Human Rights Law

A Brief History of Guantanamo Bay

By Unitary Moonbat

Indeed, it was Christopher Columbus himself who first rendered the name Guantanamo in a European language, and the British once held the bay as a trophy from the War of Jenkin's Ear.  Its history with regards to the United States is inexorably tied to a guy whose face is carved on Mount Rushmore, and its current status as a tenaciously-secretive playground for School of the Americas aficionados is based upon some of the most imperialistic documents of the entire Era of the Big Stick.

So join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight we'll have a look at Guantanamo's historia trieste.  After all, it's the bay's unique and convoluted history that ultimately formed the basis for the landmark Supreme Court decision in 2004 that reversed government-favoring lower courts in finding that the human beings incarcerated there were, in fact, under the jurisdiction of US law - which proves that learning more about the story behind a given gulag is a key component to getting said gulag shut down.
Historiorant:  This diary is dedicated to Alexa, since it was her vision and passion that brought NION and No Columbus Day into being - may she live long and prosper.  ;-)


Geography and Stuff

Okay, we can do this part old-school.  Here's what the Bay looks like without human lines:

And here's what it looks like to an administration looking for an extraterritorial limbo and authoritarian playpen:

For all you absolute-location enthusiasts out there, Guantanamo lies at 19°54' N, 75°9' W; those who dig their geography from a slightly more relative perspective might like to hear that it lies at the extreme southeastern tip of Cuba, its mouth opening southward to the Caribbean Sea.  It is more than 350 miles closer to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, than it is to Havana, whose harbor on the northwestern coast of island looks northward to the Gulf of Mexico and the Strait of Florida.

Given the site's location, elevation, and climate, it probably doesn't come as a surprise that the place is a citrus cornucopia.  Though mangrove swamps anchor the waterlogged shorelines of the bay, both imported and native trees flourish inland, and those residents of the Base who don't live in cages enjoy bountiful harvests of mangos, limes, and most of the other ingredients needed to make drinks that mix well with rum.

Of the fauna that might be visible to the incarcerees at Rush's Club Gitmo (?, I presume), probably the most ironically numerous are the free-flying birds.  Mundane and spectacular species alike call Guantanamo home for at least part of the year, as do sea turtles, spiny lobsters, and other marine life.  There may even be a few crocodiles left in the slow-moving rivers, but no one's going to be naming any more nearby towns "Caimanera" anytime soon   Surprisingly, the fishing's reputed to be not so great: the nearness of the offshore shelf (the very thing that makes it such a good deep-water port for Navy ships) means that the coast is comparatively short on shallow reefs.  .


Don't Be Afraid to Meet the Taino - You Already Know a Few Words of Their Language

In 1492, as Ferdinand and Isabella were decreeing that Jews were no longer welcome in the newly-reconquisted kingdom of Spain, 5 Taino caciques divided the island of Cuba amongst themselves.  These chieftains, whose largest population centers were likely in the 3000-5000 inhabitant range, were part of a larger culture that had its origins in South America as relatives of the far-flung Arawak-speaking tribes, who are often identified as the "indians" with whom Columbus interacted.  

When Mr. October 12th first met them, the Taino controlled the islands nowadays known as Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and the Bahamas (from whose Taino name - Lucays - is derived the word South-Florida word "Cay").  The word "Taino" is actually Arawakan for "friendly people," and was used by Columbus to distinguish the more pacifistic northern island tribes from the overtly-hostile Carib groups to the south.  Besides Guantanamo and a lot of other, less nefarious place names around the Greater Antilles, the Taino also bequeathed unto Spanish and English the words barbacoa, hamaca, tabaco, canoa, yuca, and Huracan.

The Taino hunted with bows (sometimes using poison-tipped arrows), and fished using hemp and cotton nets.  Though war was known among them, often rival groups would settle matters using a Mesoamerican-inspired ball game, and at least one anthropological school holds that certain branches of Voodoo (Petwo?) were profoundly influenced by the polytheistic religion of the Taino.  As some of Guantanamo's most recent inhabitants can mournfully attest, however, spirituality has its limitations when it is a warrior's only shield against a technologically superior and morally unencumbered enemy.


