On Military Bases in Far-Off Lands
How does Cuba, do Cubans, tolerate the presence of the US military base in Guantanamo?
The question isn’t directed to the symbolism that Guantanamo has taken on throughout the world in the last 5 years, which has to make having the place on the end of one’s island being the approximate equivalent to finding a really huge pile of dog turds in one’s prize flower beds just as the garden committee comes for a photo shoot.
No, my question is the more primitive one, not geo-political, but just human — what could the reaction possibly be from a country and its people, who for 50 years have:
- been routinely vilified and cast as evil by their northern neighbors (meaning us, the good people of the US of A)?
- been economically boycotted?
- been bombarded with lame propaganda?
- basically received nothing from us but insults and grief, constantly?
Yeah, I wonder what Cuba thinks every morning on waking up, finding this gonad-heavy, frisbee-infested military base belonging to a country that hates it and is only there because of some sort of great-grandfather clause? It must be very humiliating. It must be infuriating.
I bet they even hate us for our freedom.
Anyway, after wondering about this all these years, there was a certain satisfaction this morning on reading a statement on the Reuters website by Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa saying that he would only renew America’s lease on its air base on Ecuador’s Pacific coast, if America would allow Ecuador to install a similar base near Miami, Florida. In his own words:
We’ll renew the base on one condition: that they let us put a base in Miami — an Ecuadorean base. If there’s no problem having foreign soldiers on a country’s soil, surely they’ll let us have an Ecuadorean base in the United States.
Rafael Correa may not be a nice person, nor a good leader, I don’t know, but it is reassuring to hear a country’s leader say things out loud that ring true. The full article is here.
