It was Christopher Columbus himself who first rendered the name Guantanamo in a European language, and the British once held the bay as a trophy from the War of Jenkin's Ear. Its history with regards to the United States is inexorably tied to a guy whose face is carved on Mount Rushmore, and its current status as a tenaciously-secretive playground for School of the Americas aficionados is based upon some of the most imperialistic documents of the entire Era of the Big Stick.
Guantanamo Bay's unique and convoluted history is, ultimately, what formed the basis for the landmark Supreme Court decision in 2004 that reversed government-favoring lower court rulings and found that that the human beings incarcerated there were, in fact, under the jurisdiction of US courts - proving that finding out more about the story behind the gulag is a key component to getting the place shut down. I invite you to take a look at Guantanamo's historia trieste, if you'll just step into this-here Cave of the Moonbat...
Geography and Stuff
Okay, we can do this part old-school, [Pony Express-style http://theimpeachproject.com/phpBB2/index.php]. Here's what the Bay looks like without human lines:
And here's what it looks like to an administration looking for an extraterritorial limbo and authoritarian playpen:
For all you absolute-location enthusiasts out there, Guantanamo lies at 19°54' N, 75°9' W; and for those who dig their geography from a slightly more relative perspective, it lies at the extreme southeastern tip of Cuba, its mouth opening southward to the Caribbean Sea. It is more than 350 miles closer to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, than it is to Havana, whose harbor on the northwestern coast of island looks northward to the Gulf of Mexico and the Strait of Florida.
Given the site's location, elevation, and climate, it probably doesn't come as a surprise that the place is a citrus cornucopia. Though mangrove swamps anchor the waterlogged shorelines of the bay, both imported and native trees flourish inland, and those residents of the Base who don't live in cages enjoy bountiful harvests of mangos, limes, and most of the other ingredients needed to make drinks that mix well with rum.
Of the fauna that might be visible to the incarcerees at Rush's Club Gitmo (TM, I presume), probably the most ironically numerous are the free-flying birds. Mundane and spectacular species alike call Guantanamo home for at least part of the year, as do sea turtles, spiny lobsters, and other marine life. Surprisingly, the fishing's reputed to be not so great: the nearness of the offshore shelf (the very thing that makes it such a good deep-water port for Navy ships) means that the coast is comparatively short on shallow reefs. And crocodiles? Maybe a few are left in the slow-moving rivers, but no one's going to be naming any more nearby towns Caimanera anytime soon.
Don't Be Afraid to Meet the Taino - You Already Know a Few Words of Their Language!
In 1492, as Ferdinand and Isabella were decreeing that Jews were no longer welcome in the newly-reconquisted kingdom of Spain, 5 Taino caciques divided the island of Cuba amongst themselves. These chieftains, whose largest population centers were likely in the 3000-5000 inhabitant range, were part of a larger culture that had its origins in South America as relatives of the far-flung Arawak-speaking tribes, who are often identified as the "indians" with whom Columbus first interacted.
When Mr. October 12th first met them, the Taino controlled the islands nowadays known as Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and the Bahamas (from whose Taino name - Lucays - is derived the word South-Florida word "Cay"). The word "Taino" is actually Arawakan for "friendly people," and was used by Columbus to distinguish the more pacifistic northern island tribes from the overtly-hostile Carib groups to the south. Besides Guantanamo and a lot of other, less nefarious place names around the Greater Antilles, the Taino also bequeathed unto Spanish and English the words barbacoa, hamaca, tabaco, canoa, yuca,and Huracan.
The Taino hunted with bows (sometimes using poison-tipped arrows), and fished using hemp and cotton nets. Though war was known among them, often rival groups would settle matters using a Mesoamerican-inspired ball game, and at least one anthropological school holds that certain branches of Voodoo (Petwo?) were profoundly influenced by the polytheistic religion of the Taino - but as some of Guantanamo's most recent inhabitants can attest, spirituality has its limitations when it is a warrior's only shield against a technologically superior and morally unencumbered enemy.
Let the Karmic Carnage Commence!
Having enriched their language at the native Cuban's expense, the Spanish next sought to enrich their purses. From his base on Hispaniola, Governor Columbus decreed that the appropriate punishment for a Taino who failed to provide the Spanish with the required annual quota of gold (an amount due from every native islander over the age of 14), was mutilation or execution. Don't bring the Admiral of the Ocean Sea enough gold, eh? Off with her hands!
