Guantánamo

  Meanwhile, anticipating Congress’s vote, the administration tried to make the best of a bad situation, assigning a legal team to address the most intractable issue confronting Justice Department officials, namely, what to do with the nearly fifty or so detainees considered too dangerous to release and yet thought to be unsuitable for trial by military tribunal, thanks to tainted evidence against them. To make indefinite detention more palatable, the administration will replace Bush administration “annual review boards” with “periodic review boards.” Where the old boards consisted entirely of military personnel and provided the detainees no legal rights, the new ones will consist of an interagency panel of military and national security personnel, and will grant detainees both legal counsel and access to at least some incriminating evidence.9

  Which raises the question of whether these changes are adequate for alleged enemy combatants detained in wartime. By all appearances, the torture and systematic abuse of detainees ended at Guantánamo long before Barack Obama took office. Indefinite detention continues there, but its legality has never been questioned by a single federal judge, liberal or conservative, and closing Guantánamo would only displace it to the United States. Moreover, the military commission system signed into law by the 2009 Military Commissions Act and now set to reopen at Guantánamo includes more protections—more judicial review, more limitations on coerced and hearsay evidence—than any prior military commissions, including Nuremburg.10

  In short, one could argue that the Obama administration is only finishing the job begun at Guantánamo by JAG lawyers, human rights advocates, and the press, who have introduced a measure of law and transparency to what has long been an obscure place. Moreover, closing Guantánamo might inadvertently allow both the administration itself and the American public to sidestep the bigger question of how Guantánamo fits into the nation’s larger detention archipelago. It is worth remembering that momentum began to build for closing Guantánamo just as escalating military engagement in Afghanistan and Pakistan swelled the ranks of detainees at Bagram air base and other detention centers beyond the purview of the American public and the reach of U.S. law. What is happening at Bagram? Where else is the United States detaining people? Under what conditions and for how long? The war against al Qaeda and the Taliban continues, but there have been no new arrivals at Guantánamo Bay.

  And so a place that has come to symbolize America’s fall from grace post-9/11 now demonstrates the power of symbols themselves to inhibit clear thinking. “The uproar over Guantánamo permits conflation of a whole congruence of ideas,” observes David Barron, former head of the Office of Legal Council in the Obama administration. “It reveals how a set of practices, some of which may be more acceptable than others, became impossible to disentangle in our minds.”11

  Meanwhile, the more things change, the more things stay the same. In February 2011, just as the new Guantánamo military commissions were set to restart, a detainee named Awal Gul died of a heart attack at the prison camp. Guantánamo officials described Gul as “an admitted Taliban recruiter and commander of a military base in Jalalabad.” Gul’s lawyer, Matthew Dodge, characterized that description as an “outrageous” slander. In three years of litigation, Dodge protested, the U.S. “government never claimed or pointed to any evidence that his client had run any Qaeda house or admitted providing support to Mr. bin Laden.”12 A few weeks later, President Obama defended what seemed to many observers to be the U.S. military’s abusive treatment of Bradley Manning, the marine accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange. Asked to explain why military officials thought it necessary to require Manning to sleep naked and appear nude before his guards, the president replied, “I have actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of [Manning’s] confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assure me that they are.”13

  Still, even if wrong about the prison, is General McCaffrey right about the base? With its immunity from federal court oversight gone, has the base become at long last dispensable? McCaffrey is hardly the first to pronounce a premature requiem on the place. As the age of sail yielded to the age of coal, then coal to oil, and bases themselves to mobile carrier battle groups, there were always people around to make an argument for shutting down Guantánamo. From its earliest days, politicians and admirals alike criticized its geographical location, physical exposure, and expense. As early as 1934, the base commander, Admiral Charles Cooke, attempted to smother talk of removing the navy from Guantánamo. In his final report before stepping down, Cooke warned successors not to lose sight of the base’s pivotal role in safeguarding hemispheric sea-lanes, thus anticipating its function in World War II. A generation later, when Adlai Stevenson suggested exchanging Guantánamo for a Soviet pledge to clear out of Cuba, President Kennedy and his senior staff wouldn’t even consider it. And yet by the late 1970s and early 1980s, both the Carter and Reagan administrations gave at least passing thought to turning the base over to Cuba.14

