Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Cuban Refugees That Never Left Cuba

Gloria Martinez has lived on the U.S. Naval base in 
Guantanamo Bay since 1961. Brandon Thibodeaux for WSJ
In 1961, Ramon Baudin got wind that Fidel Castro ’s security forces were looking for him. He hid in a bus headed to this U.S. military base, sneaked past a police checkpoint, then pleaded with the American sentry: “Hey, buddy, I’m running away. Open the gate.”
Mr. Baudin has been here ever since, part of a small group of Cuban exiles who, in a hot moment of the Cold War, won permission from the U.S. government to stay at the Guantanamo Bay Naval base until Cuba was free.
In the early 1960s, hundreds of anti-Castro Cubans took 
refuge on the U.S. Naval base in Guantanamo Bay. Half 
a century later, two dozen of them still live here. 
Photo: Brandon Thibodeaux for WSJ
For more than 50 years, the exiles have waited out Mr. Castro, circumscribed by a 17-mile razor-wire fence that separates their present from their past. They have married and divorced, had jobs and children. They have danced at base clubs and drunk at base bars. They play dominoes and listen to singer Celia Cruz. They have also seen their adopted home become synonymous with prisoner abuse since the U.S. housed nearly 800 terror suspects here.
The ill are treated at the Navy hospital, and the dead buried by the beach in the base cemetery, alongside sailors and Marines who perished in the tropics 100 years ago.
“I thought I was only going to be here for six months,” said Mr. Baudin’s neighbor Noel West, 81 years old.
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“At the time, the Navy offered them safe haven, and we said, ‘Hey, you’re welcome to stay here until this gets resolved,’ ” said the base commander, Navy Capt. John Nettleton. “And here we are half a century later, and they’re still here.”
Now, the two-dozen remaining exiles are aging at a pace that is outstripping the Navy’s ability to care for them. The Navy flies the seriously ill to military hospitals in the U.S. Navy personnel have converted former nurses’ quarters at the base hospital into a 24-hour assisted-living facility. Government drivers transport the Cuban exiles to doctor appointments, exercise classes, McDonald’s and the all-in-one base store, the Navy Exchange.
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