Guantánamo Is The Place Where Presidents Abuse Human Rights

Guantánamo Bay has a sordid history of human rights abuses. There is no reason to keep people there except to evade oversight, which is why Trump has big plans for it.

By Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs

Like his predecessors, President Trump has plans for Guantánamo Bay. It is somewhat odd, when you think about it, that the U.S. possesses a little sliver of Cuba that our country uses as a military prison. “How does Cuba feel about that?” you might wonder. Some assume that Cuba must have consented to the arrangement. “We lease the land from Cuba, so it is not against the will of Cuba,” one Quora user assured a questioner. In fact, while it’s true that there is technically a “lease,” the lease is essentially a fiction meant to justify the theft of a Cuban harbor and 45 square miles of land. The U.S. navy base and detention facility there is a peculiar place. It has a gift shop inside, a cafe that serves Starbucks drinks, and a McDonald’s, and it is surrounded by a Cuban minefield put in place by a government that detests the American presence there. (The Americans used to maintain landmines there, too, making it the largest minefield in the Western Hemisphere, which killed a number of both Americans and Cubans during the decades they were in the ground.)

The “lease” was imposed on Cuba by force in 1903. The United States had captured Cuba from the Spanish and made it clear that it would only grant Cuba its independence if it agreed to “lease” Guantánamo Bay to the United States indefinitely. The U.S. sends the Cuban government a check for $4,085 every year, in accordance with the lease terms. The Cuban government refuses to cash the checks, on the reasonable grounds that the lease is a legal fiction designed to legitimize the theft of Cuban land. The U.S. has long made it clear that it does not believe Cuba has any right to cancel the lease and would forcibly resist any effort by Cuba to take its land back.

The first point to make about Guantánamo, then, is that the U.S. should not even have it in the first place. An agreement imposed by force has no legitimacy, and Cuba should be given its land back. Of course, the fact that something is illegal and immoral doesn’t mean the U.S. will stop doing it, and as with the ongoing U.S. blockade of Cuba (consistently condemned by nearly all of the countries of the world), the illegitimate occupation of Guantánamo continues despite being a flagrant infringement on the rights of our island neighbor.

It is not like the U.S. actually needs Guantánamo. There is a naval base there, but it serves no strategic purpose. The former commander in chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command, Jack Sheehan, acknowledged that “Guantánamo serves no military purpose, affords no strategic advantage.” But because Guantánamo is entirely cut off from Cuba and from the United States, it provides a convenient place for presidents to operate in a legal no man’s land, and multiple presidents have used it as a storage unit for populations they don’t want inside the U.S. but either can’t or don’t want to expel entirely.