Later, after every flake of gold dust on the surface of every Christian-held island had been picked up by a Taino and delivered to a Spaniard, the conquistadors enslaved the native survivors and forced them to dig for more. Tens of thousands - perhaps hundreds of thousands - died in the mines in the decades after the Spanish arrival. To this death toll must also be added the horrific consequences of disease transmission from the plate-armored Typhoid Marys to the clean-living Indians - whose sense of hygiene and lack of inoculating prior exposure to the Eurasian petri dish left them physiologically incapable of dealing with the disease-ridden miasma that enshrouded the Europeans of the time.
The numbers totaling the native people who died during the first few decades of the European invasion of the Caribbean vary widely: it seems that anywhere between 200,000 and 3 million Taino may have perished by 1540, and by the end of the 16th century, the Taino had been more or less obliterated entirely. Having exhausted its readily accessible supply of slaves by working them to death and massacring them as an example to others, the Spanish would have to turn to a new source of enslaved human beings for the next wave of unwilling immigrants to Cuba.
At least one European voice speaks to us through the ages regarding the mistreatment of the powerless and the profaned of the Caribbean islands. Writing in 1561 about a trip he took to the Indies in 1508, Father Bartolome de Las Casas might or might not be exaggerating some numbers, but he asks a still-relevant question in his History of the Indies:
"There were 60,000 people living on this island (when I arrived in 1508), including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this?"
Source: Wikipedia; emphasis mine
Who, indeed?
Of Severed Body Parts and Dubious Wars
In 1729, England signed the Treaty of Seville with Spain, in which it promised not to trade with any of Spain's colonies in the New World - your basic mercantilist trade agreement. Ever mindful of its slipping status as a first-rate power, Spain insisted on verifiability that the Brits were living up to their end of the bargain. To mollify the rich-but-fading Iberian empire, England agreed to allow Spaniards to board and inspect British ships encountered in Spanish waters.
These incidents were about as pleasant and cordial as all the other times when one nation applies its unilateral, ham-handed declarations upon a proud and un-intimidated upstart. To wit, when the guarda costa boarded the brig Rebecca in 1731, the conversation devolved to the point that the Spanish commander cut off one of the ears of the brig's skipper, Robert Jenkins.
Historiorant: The actual circumstances surrounding Mr. Jenkins' amputation are debatable; some historians say Jenkins lost his ear in the pillory and that the "evidence" that he later publicly produced was, in fact, the ear of a pig. Still, the wag-the-dog effect of subsequent events makes the saber-based, human-ear story the more historically relevant one.
Not having a right-wing echo chamber or a far-bloviating cadre of sheepherders like Faux News to help the story of the captain's need for national vengeance grow legs, little was done about the affront to British sovereignty for about seven years after Jenkins first filed his report. Like Achmed Chalabi, though, the mariner was patient, and in 1738, he finally got a chance to address the House of Commons. There, at the end of an eloquent speech, he dangled before the shocked (and outraged! - outraged, I tell you!) MPs a little scrap of leathery-looking something-or-other that he claimed was the actual ear that he had lost to Spanish deprivations.
To show how bloody indignant they were at this nearly decade-old affront to all things British, Parliament instructed a reluctant Prime Minister Robert Walpole to declare war on Spain in 1739. The so-called War of Jenkins' Ear had an Afghanistan-in-late-2001 lock on the headlines until 1742, when it was relegated to sideshow status by the much broader War of Terra War of Austrian Succession that by then was engulfing Europe.
The British won the first major battle at Puerto Bello, Panama, in late 1739, when they caught at unawares the garrison at Spain's major transit port for South American silver. The city, which had been a thriving port and an important facet of the Spain's New World trade, was mercilessly looted, and would not recover economically until after the construction of the Panama Canal in the early 20th century. For his part, the admiral who devised the attack, Edward Vernon, was in 1740 invited back to the capitol for a proper fete thrown by a war king: Portobello Road in London takes its name from this battle, and the dinner honoring its victor marks the first public performance of God Save the King.
With joementum on his side, "Old Grog" Vernon (seriously, that was his nickname) next set his sights on Cartagena. There, in 1741, he was turned back by a fierce Spanish- and Indian defense after a month-long siege, and so retreated with heavy losses. He then went to the area of Guantanamo Bay, seeking to use it as a staging area for moves on some less prickly Spanish fruit at the southern Cuban city of Santiago. That assault, too, failed, but so did Spanish counter-attacks in Georgia and Florida, and the war ran out of steam due to lack of troops, resources, and mother-country commitment. During the brief period that the British controlled the area, America's future human rights-free zone was renamed Cumberland Bay, but it resumed its traditional moniker after the 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle reaffirmed Spanish hegemony throughout Cuba.
