If you want to understand Guantánamo in the age of the War on Terror, you need to understand it in the age of Clinton and Bush Senior. In the early 1990s, the American naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, became home to thousands of refugees fleeing from Haiti. Parts of the base were converted to refugee camps, where Haitians lived in squalor, and awaited permission to emigrate to the United States. The problem only got worse when several hundred refugees tested positive for HIV. At the time, federal law prevented anyone with the virus from moving to the US.
As Jonathan Hansen writes in Guantánamo: An American History, it was at this juncture that "the US government first broached the idea of exploiting Guantánamo Bay's ambiguous political and legal status to deny constitutional protections to individuals detained at the naval base". If the government could argue the base was neither US nor Cuban territory, then Haitian refugees would have fewer constitutional protections, such as a right to counsel, and their applications for asylum would be easier to refuse.
As a presidential candidate, Bill Clinton excoriated president George H W Bush's treatment of Haitian asylum seekers. But as Hansen documents, Clinton's administration continued the policies of his predecessor, and the Justice Department repeatedly went to court to argue that the Constitution did not apply at Guantánamo Bay. They were defeated in lower courts, but the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in the department's favour. However, support from high-profile lawyers and celebrities, along with leaked video of guards beating refugees, forced Clinton to change course and Haitian refugees were finally allowed to enter the US.
The Haitian episode stands as an ominous precursor to the post-9/11 life of Guantánamo Bay, in which the US naval base has become home to a notorious prison camp for detainees in the War on Terror. Although we are told that guards and interrogators no longer engage in torture, successive administrations have ensured that its detainees remain largely free of the protections provided by the US Constitution and the Geneva Conventions.
Marooned in a lawless place, Gitmo detainees are now subject to the psychic torture of not knowing if, or how, they could ever be freed. With the advent of indefinite detention, secret evidence files and military tribunals, terms like "innocent" and "guilty" have been made superfluous. And with Barack Obama having signed indefinite detention into law, there is a real chance that some of the 170 men still imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay may die there of old age, joining the five prisoners who have committed suicide.
As Hansen's indispensable book makes clear, the history of US involvement at Guantánamo Bay is long, complex and frequently injurious to all involved. The US has, he argues, gained some benefits from its 108-year occupation of a 45-square-mile section of land in southeastern Cuba. The harbour at Guantánamo has provided useful refuge from storms and, during the Second World War, became an essential site for refuelling naval ships. After the rise of Fidel Castro, Gitmo was sometimes the only point of contact between American and Cuban officials. But more often, the base has served as a symbol of American imperialism and, for Cubans, a reminder of outsiders' persistent designs on the island.
Christopher Columbus landed in Guantánamo in 1494, and within two decades, Spanish colonists had established several settlements and massacred thousands of native Taíno. Over the next few centuries, Great Britain, and eventually the United States, showed frequent interest in taking control of the island.
In June 1823, James Monroe wrote to Thomas Jefferson that "too much importance could not be attached to" Cuba. A few months later, Jefferson wrote to James Madison that Cuba was "the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of states". Both saw it as essential to promoting and safeguarding trade in the Gulf of Mexico. Hansen cites Cuba as inspiration for the Monroe Doctrine, which declared American primacy in the Western Hemisphere and warned European nations against outside interference.
As the United States' borders reached the Pacific, its leaders' interest in Cuba persisted. In 1848, Jefferson Davis, future president of the Confederacy, stated: "Cuba must be ours to increase the number of slaveholding constituencies." In 1854, after failing to buy Cuba from Spain, president Franklin Pierce ordered three of his ambassadors to concoct a plan to take possession of the island. The outcome of their deliberations, the Ostend Manifesto, declared: "Cuba is as necessary to the North American republic as any of its present members."
In February 1895, on the pretext of a geological survey, the USS Columbia sailed into Guantánamo Bay, spending several days there. Within three years, the United States and Spain would be at war, prompted by the suspicious sinking of the USS Maine, and on the pretext of freeing the Cuban people from Spanish tyranny. By August 1898, the Spanish empire was sundered, its colonies in the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico and Cuba seized by the United States, which now found itself in possession of a string of islands on which it could establish coaling stations for its growing navy.