  Fifty years after Castro’s rise to power, Guantánamo’s strategic irrelevance is universally acknowledged. “Guantánamo serves no military purpose, affords no strategic advantage,” observes retired U.S. Marine Corps general Jack Sheehan, former commander in chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command (1994–97). “We’re not going to attack Cuba. The place exists now solely as a product of bureaucratic inertia.”15 Guantánamo was once important “as a political icon and covert platform,” Barry McCaffrey has remarked. “As a strategic naval facility, it never was important; it’s always been a sump.”16 Today, adds Jeffrey Johnston, former commander of public works at the base, “Guantánamo adds absolutely nothing to the navy. If Guantánamo disappeared, every ship would sail, every sailor would be trained. Moreover, the navy would save fifty million dollars per year.”17

  Perhaps nobody knows the base like Jeff Johnston. For three years (1999–2002), Johnston observed goings-on at Guantánamo from his perch in SOUTHCOM. In 2004, he became the head of public works at the base, a position he retained for five years, an unusually long time in one place. Upon arriving at Guantánamo, Johnston discovered that familiarizing oneself with Guantánamo meant getting to know the Ghost of Guantánamo Past. To this day, the base remains littered with land mines, unexploded ordnance, ancient, unused dry docks, the infrastructure of abandoned neighborhoods and migrant camps, not to mention old wells and used shell casings dating back to the “Spanish-American War.” From the myriad minor things Johnston learned about Guantánamo’s history, one larger lesson stands out: “It is as wishful to pronounce Guantánamo dead as it is futile to predict its future.”

  “Who knows what the future holds?” Johnson remarked. “If history is any guide, the next Guantánamo will be nothing like past ones.” Migrant operations like those of the 1990s are unlikely to happen again. Nor is there likely to be another prison. To Johnston, Guantánamo is as much about the valleys—the downtimes—as it is about the peaks. “The valleys occur and everyone says, ‘That’s it! Gitmo’s done! We’re out of here!’ Then something comes along—racial fears, fears of communism, Castro, the cold war, revolution in Haiti, terrorism, you name it—and someone says, ‘Hey, use Gitmo!’ after which comes, ‘Okay, that’s that. Close it down, Gitmo no longer matters.’”18

  Cut through this noise and what do you find? “In quiet times,” Johnston observes, “Gitmo is a silent bridge between history past and history future. There’s a lull woven into Gitmo. Every day of doing nothing there is essential to tending the fields on which enormous world-changing events will transpire.” As public works officer, Johnston felt “an obligation to the future charted by what happened in the past. Who in the world would ever have predicted GTMO’s current and recent uses—that over the course of the last decade and a half, for example, Guantánamo would be the site of the only truly productive contact between the Cuban and U.S. governments” (during fence line meetings between the base commander and his Cuban counterpa
rt)?19 “We can’t know what the future of GTMO will look like,” Johnston insists. But of one thing we can be sure: “Guantánamo is now part of who we are.”20

  What do Cubans hope for the bay? “The U.S. Naval Base is the last vestige of the American intervention in Cuba over a century ago,” the Cuban poet and writer Rafael Hernández observed a few years back. As fractious a people as anybody, “there is yet one thing that all Cubans, regardless of age or ideology, agree upon. We want the bay back. Not one single Cuban will say it’s good for us.” The base has brought the region’s economic development to a standstill, Hernández explained. More than a political and military thorn in Cuba’s side, it is an environmental disaster, with U.S. fighter planes buzzing the Cuban countryside, unexploded ordnance sprawled across the Guantánamo estuary, and nuclear submarines prowling about the harbor.21

  Hernández is right about Cubans’ fractiousness: many Cubans disagree with him about the U.S. base. Since the Taíno cacique Hatuey first fled Hispaniola for the Guantánamo Basin five centuries ago, Cubans have long looked on the region as a refuge from the repression, thuggery, corruption, and racial persecution besetting the rest of Cuba. Oriente province has long served as Cuba’s frontier, Guantánamo as the nation’s safety valve. For the past fifty years, Cubans fleeing the persecution of Castro’s government have regarded the U.S. base as a vestige of imperialism, to be sure, but also as a haven. Cuban dissidents have climbed fences, tiptoed through minefields, and swum thirty miles against current, wind, and long odds to make it to the naval base.

