complimentary rum drink has taken on a more sobering quality. The tropical haze hovering over the place has become thicker, darker. Imagine someone in 1950 recalling a 1925 visit to the once tranquil German village of Dachau: that is how I now feel about my brief glimpse of Guantánamo. Years after that glimpse, Gitmo, having been repurposed as a Kafkaesque penal colony, can no longer be dismissed as the odd neocolonial outpost that I thought I saw from the Malones Lookout. What had seemed merely ludicrous and anachronistic in 1998 has become, in hindsight, something much more insidious.

  By 2004, nearly 800 prisoners in the War on Terror had been brought to Guantánamo and incarcerated in an isolated sector of the base known as Camp Delta. Over the years, reports of mistreatment and torture have surfaced, leading to international condemnation. Though the number of prisoners has steadily been reduced, to this day the prison camp remains operational and, by presidential executive order in 2017, will remain operational indefinitely. Meanwhile, the United States has no plans to turn the naval base over to Cuba.

  By coincidence, the place where Stephen Crane and the Marines landed in 1898 is located just four miles from Camp Delta.
As Crane reported, he and the Marines came ashore at nightfall. Nearby, a small village was burning—the result of American bombardment. From this first beachhead, the Cuban interior appeared “sombre,” a place of “mysterious hills” covered with “a thick, tangled mass.” The Marines did not know what awaited them in that interior, but they were, as Crane described them, confident that they could subdue whatever force they encountered.

  In 1898, with one of the nation’s major writers as witness, some of the defining attributes of American hubris were on display from San Juan Hill to the shores of Guantánamo Bay. They still are.

  MADDY CROWELL

  The Great Divide

  from Harper’s Magazine

  Like most things in Kashmir, the Baramulla railway station is surrounded by barbed wire, Indian Army bunkers, and frost-tipped mountains that, at sunset, look bloodstained and haunted. When I walked into the station in July 2016, I was stopped by a group of Indian soldiers armed with AK-47s who demanded to know what I was doing in Baramulla, a town just 30 miles from the Line of Control that has divided the disputed region between India and Pakistan since 1972. I told them I was a journalist, working on a story about the construction of India’s first rail line into Kashmir. They waved me through. “The train is a very good project,” one of the soldiers told me as I walked onto the platform.

  At half past noon, the 10:50 southbound to Srinagar announced itself with a long baritone whistle. Hundreds of passengers rushed off the cars as the soldiers prodded them with wooden batons. I found a spot by the door. As the train began to pick up speed, a group of young boys jumped aboard, blasting Punjabi music from their phones.

  A lanky 20-year-old named Sayeed Ahmad crouched beneath a window. Ahmad, who was from the village of Budgam, had spent the day picnicking with his friends. Like many young men and women in Kashmir, he regarded the Indian Army as an occupying force. He described how, every Friday after prayers, he would pelt the soldiers with stones. “They beat us,” he said. He took off his light-green polo to show me a scar on his shoulder. It looked like a purple worm. “We are forced to take up the gun.”

  “We want liberation from India,” said his friend, 22-year-old Sameer Ahmad. The train shook and the windows began to rattle. “Pakistan is the best. They are our Muslim brothers.”

  Many of the younger Kashmiris on the train were born in the ’90s, as thousands of Pakistanis were slipping across the border to join militant groups such as the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front and Hizbul Mujahideen. At one time, there were more than 60 such organizations, some fighting for an independent Kashmir, others insisting that the region, where some 90 percent of residents are Muslim, become part of Pakistan. Unlike their parents, who grew up in a time when the leaders of Kashmir’s separatist movement were proponents of nonviolence, this generation has been inspired by young fighters who share posts and videos calling for armed resistance to Indian rule. “Students here, they will take up a gun instead of a pen now,” said my translator, a 25-year-old photographer named Khurshid Ahanger. They’ve grown up seeing India “through the barrel of a gun.”

  As our train crawled toward Srinagar, I huddled near an open window to catch a breeze, watching the emerald fields swirl in the distance. A young boy dressed in white leaned out the window. “I feel like a king here,” he told me with a shy smile. He’d moved to Kashmir with his family from Uttar Pradesh, a Hindu-majority state. (Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came into power in 2014, there has been a marked rise in the number of attacks against Muslims in India. According to Amnesty International, at least 10 Muslim men were publicly killed over a three-month period last year.)

  We pulled into the Srinagar station. Mothers on the platform were fanning flushed babies. Young boys attempted to climb on top of the already full train as the conductor blew the whistle. Army officers beat them back with batons.

  “Every time it’s like this,” a soldier said to me as I got off the train.