Hansen's book is very good at showing the delicate political machinations under way in the post-war period, as the nascent US empire began to grasp its military strength. Between sketches of various political factions, we learn how US assistance in a war of independence turned into an occupation.
President McKinley's claims of "singular intimacy" with Cuba were frequently a cover for meddling with the inchoate Cuban state. A list of demands from US secretary of war Elihu Root - which included anything from prohibitions against Cuba amassing debt to requiring US permission for Cuba to negotiate with foreign countries - eventually became the notorious Platt Amendment. This piece of legislation allowed the United States to intervene at will in Cuban affairs and to lease the site at Guantánamo Bay. Despite protests in both countries, Cuba eventually adopted the amendment. They had little choice: ratification was a prerequisite for the end of the American military occupation; without it, American forces would never leave.
Over the next few decades, Cuba became a playground for American tourists, and American investment soared. The base also grew, becoming a small city in its own right. Guantánamo boomed during the Second World War, when the US Navy gave a $37 million contract to Frederick Snare Corporation to upgrade the base's facilities. In a portent of things to come, the contractor was accused of barbarous labour practices but "claimed immunity from both US and Cuban labour standards and laws".
During Gitmo's pre-Castro "golden age", the base was a highly valued posting where American sailors and their families could find cheap domestic help and abundant leisure activities. But this idyll had a dark side: Hansen presents frequent examples of abuse, racism and sexism, to go along with the alcoholism and marital instability that plagued families on base.
Out of this ferment, Hansen unearths the fascinating story of Charles Ryan, a 19-year-old American who tagged along after his father was posted to Guantánamo. In the mid-1950s, Ryan became one of a number of Gitmo residents disgusted by the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. At that time, Fidel Castro was not a confirmed communist, and his band of revolutionaries was one of several that received clandestine aid from some US residents of the base.
But on February 17, 1957, Ryan went a step further, trekking off to the mountains of eastern Cuba to take up arms alongside Castro. Ryan's story—which entails sneaking past military checkpoints, mountain firefights and meetings with Che Guevara —is among the book's finest sections, not least because it takes a thorough look at the youthful, utopian Castro, before he instituted a dictatorship of his own.
In the years before September 11, 2001, Gitmo was at "minimum pillar", essentially operated by a skeleton crew. After the 9/11 attacks, there were some rumblings that the base would take on a new role, but, in the words of one officer stationed there at the time, "no one would be so dumb as to bring detainees here". Instead, the Bush administration pursued "a politicisation of national security policy at the expense of expertise". Guantánamo soon became an open-air prison.
Along with interviews with former personnel, Hansen collates much of the extant material charting how Gitmo became synonymous with torture. Hansen does leave out some inculpating details; for example, he quotes heavily from James Yee, a Muslim US Army chaplain who was harassed by soldiers at Gitmo, but he doesn't mention that Yee was arrested on bogus espionage charges and kept for 76 days in solitary confinement, only to be vindicated and honourably discharged. But overall, Hansen's discussion of Gitmo's role in the War on Terror is blistering, drawing from both ends of the political spectrum to illustrate the moral, legal and strategic disaster the base has been.
Among his most vivid testimonials, Hansen quotes Joseph Marguiles, a lawyer who has worked with prisoners on death row. In his own book, Marguiles writes: "I have never been to a more disturbing place than the prison at Guantánamo. It is a place of indescribable sadness, where the abstract enormity of "forever" becomes concrete: this windowless cell; that metal cot; those steel shackles".
Currently, 89 Guantánamo prisoners have been cleared for release, but Congress has prevented their discharge. They are trapped in this Kafkaesque "forever", part of the United States's "detention archipelago", which stretches from Gitmo to Bagram to places unknown. No one can say when, or even if, it will end.
Jacob Silverman is a contributing editor for the Virginia Quarterly Review. His work has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The New Republic.