By Drake Nanda

Some ports are just too good to pass up. Strategic location, access to cheap raw materials, cheap labor, convenient offshore quasi-territory from which to conduct quasi-legal activities—all reasons which have contributed to regular takeovers of important harbors by stronger nation states.

True, the world used to be terribly brutish, where governments acted without regard to the inalienable rights of a nation and its citizenry and simply took whatever or whomever they wished. But surely this era has passed with the close of colonialism, right? No modern, democratic nation that touts the value of self-determination, the equality of men, universal suffrage, territorial integrity, and, above all, the right of a people to choose their own leaders would still hold land and navigable waters by force on foreign soil. And least of all the existing nations to possibly do so would be the United States, of course.

Well, Virginia, there really is a fanciful, tropical island where the U.S. government occupies land by force and pays for it every year with a check to the Cuban government, all the while having attempted to assassinate or undermine its leadership, imposing economic sanctions and refusing to even have diplomatic relations. Guantanamo Bay, or GTMO, pronounced git-mow, is our little anomaly on the southeast shore of Cuba. It’s a quiet fact, but stunning really. Think back to when you first learned that the U.S. still had a huge naval base on Cuban soil. It must have seemed as unlikely as having the Supreme Court elect the president. Didn’t it leave you wondering, how could that have happened? And most importantly, what’s the ferry service like?

Sugar got the U.S. hooked on Cuba during the civil war when our internal rebel enemy refused to trade. A condition for the end of occupation after the Spanish-American War was the insertion of a U.S. law into the Cuban constitution. This bit of skull-crushing diplomacy, known as the Platte Amendment, gave the U.S. the right to establish bases and re-invade Cuba if order needed restoring. How convenient. As a result, a real estate deal for a lovely harbor and beachfront property was struck between chummy partners. The deal was renegotiated in 1934 at an annual rate of $4,085, with a clause that said the lease could only be broken if both parties agreed to it or if the U.S. vacated the property. Yeah, right—the U.S. agreeing to leave GTMO is about as likely to happen as our stealth government running a super secret invisible commando prison where A-rabs check in but they don’t check out.

Enter Fidel’s revolution. The U.S. had seen other messy transitions in Cuba in the past and weathered them in stride, so it wasn’t too worried at first. After all, U.S. companies still owned 80 percent of the country, so how bad could it get? Well, after Fidel took back the land U.S. companies owned and nationalized Standard Oil’s operations, things got pretty bad.

Some might say it was bad enough when he started executing or imprisoning his opponents, but hey, that happens. Standard Oil, that’s serious.

And yes, the ferry service is tremendous. The most vital command tenant of the base is Fleet and Industrial Supply, which runs the bi-weekly GTMO Barge from Jacksonville, Florida, which brings in almost everything the base uses. In addition, there is a local ferry service also run by the U.S. Navy that crosses the 2.5 mile wide Guantanamo Bay from the airfield on the leeward side to the main base on the windward side. Simply put, this anachronistic spasm of duplicitous neo-colonialism owes its very existence to the ferry.

Guantanamo Bay, Cuba—you can get there from the San Francisco Bay, here in the heart of occupied Mexico, only 5,239 miles away, in just 19 days and 2 hours traveling at 10 knots.