Let the Karmic Carnage Commence!

Having enriched their language at the native Cuban's expense, the Spanish next sought to enrich their purses.  From his base on Hispaniola, Governor Columbus decreed that the appropriate punishment for a Taino who failed to provide the Spanish with the required annual quota of gold (an amount due from every native islander over the age of 14), was mutilation or execution.  Don't bring the Admiral of the Ocean Sea enough gold, eh? Off with her hands!

Later, after every flake of gold dust on the surface of every Christian-held island had been picked up by a Taino and delivered to a Spaniard, the conquistadors enslaved the native survivors and forced them to dig for more.  Tens of thousands - perhaps hundreds of thousands - died in the mines in the decades after the Spanish arrival.  To this death toll must also be added the horrific consequences of disease transmission from the plate-armored Typhoid Marys to the clean-living Indians - whose sense of hygiene and lack of inoculating prior exposure to the Eurasian petri dish left them physiologically incapable of dealing with the disease-ridden miasma that enshrouded the Europeans of the time.

The numbers totaling the native people who died during the first few decades of the European invasion of the Caribbean vary widely: it seems that anywhere between 200,000 and 3 million Taino may have perished by 1540, and by the end of the 16th century, the Taino had been more or less obliterated entirely.  Having exhausted its readily accessible supply of slaves by working them to death and massacring them as an example to others, the Spanish would have to turn to a new source of enslaved human beings for the next wave of unwilling immigrants to Cuba.

At least one European voice speaks to us through the ages regarding the mistreatment of the powerless and the profaned of the Caribbean islands.  Writing in 1542 about a trip he took to the Indies in 1508, Father Bartolome de Las Casas might or might not be exaggerating some numbers in his A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, but he did make clear that there were people concerned about human rights in Cuba as early as 466 years ago:

When the Spanish first journeyed there, the indigenous population of the island of Hispaniola stood at some three million; today only two hundred survive. The island of Cuba, which extends for a distance almost as great as that separating Valladolid from Rome, is now to all intents and purposes uninhabited, and two other large, beautiful and fertile islands, Puerto Rico and Jamaica, have been similarly devastated. Not a living soul remains today on any of the islands of the Bahamas, which lie to the north of Hispaniola and Cuba, even though every single one of the sixty or so islands in the group, as well as those known as the Isles of Giants and others in the area, both large and small, is more fertile and more beautiful than the Royal Gardens in Seville and the climate is as healthy as anywhere on earth. The native population, which once numbered some five hundred thousand, was wiped out by forcible expatriation to the island of Hispaniola, a policy adopted by the Spaniards in an endeavour to make up losses among the indigenous population of that island.

In 1729, England signed the Treaty of Seville with Spain, in which it promised not to trade with any of Spain's colonies in the New World - your basic mercantilist trade agreement.  Ever mindful of its slipping status as a first-rate power, Spain insisted on verifiability that the Brits were living up to their end of the bargain.  To mollify the rich-but-fading Iberian empire, England agreed to allow Spaniards to board and inspect British ships encountered in Spanish waters.

These incidents were about as pleasant and cordial as all the other times when one nation applies its unilateral, ham-handed declarations upon a proud and un-intimidated upstart.  To wit, when the guarda costa boarded the brig Rebecca in 1731, the conversation devolved to the point that the Spanish commander cut off one of the ears of the brig's skipper, Robert Jenkins.

Historiorant:  The actual circumstances surrounding Mr. Jenkins' amputation are debatable; some historians say Jenkins lost his ear in the pillory and that the "evidence" that he later publicly produced was, in fact, the ear of a pig.  Still, the wag-the-dog effect of subsequent events makes the saber-based, human-ear story the more historically relevant one.

