From ‘yellow journalism’ to orange jumpsuits: the long, disastrous history of Guantánamo Bay
Abstract
Understanding how the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay came to operate as it has across the past twenty years, and how it came to epitomize American abandonment of constitutional ideals, can be considerably enhanced by a look at the longer, tangled history linking the U.S. and Cuba.
Beginning with the seizure of Guantánamo Bay during the Spanish-American War in 1898, the U.S. has claimed to promote civil and human rights through policies developed though interaction with leaders on the island. Time and again, pursuit of U.S. interests—economic, strategic, and geo-political—trumped human rights, independence, and self-determination for Cubans, despite U.S. public assurances to the contrary. Real U.S. policy implementation was another story entirely. Settlements after the war, like the 1901 Platt Amendment, promised protection for “life, property, and individual liberty,” but the U.S. took action that had the polar opposite effect, while American business interests were protected. The vicissitudes of the Partido Independiente de Color (PIC, or “Independent Party of Color), plus the stories of the so-called Guerra de razas of 1912, and the Cuban revolution of 1933, provide further evidence of the early twentieth century disconnect between U.S. political ideals and foreign policy actions.
When the detention center at Guantánamo opened on 11 January 2002, there were eerie parallels between the justifications and propagandistic double-speak used then and earlier U.S. posturing in Cuba. Surely the legal machinations of the Bush administration, especially those of the team justifying the rendition and detention program that GTMO symbolizes, were of a categorically different nature in scope and impact than those affecting Cuba in the early twentieth century. Still, the actions were consistent with the longer run trajectory of U.S. foreign policy. The public rhetoric of George W. Bush, plus the memoranda generated by individuals like Alberto Gonzalez (2002) and Donald Rumsfeld (2003), as well as the reports by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Committee on Armed Services (2008) and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (2014) illustrate the parallels.
This historical consistency can help explain two things: first, the complex set of causes that made the horrors at Guantánamo, and at other sites for the unconstitutional holding of detainees, possible. And second, the equally complex reasons why subsequent presidents, such as Barack Obama and Joseph Biden, while supporting the closure of Guantánamo in theory, have found it so mightily difficult to accomplish in practice.
Bio
William V. Hudon is Professor of History at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught since 1989. He completed a Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago in 1987. A specialist in early modern Italian history, most of his publications are in that field. For the past several years he has conducted research and taught a course on global religion and violence, spanning the period from ancient Mesopotamia to the present. His most recent work, co-authored with a colleague, Elizabeth Miller, explores the rhetorics of terror employed in the public statements of Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush.