(C) OpenDemocracy
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In Guantánamo, the law has never been a red line for the US [1]
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Date: 2025-02
The base is a remnant of the Spanish-American war and the US intervention in the Cuban independence war against the Spanish colonial rule – a poisoned chalice embodied in the 1901 Platt amendment that made Cuba a US protectorate.
The US occupation of Guantánamo Bay started formally in 1903 and was later regulated by a 1934 treaty. Under the agreement, Cuba leases the area to the US for a few thousand dollars a year – though the payment is symbolic, with Cuba refusing to cash the annual cheque in protest of what it feels is the US’s “illegal” occupation of the site. The lease can only be terminated if agreed by both parties or if the US abandons the base.
All of this makes Guantánamo both the oldest US military outpost and the only one rejected by the host country. Washington recognises Cuban sovereignty over that patch of land and sea, which it has conveniently used to deny people locked up there – migrants, foreign civil workers, asylum seekers, suspects of terrorism – rights granted by the US Constitution and international law. A legal limbo.
As I wrote in my 2017 book about six former Guantánamo prisoners transferred to Uruguay, ‘Guantánamo entre nosotros’ (which translates as ‘Guantánamo among us’ in English), the base had been a giant open-air jail for tens of thousands of Haitians and Cubans fleeing their countries years before Bush opened the illegal prison for suspects of terrorism in 2002.
The 1991-94 Haitian refugee crisis erupted after a coup d’etat against democratic president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The US Coast Guard intercepted more than 38,000 people who left the country by sea during the first six months, sending them either to overcrowded camps in Guantánamo, where living conditions were deplorable, or back to Haiti.
Only 10,500 were allowed to pursue asylum claims in the US after being screened by US naval officials. The screenings included HIV tests, and those who tested positive were required to meet a higher standard of “well-founded fear” of persecution in order to not be sent back to Haiti. Up to 250 HIV-positive refugees were then placed in a separate camp at Guantánamo, making the US the only country to have a prison camp exclusively for HIV-positive persons.
In 1993, a US judge ordered the Bill Clinton administration to shut the HIV detention centre and give the prisoners proper healthcare and access to legal defence to pursue their asylum requests. The judge said locking the Haitians under “arbitrary and indefinite detention” was a violation of their rights to due process, and their continued imprisonment, he added, “serves no purpose other than to punish them for being sick”.
It was the first time the US judiciary ordered the government to close a detention centre in Guantánamo. But through the years, Washington has relentlessly refused to do so. Quite the opposite, one administration after another has taken advantage of the legal black hole the US carved itself.
As the Haitian crisis evolved, another began: thousands of Cuban balseros (rafters) ventured to the sea in makeshift boats once the president of Cuba, Fidel Castro, lifted a ban on emigration in August 1994. People fled from political repression and the serious economic recession experienced by the country (known as the ‘Special Period’), whose ailing economy had lost its crutches after the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Hundreds of thousands had left Cuba for the US since the 1959 revolution, and they were generally well-received. But fearing a flow of new migrants, the Clinton administration ordered to intercept the balseros at sea and send them to Guantánamo. In less than two months, more than 32,000 Cubans were captured and held in detention camps, separated from the Haitian migrants.
At its peak in 1994, Guantánamo had nearly 50,000 refugees living in tents, with no tap water and a lack of food, hygiene or proper system for leaving and being admitted into the US. Protests erupted. Rebels were locked in a separate area that the military named Camp X-Ray.
While some Cubans were sent to Panamá, most were eventually granted permission to live in the US. By 1996, there were no migrants locked in Guantánamo. Only Camp X-Ray remained – the site and the name of what would become the first experiment of a military prison for suspects of terrorism.
If you’re old enough, you may remember images of Camp X-Ray: prisoners in orange jumpsuits, handcuffed and chained, their faces covered by masks and blindfolds and their hands cuffed together in mittens, sitting on their knees in an unbearable position in open-air cages surrounded by razor wire, under military watch. If you’re not, you can google them.
Back to my 2017 visit to Guantánamo. Commander Clarke and his officers told reporters it was important for us to send the message that prisoners were then being treated humanely and according to the Geneva Conventions, one of whose articles establishes that “prisoners of war must at all times be protected [...] against insults and public curiosity”. For this reason, he argued, we couldn’t talk to the men nor photograph her faces.
We could, instead, watch, take pictures and record them (taking care not to show their faces). We could peep at the men through a dark, one-way window, and were instructed to be silent so that they wouldn’t know they were being watched as they prayed and had supper in a communal space in Camp VI. We just couldn’t talk or interview them. We couldn’t make their voices heard – a curious interpretation of what “public curiosity” is.
A short video posted on X by the current White House shows how US authorities dehumanise and mock undocumented migrants, who are seen being shackled as they board a deportation flight. Captioned ‘ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight’, the video includes footage of chains jingling as they’re pulled from a box and attached to a person. ASMR stands for “autonomous sensory meridian response” and is used to describe a pleasant physical feeling triggered by videos with unusual sounds.
Lawless cruelty isn’t new, but it can get worse.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/guantanamo-trump-detain-migrants-history-hiv-refugees-cuba-haiti-us/
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