  Forward-looking Cubans can imagine a revolution finally ridding the nation of the Castros and their cronies. But they are not so naïve to think that such a revolution will be smooth or without its reverses. Keen readers of history, Cubans can foresee a liberal revolution giving way to a conservative reaction and so on in a cycle that could make a continued U.S. presence at Guantánamo as salutary as it is humiliating. Asked for their final word on the American presence in Guantánamo, a disparate group of Cuban exiles, all of whom risked their lives to get to Guantánamo and who spent months behind barbed wire there in 1994–95, replied simply: “Don’t give it back.”22

  Which is not to say the United States shouldn’t return the base to Cuba, only to suggest that Cubans themselves differ about its future—and that imperialism is rarely as straightforward as it seems.

  ALSO BY JONATHAN M. HANSEN

  The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating

  American Identity, 1890–1920

  NOTES

  PREFACE

  1 On a later trip to the naval base, I had a chance to interview a small planeload of Filipino workers heading home after six years. The several I spoke to signed successive two-year contracts (with two months’ leave in between). They got their jobs through a Philippine government agency. For a monthly salary of five hundred dollars (which they sent directly home), they worked six eight-hour days per week at an hourly rate of roughly $2.60. Author interview, Filipino laborers, October 23, 2008, Guantánamo Bay (the Filipinos I interviewed requested to remain anonymous).

  1 REDISCOVERING GUANTÁNAMO

  1 Francis Augustus MacNutt, ed., De Orbe Novo: The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D’Anghera, vol. 1 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), 94–95; J. M. Cohen, ed., The Four Voyages of Columbus (New York: Penguin Books, 1969), 170–71; and John Harmon McElroy, ed., The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, by Washington Irving (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981), 239–42.

  2 MacNutt, Martyr, 94–97, Carl Ortwin Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 58; and Samuel M. Wilson, The Indigenous People of the Caribbean (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), 54.

  3 Hortensia Pichardo Viñals, ed., Documentos para la historia de Cuba, tomo 1 (La Habana: Editorial Pueblo y Educación), 1984, 51.

  4 MacNutt, Martyr, 95.

  5 Peter Martyr reports that Columbus had taken this interpreter, whom he named “Diego Columbus,” off “Guanahani (an island near by Cuba)”; ibid.

  6 Cohen, Four Voyages of Columbus, 169–70.

  7 The province of Guantánamo was among the densest areas of Taíno settlement in Cuba. (See www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/41/311.html.) Exactly how dense Taíno settlement was in the immediate vicinity of Guantánamo Bay is hard to say. Strained Cuban-U.S. relations at the bay over the past fifty years and U.S. development at likely archaeological sites at the U.S. naval base have hampered archaeological investigation. See Timothy R. Sara and William F. Keegan, Archaeological Survey and Paleoenvironmental Investigations of Portions of U.S. Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (Newport News, Va.: Geo-Marine, 2004), chap. 3.

  8 McElroy, The Life and Voyage of Christopher Columbus, 239–42; Cohen, Four Voyages of Columbus, 169–71; Sara and Keegan, Archaeological Survey, 15–41, 155–56, 170–71. Cf. Irving Rouse, The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), chap. 3, 4, and 6; Samuel M. Wilson, ed., The Indigenous People of the Caribbean (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), chap. 12–14; and Samuel M. Wilson, “Cultural Pluralism and the Emergence of Complex Society in the Greater Antilles,” paper delivered at XVIII International Congress for Caribbean Archaeology, St. George’s, Grenada, July 1999 (available at uts.cc.utexas.edu/~swilson/wilson_iaca99.html).

