GUANTANAMO BAY, 18 March 2006 — Virgilio Franqui was a sun-blistered Cuban migrant plucked off a makeshift raft in the Florida Straits when he first set eyes on the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay in 1993.
He spent 11 months there in a vast tent camp full of refugees. Now a US Navy medical corpsman and US citizen, Petty Officer Franqui is back at Guantanamo handling paperwork at the base hospital, which cares for US service personnel and their families. He is believed to be the only Cuban refugee ever to have returned as a US serviceman.
“It was either Iceland or Gitmo,” Franqui said of the only job postings available when he asked for the assignment. The “Ice” part did not appeal to his tropical sensitivities. Guantanamo has become synonymous in recent years with the prison camp that holds about 490 foreign captives in the US war against terrorism. But for tens of thousands like Franqui, the dusty little base in southeast Cuba has served as a way station for Cubans who want to leave Cuba, and also for Haitians fleeing their impoverished land.
Franqui’s posting will keep him on the island until 2007. But because Cuba and the United States have no formal diplomatic relations, he cannot leave the US base to visit any other part of his homeland.
He is friendly with a few Cubans living on the base and said he was happy to see Cuba again. “Of course you know it’s Cuba, so I was happy to come back,” he said. “I was dying to go in the ocean again, the Cuban ocean.”
The United States has leased the base from Cuba since 1903, under a perpetual agreement that rankles President Fidel Castro, a longtime US ideological foe who would prefer to evict his tenants. US-bound Cuban migrants stopped at sea by the US Coast Guard are generally returned to Cuba. But those who persuade immigration officers that they would face persecution from the communist government are taken to Guantanamo to await rulings on political asylum in the United States and elsewhere.
There are about 40 at any given time. They live in old hotel-style quarters and some take jobs to earn a little money as they bide their time. One works at the base McDonald’s.
The migrant population peaked at 45,000 in the mid-1990s, when waves of Cubans and Haitians fled political and economic upheaval in their homelands. The United States has since negotiated migration accords to avert mass exoduses like the one that first brought Franqui to Guantanamo. He and his father were among 11 people who pitched in to build a crude 15-foot raft and set out to sea from a beach near Havana in 1993. Franqui had wanted to leave since he was a boy of 7 or 8 and half his family had fled during the Mariel boatlift in 1980.
“We didn’t like Castro,” he said. “I just wanted to leave because I didn’t like the system.”
The group was picked up by the Coast Guard three days later. Badly sunburned and shivering with pneumonia, Franqui watched from the deck as the ship stopped to pick up other Cubans from rafts and small boats.
“The ocean was full,” he said. “It was like ants in the water.” Another ship dropped him at Guantanamo but the arid brown landscape of southeast Cuba looked nothing like his home near lush, green Havana. He thought he had been taken to South America. “I didn’t even know this was Cuba,” Franqui recalled.
He and his father were sent to a camp at an abandoned airstrip under the blazing sun, crowded with canvas tents as far as the eye could see. Franqui turned 21 there, subsisting for the first few months on the military’s limited rotation of packaged ready-to-eat meals called MREs. “Everybody’s fighting for No. 5 with the ham,” he said. “This place was like a market, people trade MREs for stuff.”
The tent camp became more bearable as kitchens were set up to cook food, a small library opened and nightly movies were shown to relieve the tedium. Franqui was allowed to walk to the beach to swim and cool off. He was eventually flown to Miami, where much of his family had settled. He took English classes at a local high school, studied to become an operating room technician then joined the Navy and took medical training at a base near Chicago.
Nearly a dozen years after leaving Cuba, he was working at a Navy hospital in Beaufort, South Carolina, choosing his next post. He asked his assignment detailer about an opening listed for Guantanamo. “He said ‘Have you been here before?’ and I said yes. I think that he thought ... as a station. He said, ‘Oh that’s good, that’s good,’” Franqui recalled.
He got the posting in 2004 and so did the woman he had been dating. She is now his wife, Petty Officer Rebecca Franqui, and they live in a small townhouse on the base that resembles small-town America in the 1950s.
Stepping off the plane into the oven-like heat of Guantanamo, he was reminded of his days as a refugee. “I got very lucky,” he said, laughing.