Not having a right-wing echo chamber or a far-bloviating cadre of sheepherders like Faux News to help the story of the captain's need for national vengeance grow legs, little was done about the affront to British sovereignty for about seven years after Jenkins first filed his report.  Like Achmed Chalabi, though, the mariner was patient, and in 1738, he finally got a chance to address the House of Commons.  There, at the end of an eloquent speech, he dangled before the shocked (and outraged! - outraged, I tell you!) MPs a little scrap of leathery-looking something-or-other that he claimed was the actual ear that he had lost to Spanish deprivations.

To show how bloody indignant they were at this nearly decade-old affront to all things British, Parliament instructed a reluctant Prime Minister Robert Walpole to declare war on Spain in 1739.  The so-called War of Jenkins' Ear had an Afghanistan-in-late-2001 lock on the headlines until 1742, when it was relegated to sideshow status by the much broader War of Austrian Succession that by then was engulfing Europe.

The British won the first major battle at Puerto Bello, Panama, in late 1739, when they caught at unawares the garrison at Spain's major transit port for South American silver.  The city, which had been a thriving port and an important facet of the Spain's New World trade, was mercilessly looted, and would not recover economically until after the construction of the Panama Canal in the early 20th century.  For his part, the admiral who devised the attack, Edward Vernon, was in 1740 invited back to the capital for a proper fete thrown by a war king: Portobelo Road in London takes its name from this battle, and the dinner honoring its victor marked the first public performance of God Save the King.

With joementum on his side, "Old Grog" Vernon (seriously, that was his nickname) next set his sights on Cartagena.  There, in 1741, he was turned back by a fierce Spanish- and Indian defense after a month-long siege, and retreated with heavy losses.  He then went to the area of Guantanamo Bay, seeking to use it as a staging area for moves on some less prickly Spanish fruit at the southern Cuban city of Santiago.  That assault, too, failed, but so did Spanish counter-attacks in Georgia and Florida, and the war ran out of steam due to lack of troops, resources, and mother-country commitment.  During the brief period that the British controlled the area, America's future human rights-free zone was renamed Cumberland Bay, but it resumed its traditional moniker after the 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle reaffirmed Spanish hegemony throughout Cuba.


Mr. Monroe and his Doctrine

U.S. claims to uncontested control over a piece of sovereign Cuban territory (as well as the rationales behind 30 military interventions and 47 covert or indirect operations since 1846) can be traced back to the Prince Metternich-at-the-Congress of Vienna era of global realpolitick.  In December, 1823, during his 7th Annual Message to Congress, President James Monroe first expressed the newly-realized foreign policy notion that the United States should be the sole decider in all matters regarding the colonial ambitions of European powers in the Western Hemisphere.  Its original text does not seek to establish US suzerainty over the countries of this side of the planet; it simply sought to close South America and the Caribbean to any European adventurism there.

Weird Historical Sidenote: The principal architect of the Monroe Doctrine was not Monroe, but the misanthropic junior member of the only other father-son double-whammy to ever afflict the White House.  Ironically, when John Quincy Adams did finally get his turn in the presidential mansion, it was under a cloud of suspicion, bad feelings, and political chicanery: The election of 1824 has borne the moniker "Corrupt Bargain" ever since the inside-the-bridlepath crowd of the time colluded to keep the dangerously populist Andrew Jackson from occupying the White House.

Monroe did not claim the western half of the planet for the Stars and Stripes primarily because most of the world map - not to mention his little side of it - was a genuine political and military mess in 1823.  Europe was still picking up the pieces after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815 (determining who was in control of Spain was an especially contentious issue), Asia and Africa were imperialist jigsaw puzzles, and in South America, colonies were declaring independence at a muy alarming rate.  From Jose de San Martin in Argentina to Simon Bolivar in Venezuela, los pobres were just saying "no" to viceregal rule.  In Mexico, the peasants led and the criollos followed, when former Spanish general Augustin de Iturbide revolted against the crown in a decade-late response to Padre Hidalgo's Grito de Dolores and declared himself Emperor of an independent Mexico in 1823.

