Where is Guantánamo Bay?

 Guantánamo is a foreign country from whichever perspective you look at it. Send ’em to Cuba, you hear in the US (remember Mitt Romney’s beautiful ‘I’m glad they’re not on our soil. […] I think we ought to double Guantánamo…). In general, in the US, Gitmo is certainly in Cuba.

Ask a Cuban about the detention facility and they’ll have the same sense of distance and ignorance about it as anyone else. Guantánamo is not Cuba – it’s the US. It’s another country. Even for the folk who live, work or are incarcerated there, it’s another country. It’s another world.

What do Cuban people tend to say, not about the US occupation of the Bay (that much is fairly obvious), but about the abuses at Gitmo? Oddly enough, protests are minimal. From my recent experience, it seems that protests are a state exercise (posters protesting against the incarceration of the Cuban Five are everywhere). Individual or community protests against the Cuban state are understandably minimal, as the penalty for such activities is quite severe. I suppose, moreoever, in the UK we are accustomed to protesting in the presence of the those whom we’re protesting about; whether marching along Whitehall and past the gates of Downing Street; whether in front of the US Embassy or the Israeli Embassy; or past the Houses of Parliament in protest of the war. So I suppose, the absence of a direct audience in Cuba would make a protest less focused.

No Cuban that I have spoken to, nor any article I’ve read in Juventud Rebelde or Granma, shows any expectation of Guantánamo being returned to Cuba. Yes, it is leasehold (although in perpetuity), and thus is not so different from pre 1997 Hong Kong. But it is very different.

There is a conference being organised by Guantánamo city UNEAC in September/October this year entitled something like ‘somos todos de Guantánamo’. What could the objectives of this gathering be? It seems highly pie-in-the-sky for citizens of Guantánamo or Caimanera to assume that they have anything in common with any individual along the lengthy and complex chain of command in the base, from commanding officers, to interrogators, camp wardens, military police, McDonalds and Starbucks employees, gardeners, etc. Could they infer that they have something in common with the detainees? This seems even more fantastic. Who owns the land? Cuba. How does ownership differ from sovereignty? This is the tricky question, as sovereignty is seen as allied to jurisdiction. Whose jurisdiction? NOBODY’S – THAT’S THE WHOLE ISSUE. Outside of Geneva protocol, outside of International Law, outside of US federal law, outside of Cuban jurisdiction, outside of the jurisdiction of any of the native countries of the detainees. Who owns Guantánamo Bay? Guantánamo Bay. Whose jurisdiction? Its own. Whose sovereignty? Its own. What an extraordinary beast.

Perhaps it’s really not of this earth.

Something Clive Stafford-Smith said that stuck in my mind, but which I cannot find reference to, is that one arrives on the Windward side of the Bay, and in order to visit Camp Delta, one is taken across the Bay in a ferry. He likens this to being rowed across the Stygian Lake by Charon…

More to follow

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