  Trains have long been intertwined with colonial ambitions in India. The British opened the subcontinent’s first railroad in 1853, a line from Bombay to Thane that hastened the export of goods to Europe. Though the railways were a commercial boon, they also provided, as the governor-general, Lord Dalhousie, wrote to London that year, “immeasurable . . . political advantages.” They “would enable the government to bring the main bulk of its military strength to bear upon any given point in as many days as it would now require months.” By 1900, the system had grown to become Asia’s largest.

  Indians, whose taxes had funded the creation of the railroads, soon began to see them as a symbol of British power. Mahatma Gandhi blamed trains for destroying local, self-sufficient economies. “Good travels at a snail’s pace,” he wrote in Hind Swaraj. “It can, therefore, have little to do with the railways.” But Gandhi’s concerns went unheard. By the time India became independent, in 1947, more than 30,000 miles of rail crisscrossed the country.

  Half a century later, Kashmir would confront the same threat that Gandhi had articulated, this time from the Indian government. During the fourth war between the two countries, in 1999, Pakistani generals authorized a secret infiltration of Kargil, a mountainous city on India’s side of the Line of Control. With few roads and no rail line in the region, India struggled to send supplies and reinforcements. In just six weeks of fighting, the country lost more than 500 soldiers.

  Kashmir’s inaccessibility was a wake-up call for India’s then prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee. When he returned to New Delhi after visiting Kargil, he remarked, “We have not attacked any country in our fifty years of independence, but we have been attacked several times and lost our land . . . We are determined not to lose our land in the future.” Preparations for a rail link in the Kashmir Valley began immediately.

  In 2002, the Indian government broke ground on the railway, which it hopes will one day connect Baramulla, Kashmir’s northernmost city, to New Delhi. But despite being prioritized by Vajpayee as a “project of national importance,” construction has been plagued by a number of setbacks. For example, in 2009, a protracted dispute over gradients broke out between two private companies that had been commissioned to work on separate sections of the line. But the biggest delay by far has been due to the plan’s most ambitious feature, the Chenab Bridge: a mile-long crossing made of blast-proof steel designed to withstand both earthquakes and explosives. When completed, it will be the loftiest railway span in the world, stretching across the Chenab River at a height greater than that of the Eiffel Tower. Scheduled to be completed in 2009, the bridge is the only section of the railway still unfinished. The latest target date is summer of next year.

  Undeterred by delays, Modi paid a one-day visit to Jammu and Kashmir in July 2014. Dressed in a creaseless light-blue kurta and surrounded by reporters, he stood before a steel train car strung with marigolds and inaugurated the railway’s latest link, connecting Katra to Udhampur. “Our aim is to win over the hearts and minds of the people of Jammu and Kashmir through development,” he said. The train whistled and the crowd clapped. “Soon Kashmir will be prosperous and peaceful.”

  When our train pulled into the Srinagar station, two years after Modi’s speech, Kashmir did appear prosperous: crowds of people were arriving for the Amarnath Yatra, a Hindu ritual in which worshippers climb to the mountainous shrine of Lord Shiva. My hotel was just around the corner from Dal Lake, which is home to hundreds of Victorian boats, some with their own floating gardens. Shikara rowers sat by the shore, waiting to pick up tourists. When I reached the hotel, the owner offered me Kashmiri tea. “It’s all peaceful,” he said, before picking up the phone to inform another potential customer that the hotel was fully booked.

  Around sunset, I met with a journalist in his 50s who has covered Kashmir for three decades. We sat barefoot in his office, sipping Mountain Dew.

  I asked him what he thought about the new train. He was quick to draw a parallel to China’s rail into Tibet
, which Beijing built in 2004 to gain control over its volatile region. “When the rail line is finished, Indians will feel they’ve vanquished their territory,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Kashmiris will feel they’re still in India’s golden chains.”

  I returned to the hotel to find the owner sitting in front of a small television, chewing on his thumbnail. “Burhan Wani has been shot,” he told me. Wani was a 22-year-old Hizbul Mujahideen commander and a local hero. He had been radicalized as a teenager after being beaten by soldiers, and started making videos to inspire young men to turn against India. The TV flickered with a photo that would go on to become the iconic image of that summer: Wani in a tan polo shirt, eyelids half-shut, face white, a thin stream of blood dripping from his forehead.

  The next morning, soldiers were stationed at every corner, blocking the streets. There was no cell service, no internet. Schools and businesses shut down.

  An hour southeast of Srinagar, in Tral, Wani’s funeral began at dawn. More than 200,000 men and women flocked to the town on foot, a sea of turquoise, pink, and black hijabs. “Azadi! Azadi!” they shouted: “Freedom!” Cloaked in an orange blanket, Wani’s body was passed through the crowd. Thousands of hands reached out to touch it.