Optional Historical Context Excursion:The Grito de Dolores, one of the great rabble-rousing speeches of the Enlightenment, is what started Mexico on the path to independence in 1810.  Though Hidalgo did not live to see the final retreat of the Spanish - executed, head displayed on pole in 1811 - history would later be forced to acknowledge that it was the ringing of a church bell and the public proclamation of "Long live our Lady of Guadalupe!  Death to bad government!  Death to the gachupines!" that launched the first of several armies to descend on Mexico City while the US was busily fighting England (again) and Spain was engaged in tumultuous rivalry with France (again).

In the context of the geopolitical situation of the time, the Monroe Doctrine was a rather audacious ploy.  Since the US would likely not be able to enforce it if the Europeans decided to push the issue, Monroe had to calculate the risk of having his bluff called.  Against the chance to set a precedent of big brother-like protectionism over the independent nations of Latin America at the moment of their inception, President Monroe judged the gamble worth it - and Presidents with varying degrees of morality have been thanking him for it ever since.


The Transmogrification of a Doctrine

Cuba and most of Spain's other possessions in the Caribbean remained in the hands of the Crown as the dust settled on the 1830's and 40's; Guantanamo's date with doctrinal destiny was still almost 60 years in the future when Monroe's policy was first twisted out of the context by an American with imperialist ambitions. The policy's survival had been ensured when it was discovered that the British Navy would enforce it in exchange for only a few minor concessions, and it was trotted out in 1836 by Americans indignant over England's coziness with the brand-new Lone Star Republic, but the first guy to really base a stand on the Monroe's idea was James K. Polk in 1845.  By selectively reading his predecessor's quarter-century old phrases, Polk turned Monroe's hoary speech into a justification for Manifest Destiny as a national policy.

Selective reading of the document also seemed to be the case in 1852, when Southerners were scrambling to maintain sectional parity with the North when it came to admitting new states.  The conquest of Cuba and its admission as a slave-holding territory was considered and rejected by Congress, and foreign policy in general was shelved as Kansas bled and the Civil War roared nigh.  In 1864, as then-General Grant ground his way toward Richmond and Sherman burned his way across Georgia, Americans looked southward long enough to declare the French puppet regime of Maximilian in violation of the Monroe Doctrine (the first broad application if the term), and in the 1870s, it was used by now-President Grant to forbid the transfer of colonies between Euro-powers.

That sort of map-monkeying was found to be the exclusive province of the United States in 1895, when Secretary of State Richard Olney - the sycophantic policy-justifier (a la Attorney General Gonzalez.) of his day - opined so.  In 1902, the foreign minister of Argentina expanded Monroe's reach considerably when he presumed to speak for all of Latin America in his own Drago Doctrine, in which he declared the Western Hemisphere under blanket protection from the US against European armies sent to collect on national debts.  The broadest interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine would come with the intervention-justifying Roosevelt Corollary in 1904, but now I'm getting a little ahead of the Guantanamo story...


Paradise Bleeding

Though there were sporadic revolts against European rule throughout the 1800s, Cuba remained within Spain's grasp, albeit increasingly tenuously.  As the century wore on and the revolts grew more and more successful, that grasp was tightened to the point in the 1890s at which General Weylar, military governor of the island, developed and implemented a system of "camps" in which to "concentrate" captured enemy troops and civilians suspected of supporting them.  So it is that Cuban history provides us the first use of the term "concentration camp."  Bitterly ironic, that.

In 1895, a bunch of exiled anti-government leaders landed with troops at Baracoa, and used cavalry and guerilla tactics to swiftly expand across the entire island.  Though most of the funding and material support for the insurgent effort was being sent from exile groups in the United States, it was the US that interdicted the lion's share of these shipments: the Coast Guard stopped 33 of 71 re-supply missions.  Of the remainder, 23 got through and 5 were stopped by Spain.  In the US, a great deal was made of the few Spanish inspections; the Malkins of the time infuriated one another by passing around newspaper clippings showing stark naked American women standing humiliated before leering Spanish officers.

