The U.S. presence at Guantánamo has a sinister significance as a site of extraterritorial detention. Most people know the military base as an extralegal prison where nearly 800 men and children were indefinitely detained and systematically tortured amidst George W. Bush’s “War on Terror.” But Washington’s practice of mass incarceration at the base predates the arrival of those first blindfolded and jumpsuit-clad men in January of 2002. For over a century, the United States has coercively maintained the base against the wishes of the Cuban government, an arrangement prompting political and legal debates surrounding the territory’s ambiguous sovereignty. Over the 1990s, Washington seized on that opacity to transform the base into a theater of extraterritorial mass incarceration to hold tens of thousands of Haitian and Cuban asylum-seekers fleeing political violence and economic collapse in their home countries. That chapter in the base’s long history set the legal precedent for its subsequent use in the War on Terror.
Now, less than a year into the second Trump administration, Guantánamo carceral legacy has been revived amidst the federal government’s sweeping immigration crackdown. As of this summer, The Department of Homeland security has transferred an estimated 500 migrants to Guantánamo before deporting them elsewhere or returning them to immigrant detention centers in the continental U.S. The number of new prisoners passing through Guantánamo is alarming, though significantly less than the 30,000 immigrants Trump promised to send to the base upon first announcing his plan in January. Guantánamo’s long history thus marches on, with Washington using it as theater to carry out operations that would otherwise be illegal on U.S. soil — a place to solve the government’s security concern du jour while sidestepping accountability.
The United States first seized Guantánamo Bay in 1898, when Washington intervened in the last throes of Cuba’s thirty-year struggle for independence from Spain. Though the Cuban nationalists’ victory was all but assured, the United States entered the fray and swiftly imposed a military occupation over the island. As part of the terms ending the four-year-long occupation, Washington required that Cuba integrate something called the Platt Amendment into an appendix of the island’s 1901 constitution. The Platt Amendment stipulated the United States’ continued right to intervene in Cuba’s affairs whenever it deemed necessary, and mandated the lease of Guantánamo Bay with no termination date, to be annulled only upon the agreement of both the United States and Cuban governments. The stated purpose of the lease was to ensure that, by granting the U.S. a space for a coaling and naval station in perpetuity, it would “enable the United States to maintain the independence of Cuba.”