Don Angel is welcoming a small audience to an 11am performance by his band. The Cubans already had the conflict wrapped up, but the marines landed anyway, raised the US flag and stayed. The occupation received a dubious veneer of legality in when the US Congress passed the Platt Amendment , a bill ostensibly designed to maintain order in the area.
Instead, they have things they want to say about the base. The US base, with its occupants, covers It includes the high-security jail that once housed orange-jumpsuit-clad detainees and still houses forty-one of them. It is also the poorest. The two countries cut diplomatic ties in , three years after the revolution swept Fidel Castro to power. More than half a century later, under president Barack Obama, Cuba and the United States restored some degree of contact, but they are yet to fully engage diplomatically.
In , Fidel Castro ordered the creation of what came to be known as the Cortina de Cactus the cactus curtain to deter Cubans from trying to reach the US side of the bay. Thousands of landmines β Cubans call them quebratas leg-breakers β were also laid on both sides. Neither Cuba nor the United States is a signatory to the mine ban treaty.
The Clinton administration removed most of the US mines, but Cuba has failed to follow suit. Caimanera is a tightly guarded military village. The locals have a special entry permit; anyone else has to get authorisation from the interior ministry. The benefits were mainly enjoyed by a small section of town, however. As a consequence, Caimanera is haemorrhaging residents daily and the average age of its 10, residents is rising fast. Few are aged between eighteen and forty.
Up to 15, Cubans worked in the US military enclave in the s and s. That ended when Fidel Castro took power and Havana and Washington ended diplomatic relations. Filipino and Jamaican labourers replaced the Cubans. Few want to talk about their work at la base , as they called it, because many of them were labelled anti-revolutionaries.