The situation on the island was destabilizing and getting worse when President McKinley was prompted by pro-Spanish "Voluntario" rioting in Havana to dispatch the battleship Maine to keep an eye on things.  When that ship exploded under mysterious circumstances - later found to be a design flaw - on February 15, 1898, the Fox News team of the day, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer - raced each other to the yellow bottom of journalistic propagandizing.  Public opinion forced McKinley into asking for permission to commence hostilities, and on April 25th, Congress obliged him (though they later passed a resolution backdating the official declaration of war to April 20th).

                                       
                            Here we see that a detailed artist's conception of the alleged Spanish mine-laying operation that sunk our battleship.  Like whispered rumors of yellowcake uranium and Winnebagos of Doom a century later, the pretty graphics and faux-logical arguments were enough to persuade a Republican to take the United States into an offensive war.

Among the rabidly nationalistic imperialists of the turn of the century, the war was a "splendid little" thing.  Assistant Secretary of the Navy Teddy Roosevelt, for example, saw it as an opportunity for battlefield glory and resigned his post to organize an all-volunteer cavalry unit he named the Rough Riders.  These he took to Cuba (though without their horses), and landed between Guantanamo and the city of Santiago.  The overall objective, finally arrived at after a period of bumbling and uncoordinated military actions, was the capture of the city, but the landings also had the effect of isolating and later compelling the surrender of the Spanish garrison in the Guantanamo region.

The Rough Rider charge up San Juan and Teakettle hills outside Santiago actually occurred on foot, and would not have been remotely successful had not the Americans brought along their five Gatling guns, but the American spirit of the time had a great fondness for epically valorous battlefield stuff.  Teddy rode the coattails of his victory to being named McKinley's running mate in the election of 1900, in which the pro-imperialists vociferously defeated a vocal opposition represented by William Jennings Bryan and Adlai E. Stevenson I.  When in 1901 McKinley, who was not nearly the frothing-at-the-mouth conqueror that Teddy would be, was shot in the gut by a miserable loner who thought the President owed him a job, the task of interpreting Mr. Monroe's Doctrine fell unexpectedly into the hands of the 42 year-old Roosevelt.

Historiorant  The Rove of the era, an Ohio Republican machine politician named Mark Hanna, was mortified at the thought of Roosevelt as Vice President.  He reportedly warned TR supporters at the 1900 Republican Convention "Don't any of you realize there's only one life between that madman and the presidency?"


What "Walk Softly and Carry a Big Stick" Really Means

Since the turn of the century marks America's entrance into the power politics and military one-upsmanship of the world's imperial powers game, the documents of that era form much of the basis for today's foreign policy.  In some cases, the harshest aspects of dollar diplomacy have since been abandoned or had their talons judiciously clipped by later courts and Congresses, but the core elements remain.  The US footprint in Panama is just one current example; Guantanamo is another.

If you were fool enough to believe Colorado Senator Henry Teller in 1898, you'd've never thunk that the US would ever presume to "own" Guantanamo Bay, or any other part of Cuba for that matter.  In an amendment he attached to the bill authorizing war against Spain (the amendment was introduced on April 11, 1898, and passed on the 19th), In it, Teller (and a majority of the Senate) promised that the United States would stand down and hand back the island just as soon as the Cubans stood up.  The Teller Amendment foreswore permanent US control of Cuba, and went on to say, in part, that the United States

"hereby disclaims any disposition of intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said island except for pacification thereof, and asserts its determination, when that is accomplished, to leave the government and control of the island to its people."
Teller Amendment, 1898

By 1901, of course, such naïveté had gone right out the window; Preznittin' in the Imperial Age was hard, see, an' if a country wanted ta' play on th' world stage, well, some eggs'uz gonna hafta git broke.  These pre-Maine-mindset eggs included things like the wimpy Teller Amendment, which was replaced with the far ballsier Platt Amendment in March, 1901.  

