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| Guantánamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba |
IN the 10 years since the Guantánamo detention camp opened, the
anguished debate over whether to shutter the facility — or make it permanent —
has obscured a deeper failure that dates back more than a century and
implicates all Americans: namely, our continued occupation of Guantánamo
itself. It is past time to return this imperialist enclave to Cuba.
From the moment the United States government forced Cuba to lease the
Guantánamo Bay naval base to us, in June 1901, the American presence there has
been more than a thorn in Cuba’s side. It has served to remind the world of
America’s long history of interventionist militarism. Few gestures would have
as salutary an effect on the stultifying impasse in American-Cuban relations as
handing over this coveted piece of land.
The circumstances by which the United States came to occupy Guantánamo
are as troubling as its past decade of activity there. In April 1898, American
forces intervened in Cuba’s three-year-old struggle for independence when it
was all but won, thus transforming the Cuban War of Independence into what
Americans are still wont to call the Spanish-American War. American officials
then excluded the Cuban Army from the armistice and denied Cuba a seat at the
Paris peace conference. “There is so much natural anger and grief throughout
the island,” the Cuban general Máximo Gómez remarked in January 1899, after the
peace treaty was signed, “that the people haven’t really been able to celebrate
the triumph of the end of their former rulers’ power.”
Curiously, the United States’ declaration of war on Spain included the
assurance that America did not seek “sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control”
over Cuba and intended “to leave the government and control of the island to
its people.”
But after the war, strategic imperatives took precedence over Cuban
independence. The United States wanted dominion over Cuba, along with naval
bases from which to exercise it.
Enter Gen. Leonard Wood, whom President William McKinley had named
military governor of Cuba, bearing provisions that became known as the Platt
Amendment. Two were particularly odious: one guaranteed the United States the
right to intervene at will in Cuban affairs; the other provided for the sale or
lease of naval stations. Juan Gualberto Gómez, a leading delegate to the Cuban
Constitutional Convention, said the amendment would render Cubans “a vassal people.”
Foreshadowing the Cuban Missile Crisis, he presciently warned that foreign
bases on Cuban soil would only draw Cuba “into conflict not of our own making
and in which we have no stake.”
But it was an offer Cuba could not refuse, as Wood informed the delegates.
The alternative to the amendment was continued occupation. The Cubans got the
message. “There is, of course, little or no real independence left Cuba under
the Platt Amendment,” Wood remarked to McKinley’s successor, Theodore
Roosevelt, in October 1901, soon after the Platt Amendment was incorporated
into the Cuban Constitution. “The more sensible Cubans realize this and feel
that the only consistent thing now is to seek annexation.”
But with Platt in place, who needed annexation? Over the next two
decades, the United States repeatedly dispatched Marines based at Guantánamo to
protect its interests in Cuba and block land redistribution. Between 1900 and
1920, some 44,000 Americans flocked to Cuba, boosting capital investment on the
island to just over $1 billion from roughly $80 million and prompting one
journalist to remark that “little by little, the whole island is passing into
the hands of American citizens.”
How did this look from Cuba’s perspective? Well, imagine that at the
end of the American Revolution the French had decided to remain here. Imagine
that the French had refused to allow Washington and his army to attend the
armistice at Yorktown. Imagine that they had denied the Continental Congress a
seat at the Treaty of Paris, prohibited expropriation of Tory property,
occupied New York Harbor, dispatched troops to quash Shays’ and other
rebellions and then immigrated to the colonies in droves, snatching up the most
valuable land.
Such is the context in which the United States came to occupy
Guantánamo. It is a history excluded from American textbooks and neglected in
the debates over terrorism, international law and the reach of executive power.
But it is a history known in Cuba (where it motivated the 1959 revolution) and
throughout Latin America. It explains why Guantánamo remains a glaring symbol
of hypocrisy around the world. We need not even speak of the last decade.
If President Obama were to acknowledge this history and initiate the
process of returning Guantánamo to Cuba, he could begin to put the mistakes of
the last 10 years behind us, not to mention fulfill a campaign pledge. (Given
Congressional intransigence, there might be no better way to close the
detention camp than to turn over the rest of the naval base along with it.) It would
rectify an age-old grievance and lay the groundwork for new relations with Cuba
and other countries in the Western Hemisphere and around the globe. Finally, it
would send an unmistakable message that integrity, self-scrutiny and candor are
not evidence of weakness, but indispensable attributes of leadership in an ever
changing world. Surely there would be no fitter way to observe today’s grim
anniversary than to stand up for the principles Guantánamo has undermined for
over a century.
Jonathan M. Hansen, a lecturer in social
studies at Harvard, is the author of “Guantánamo: An American History.”
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