  9 Wilson, Indigenous People of the Caribbean, 17; and Rouse, The Tainos, 20.

  10 Wilson, “Cultural Pluralism.”

  11 Franklin Knight, “Slavery and the Transformation of Society in Cuba, 1511–1760,” Elsa Goveia Memorial Lecture, University of West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, March 22, 1988, 3; Anthony Pagden, Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, from Greece to the Present (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 52.

  12 Knight, “Slavery and the Transformation of Society in Cuba,” 3; J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 17–19; and C. H. Haring, The Spanish Empire in America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1947), 23–27.

  13 The term “long argument” is borrowed from Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

  14 Carl Sauer has written that relations between Spaniards and Indians at Hispaniola began to fall apart in the spring of 1494, when one of Columbus’s lieutenants removed the ear of a Taíno vassal in response to an alleged theft by Indians of Spanish clothing. If, indeed, this is the first case of formal violence perpetrated on the Indians of the New World, one must still reckon with the psychological upheaval and disorientation that the Spaniards’ arrival exacted on Taíno communities; Sauer, Early Spanish Main, 84. Cf. Dave D. Davis, “The Strategy of Early Spanish Ecosystem Management in Cuba,” Journal of Anthropological Research 30, no. 4 (Winter 1974): 294–314.

  15 Juan Tomás Tavares K., The Indians of Hispaniola (Santo Domingo: Editores de Santo Domingo, 1978), 48. See also Julia Tavares, On the Trail of the Arawaks (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975).

  16 Sauer, Early Spanish Main, 149.

  17 Ibid. Dave Davis argues that Velázquez and the Crown learned from its annihilation of the Indians on Hispaniola, introducing a milder form of encomienda in Cuba; Davis, “Early Spanish Ecosystem Management in Cuba,” 298–99.

  18 Las Casas was one of several well-known critics of the Indian genocide. He came to his beliefs slowly, after first participating in the Spanish conquest of Cuba. To spare the Indians, Las Casas endorsed African slavery, though he came to regret this, too. At the time that he endorsed African slavery as an alternative to the forced labor of Indians, he was unaware of the cruelty of the African slave trade then under way at the hands of the Portuguese and Spanish slave traders, including Columbus himself. Once aware of it, he withdrew his endorsement, insisting that it was the only logical conclusion for a man of his religious and philosophical belie
fs. Haring, Spanish Empire in America, 43–56; Pagden, People and Empires, 64–72; Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery (London: Verso, 1998),135–36; Lawrence Clayton, “Bartolomé de las Casas and the African Slave Trade,” History Compass 7, no. 6 (July 2009): 1529–30.

  19 Ladislao Guerra Valiente, Las Huellas del Génesis: Guantánamo Hasta 1870 (Guantánamo: Editorial El Mar y Montaña, 2004), 11; Bartolomé de las Casas, “Hatuey,” in Pichardo Viñals, ed., Documentos para la Historia de Cuba, 51–53.

  20 Las Casas, “Hatuey,” 51–53.

  21 Manuel A. Iturralde-Vinent, “Meso-Cenozoic Caribbean Paleogeography: Implications for the Historical Biogeography of the Region,” International Geology Review 48 (2006): 791–827; Walter Alvarez, “Eastbound Sublithosphere Mantle Flow Through the Caribbean Gap and Its Relevance to the Continental Undertow Hypothesis,” Terra Nova 13, no. 5 (2001): 333–37; and J. Pindell, L. Kennan, K. P. Stanek, W. V. Maresch, and G. Draper, “Foundations of the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Evolution: Eight Controversies Resolved,” in M. A. Iturralde-Vinent and E. G. Lidiak, eds., “Caribbean Plate Tectonics: Stratigraphic, Magmatic, Metamorphic, and Tectonic Events,” Geologica Acta 4, nos. 1–2 (2006): 303–41. The geological composition of Cuba is immensely complicated, hence there is much division and debate about Cuba’s paleogeological origin. See, for example, K. H. James, “Arguments for and Against the Pacific Origin of the Caribbean Plate: Discussion, Finding for an Inter-American Origin,” in Iturralde-Vinent and Lidiak, eds., “Caribbean Plate Tectonics,” 279–302. For schematic illustrations of the process described here, see www.scotese.com.