In fact, Platt's amendment to the 1901 funding measure supporting the post-war occupation of Cuba was so ballsy that the incarcerees at Guantanamo can trace the ground beneath their very cages to it.  At the behest of Secretary of War Elihu Root, Senator of Connecticut Orville Platt submitted to Congress one of the most vile pieces of imperialist legislation ever conceived as part of a Republican re-visioning of the US-Cuba relationship.  The Platt Amendment stipulated that:

• Cuba would cede the naval base at Guantanamo Bay to the United States
• Cuba would not transfer Cuban land to any entity other than the United States
• Cuba could not contract foreign debt that it couldn't pay for
• Gave the US the right to intervene in Cuban affairs as the US saw fit, and
• Cuba was not permitted to negotiate treaties with nations other than the US

When Roosevelt withdrew the Marines in 1902 - leaving a few at Guantanamo, of course - a few among the Cuban power elite cautiously came out in support of the US policy.  In 1903, the Cuban-American Treaty (the enabling legislation for the Platt provisions) was signed by a Cuban toady named Tomas Estrada Palma, who had the Platt amendment basically written into the new Cuban constitution.  He also ceded Guantanamo Bay and Bahia Honda to the Americans; the Manhattan Island-sized base they constructed has gone on to become the oldest existing overseas US military base.  American economic suzerainty over Cuba was ensured through manipulation of the sugar market, and the Marines only had to be sent in a couple of times over the next few decades.


Good Neighbors and Guantanamo Bay

The next Roosevelt to inhabit the White House was inclined to try to undo some of the foreign policy damage done in Latin America during the reign of his relative.  Accordingly, FDR's "Good Neighbor" policies were extended to Cuba, which took the opportunity to revisit and repeal the hated 1903 treaty.  Well, repeal almost all of it - the US would not allow Guantanamo to be put on the table.  In pigheadedly sticking to the immediate demands of the Navy, the US was effectively manufacturing nationalist ammunition for Fidel Castro to use in a revolution still 20 years off - diplomatic insults capped with territorial claims like this tend to remain long in a national memory:

Article III

While on the one hand the United states recognizes the continuance of the ultimate sovereignty of the Republic of Cuba over the above described areas of land and water, on the other hand the Republic of Cuba consents that during the period of the occupation by the United states of said areas under the terms of this agreement the United states shall exercise complete jurisdiction and control over and within said areas with the right to acquire (under conditions to be hereafter agreed upon by the two Governments) for the public purposes of the United States any land or other property therein by purchase or by exercise of eminent domain with full compensation to the owners thereof.

Guantanamo remains in US hands on the basis that the contract for the lease (Cuba doesn't cash the checks) on the base can only be revoked by both parties, meaning the land belongs to Washington until Washington says it doesn't.  Cuba has attempted to find legal recourse to having a foreign power declare gulag rights on her sovereign soil, basing its claim on Article 52 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which states:

Coercion of a State by the threat or use of force

A treaty is void if its conclusion has been procured by the threat or use of force in violation of the principles of international law embodied in the Charter of the United Nations.

Seems fairly clear, but the United States has maintained the position that Guantanamo was freely given by a Cuban president who was not being coerced, but was, in fact, just being a good little sell-out.  And almost lost in the discussion is what role the idea of "implied threat of force" - eg, rattling the big stick - played in Cuban decision-making in 1903 and afterwards.

The Treaty of 1934 was signed with the blessing of the newly-emerged strongman of Cuba, ex-Sergeant Major Fulgencio Batista, who would remain the center of dictatorial power (and sometimes president) on the island until his overthrow a quarter-century later.  His government - essentially a kleptocracy - presided over a corrupt, neon-lit, art-deco golden age of mobsters, celebrities, and mysterious guys with pencil-thin mustaches, and for a while, the decadence and the good times rolled - at least at the higher end of the socio-economic stratum.  For the other 95% of the population, things weren't quite so rosy, as Arthur Schlessinger noted in a US government-commissioned report:

The corruption of the (Batista) Government, the brutality of the police, the regime's indifference to the needs of the people for education, medical care, housing, for social justice and economic justice... is an open invitation to revolution.

