Buehn, Bob - short clip - The Mayor of Guantanamo
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
- | The community was really worried about all this. | 0:18 |
You know, first picture, a little American town | 0:20 | |
of 2,500 people and they get the word that this is coming. | 0:23 | |
And there was some corporate memory there | 0:28 | |
that when the mass migration occurred, that the dependents, | 0:31 | |
the family members were moved out of the base and sent back | 0:34 | |
to the States, mostly because it had 40,000 Cubans | 0:38 | |
and Haitians, and they just couldn't support. | 0:42 | |
Logistically, the families too. | 0:44 | |
So they got sent away. | 0:47 | |
So there were two groups, there were families | 0:48 | |
who were afraid they were gonna get sent away | 0:51 | |
because of this and there were families | 0:52 | |
that afraid they weren't gonna get sent away. | 0:54 | |
They were afraid they were scared to stay. | 0:55 | |
So this, we had a couple of town hall meetings right away. | 0:58 | |
As Base Commander, and I was as much a mayor | 1:02 | |
as I was a Military Commander | 1:05 | |
because I had probably more civilians that I was | 1:07 | |
dealing with than people in uniform. | 1:09 | |
People in uniform are easy | 1:11 | |
but I had to deal with the civilian. | 1:13 | |
So it was really like being a small town mayor. | 1:14 | |
And we would have, we had a couple of venues | 1:17 | |
where we had public meetings and General Winner came with me | 1:19 | |
and we tried to calm everybody and say, "You know what? | 1:21 | |
First of all, don't worry. | 1:25 | |
Your security is gonna be fine. | 1:26 | |
We don't know yet if you're gonna stay or go | 1:29 | |
but we think you're gonna be able to stay." | 1:31 | |
And, you know, we just tried to communicate. | 1:32 | |
And he was great about that too, by coming on as well. | 1:35 | |
So the community knew about as much as they could know, | 1:39 | |
we tried to pass to them. | 1:43 | |
So it was no surprise when the arrival came | 1:45 | |
and everybody saw this bus go by, | 1:48 | |
they knew what was going on. | 1:50 |
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