Hi Barry, Interesting lyrics. Have you heard the other "Guantanamo Bay"? Sung to the melody of The Irish Washerwoman: Guantanamo Bay, call it Gitmo for short Not much of a base and far less of a port One look at the piers and you'll know that you're seein' The goddamdest hole in the whole Caribbean So hurrah then for Gitmo, on Cuba's fair shore The home of the cockroach, the flea, and the whore We'll sing of its praises and wait for the day We get the hell out of Guantanamo Bay In Guantanamo Bay we're confined to our quarters We're scratching and sweating, we're waiting for orders We're watching the bay and surveying the wrecks And wondering which we'll be shipping on next When the cruiser Alaska hove into view To clean off her bottom and pick up a crew Nary a sailor was ready for sea They'd all been on leave and they all had VD Guantanamo City has hundreds of doors And behind every one there are hundreds of whores They lean on the windows with stark naked chests And beat out your brains with their low-hanging breasts My buddies and I have a hell of a plan We're saving each nickel and dime that we can We'll buy TNT and then one sunny day We'll blow up this goddam Guantanamo Bay Notes from the book: Guantanamo Bay, located in Cuba's Oriente Province on the island's southeast corner, is America's oldest overseas Naval Base. The United States government originally leased the 45 square miles of land and water from the Cuban government in 1903, for use as a coaling station … After Castro's revolution in 1958-59, Guantanamo City and its hundreds of doors* became off-limits to American personnel (though rumor has it that Marines could still obtain blow jobs from enterprising young women throught the holes in the chain-link fence surrounding the base). Between this and the reference to the 1944 visit of USS Alaska, the song's date of original composition can be fixed fairly closely. It was still in oral circulation as recently as the mid-1970s, when the editor of this collection learned it at Gitmo. * Guantanamo City has hundreds of doors, and behind every one there are hundreds of whores. These first two lines of the fifth verse refer to an allegation also heard about Olongopo in the Philippines.
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