Mr. Monroe and his Doctrine
U.S. claims to uncontested control over a piece of sovereign Cuban territory (and the rationales behind 30 military interventions and 47 covert or indirect operations since 1846) can be traced back to the Prince Metternich-at-the-Congress of Vienna era of global realpolitick. In December, 1823, during his 7th Annual Message to Congress, President James Monroe first expressed the newly-realized foreign policy notion that the United States should be the sole decider in all matters regarding European powers and their colonial ambitions in the Western Hemisphere. Its original text does not seek to establish US suzerainty over the countries of this side of the planet; it simply sought to close South America and the Caribbean to any European adventurism there.
(Weird Historical Sidenote: The principal architect of the Monroe Doctrine was not Monroe, but the misanthropic junior member of the only other father-son double-whammy to ever afflict the White House. Ironically, when John Quincy Adams did finally get his turn in the presidential mansion, it was under a cloud of suspicion, bad feelings, and political chicanery: The election of 1824 has borne the moniker "Corrupt Bargain" ever since the inside-the-bridlepath crowd of the time colluded to keep the dangerously populist Andrew Jackson from occupying the White House).
Monroe did not claim the western half of the planet for the Stars and Stripes primarily because most of the world map - not to mention his little side of it - was a genuine political and military mess in 1823. Europe was still picking up the pieces after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815 (determining who was in control of Spain was an especially contentious issue), Asia and Africa were imperialist jigsaw puzzles, and in South America, colonies were declaring independence at a muy alarming rate. From Jose de San Martin in Argentina to Simon Bolivar in Venezuela, los pobres were just saying "no" to viceregal rule. In Mexico, the peasants led and the criollos followed, when former Spanish general Augustin de Iturbide revolted against the crown in a decade-late response to Padre Hidalgo's Grito de Dolores and declared himself Emperor of an independent Mexico in 1823.
(Optional Historical Context Excursion: The "Cry of Dolores," one of the great rabble-rousing speeches of the Enlightenment, is what started Mexico on the path to independence in 1810. Though Hidalgo did not live to see the final retreat of the Spanish - executed, head displayed on pole in 1811 - history would later be forced to acknowledge that it was the ringing of a church bell and the public proclamation of "Long live our Lady of Guadalupe! Death to bad government! Death to the gachupines!" that launched the first of several armies to descend on Mexico City while the US was busily fighting England (again) and Spain was engaged in tumultuous rivalry with France (again)).
In the context of the geopolitical situation of the time, the Monroe Doctrine was a rather audacious ploy. Since the US would likely not be able to enforce it if the Europeans decided to come in force, Monroe had to calculate the risk of having his bluff called. Against the chance to set a precedent of big brother-like protectionism over the independent nations of Latin America at the moment of their inception, President Monroe judged the gamble worth it - and Presidents with varying degrees of morality have been thanking him for it ever since.
The Transmogrification of a Doctrine
Cuba and most of Spain's other possessions in the Caribbean remained in the hands of the Crown as the dust settled on the 1830's and 40's; Guantanamo's date with doctrinal destiny was still almost 60 years in the future when Monroe's policy was first twisted out of the context by an American with imperialist ambitions. The policy's survival had been ensured when it was discovered that the British Navy would enforce it in exchange for only a few minor concessions, and it was trotted out in 1836 by Americans indignant over England's coziness with the brand-new Lone Star Republic, but the first guy to really base a stand on the Monroe's idea was James K. Polk in 1845. By selectively reading his predecessor's quarter-century old phrases, Polk turned Monroe's hoary speech into a justification for Manifest Destiny as a national policy.
Selective reading of the document also seemed to be the case in 1852, when Southerners were scrambling to maintain sectional parity with the North when it came to admitting new states. The conquest of Cuba and its admission as a slave-holding territory was considered and rejected by Congress, and foreign policy in general was shelved as Kansas bled and the Civil roared nigh. In 1864, as then-General Grant ground his way toward Richmond and Sherman burned his way across Georgia, Americans looked southward long enough to declare the French puppet regime of Maximilian in violation of the Monroe Doctrine (the first broad application if the term), and in the 1870s, was used by now-President Grant to forbid the transfer of colonies between Euro-powers.
Map-monkeying was found to be the exclusive province of the United States in 1895, when Secretary of State Richard Olney - the sycophantic policy-justifier (a la Attorney General Gonzalez.) of his day - opined so. In 1902, the foreign minister of Argentina expanded Monroe's doctrine considerably when he presumed to speak for all of Latin America in his own Drago Doctrine, in which he declared the Western Hemisphere under blanket protection from the US against European armies sent to collect on national debts. The broadest interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine would come with the intervention-justifying Roosevelt Corollary in 1904, but now I'm getting a little ahead of the Guantanamo story...