Indeed.


The Cold War in the Tropics

For all his numerous faults, Batista did stand side-by-side with a grieving, angry United States by declaring war on Japan the day after the Pearl Harbor attacks; declarations against Germany and Italy followed three days later.  The base at Guantanamo was a critical factor in protecting Allied shipping in the Caribbean, but even the eastern screen it provided wasn't 100% U-boat-proof: on May 15, 1943, a Cuban naval vessel sunk a German submarine in the waters north of Havana.  Cuban plans to draft and deploy an army to aid the Allied cause never got off the ground, and after the war, it looked like things were going to go back to the way they'd been ante-bellum.

Batista served as president from 1940 to 1944, when he lost an election to longtime rival Ramon Grau.  He won a seat in the Cuban Senate in 1948 (running from his home in Daytona Beach), but wasn't nearly so successful in his next run at the presidency, in 1952.  During the campaign Batista learned that he was a distant third place in the polls, and he resolved to take matters into his own hands by dispensing with the democratic process and simply staging a coup.  It was successful, and had at least tacit US support: successive governments in Washington had found Batista a stabilizing force in a land where people sometimes make ominous noises about stuff like agrarian land reform and taking the keys of Havana back from guys like Mayer Lansky.

Fidel Castro was unsuccessful in his first attempt to overthrow Batista in 1952, and after serving a couple of years in prison, he made his way to Mexico to plot his revenge.  Ever since those plans bore fruit and installed him as dictator in 1959, Castro has periodically mentioned his discomfort with having an enemy's military base upon his island - here he is on December 3, 1971:

"that base is there just to humiliate Cuba; just like a knife stuck in the heart of Cuba's dignity and sovereignty... But from a military standpoint, the base is completely useless."

Perhaps not entirely true - it is, after all, a deep-water port which lies astride the approaches to a region of vital shipping and commerce - but even though I'm no lover of Castro, I can see his point.  He reiterated the sentiments in January, 1985:

"In our country we have a military base against the will of our people. It has been there throughout the twenty-six years of the revolution, and it is being occupied by force. We have the moral and legal right to demand its return. We have made the claim in the moral and legal way. We do not intend to recover it with the use of arms. It is part of our territory being occupied by a U.S. military base. Never has anyone, a revolutionary cadre, a revolutionary leader, or a fellow citizen, had the idea of recovering the piece of our territory by the use of force. If some day it will be ours, it will not be by the use of force, but the advance of the consciousness of justice in the world."

He's still waiting for that advance of the consciousness of justice, and likely will be when he goes on to the Great Worker's Paradise in the Sky (or is that contradictory?  It's been so long since I was called a godless Commie...).  The right to occupy Guantanamo Bay has been asserted by Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush the At-Least Rational, Clinton, and Bush the Lesser, and with that one on the end having discovered the benefits to a nascent police state of having a few Extraterritorial Islands of Doom scattered about the globe, it's not likely that the shores of Guantanamo Bay will be considered Cuban land anytime soon.


Historiorant

The history of the US possession of the Guantanamo Bay naval base is like the current operations there: repugnantly imperialistic, an anachronism from an era that is best remembered as a warning, rather than an example.  The base is held on the shakiest of legal arguments, its status as an extraterritorial limbo makes is the perfect Black Hole, and the star-chamber secrecy surrounding it is a blight on all things American.  Guantanamo Bay must be shut down.


Historically hip entrances to the Cave of the Moonbat can be found at Daily Kos, Never In Our Names, Bits of News, Progressive Historians, and DocuDharma.

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on October 12, 2008 (boomark / email).