Paradise Bleeding
Though there were sporadic revolts against European rule throughout the 1800s, Cuba remained within Spain's grasp. Given that these revolts were increasingly successful as the century wore on, that grasp was increasingly tightened until the point in the 1890s at which General Weylar, military governor of the island, developed and implemented a system of "camps" in which to "concentrate" captured enemy troops and civilians suspected of supporting them. So it is that Cuban history provides us the first use of the term "concentration camp." Bitterly ironic, that.
In 1895, a bunch of exiled anti-government leaders landed with troops at Baracoa, and used cavalry and guerilla tactics to swiftly expand across the entire island. Though most of the funding and material support for the insurgent effort was being sent from exile groups in the United States, it was the US that interdicted the lion's share of these shipments: the Coast Guard stopped 33 of 71 re-supply missions. Of the remainder, 23 got through and 5 were stopped by Spain. In the US, a great deal was made of the few Spanish inspections; the Malkins of the time infuriated one another by passing around newspaper clippings showing stark naked American women standing humiliated before leering Spanish officers.
The situation on the island was destabilizing and getting worse when President McKinley was prompted by pro-Spanish "Voluntario" rioting in Havana to dispatch the battleship Maine to keep an eye on things. When that ship exploded under mysterious circumstances - later found to be a design flaw - on February 15, 1898, the Fox News team of the day, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer - raced each other to the yellow bottom of journalistic propagandizing. Public opinion forced McKinley into asking for war, and on April 25th, Congress obliged him (though they later passed a resolution backdating the declaration of war to April 20th).
Among the rabidly nationalistic imperialists of the turn of the century, the war was a "splendid little" thing. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Teddy Roosevelt, for example, saw it as an opportunity for battlefield glory and resigned his post to organize an all-volunteer cavalry unit he named the Rough Riders. These he took to Cuba (though without their horses), and landed between Guantanamo and the city of Santiago. The overall objective, finally arrived at after a period of bumbling and uncoordinated military actions, was the capture of the city, but the landings also had the effect of isolating and later compelling the surrender of the Spanish garrison in the Guantanamo region.
The Rough Rider charge up San Juan and Teakettle hills outside Santiago actually occurred on foot, and would not have been remotely successful had not the Americans brought along their five Gatling guns, but the American spirit of the time had a great fondness for epically noble battlefield stuff, and Teddy rode the coattails of his victory to being named McKinley's running mate in the election of 1900, in which the pro-imperialists vociferously defeated a vocal opposition represented by William Jennings Bryan and Adlai E. Stevenson I. When in 1901 McKinley, who was not nearly the frothing-at-the-mouth conqueror that Teddy would be, was shot in the gut by a miserable loner who thought the President owed him a job, the task of interpreting Mr. Monroe's Doctrine fell unexpectedly into the hands of the 42 year-old Roosevelt.
(Historiorant: For those interested in the "other" theater of the Spanish-American War, I did a diary on it a few months back. It's called HfK: This Very Evening, 107 Years Ago - I'd love to provide a link, but the diary archive on my Kos page can't seem to move beyond the 10-12 that are on the first screen. Che sera, sera, I guess)
What "Walk Softly and Carry a Big Stick" Really Means
Since the turn of the century marks America's entrance into the power politics and military one-upsmanship of the world's imperial powers game, the documents of that era form much of the basis for today's foreign policy. In some cases, the harshest aspects of dollar diplomacy have since been abandoned or had their talons judiciously clipped by later courts and Congresses, but the core elements remain. The US footprint in Panama is just one current example; Guantanamo is another.
If you were fool enough to believe Colorado Senator Henry Teller in 1898, you'd've never thunk that the US would ever presume to "own" Guantanamo Bay, or any other part of Cuba for that matter. In an amendment he attached to the bill authorizing war against Spain (the amendment was introduced on April 11, 1898, and passed on the 19th), In it, Teller (and a majority of the Senate) promised that the United States would stand down and hand back the island just as soon as the Cubans stood up. The Teller Amendment foreswore permanent US control of Cuba, and went on to say, in part, that the United States...
"hereby disclaims any disposition of intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said island except for pacification thereof, and asserts its determination, when that is accomplished, to leave the government and control of the island to its people."
Source
By 1901, of course, such naïveté had gone right out the window; Preznittin' in the Imperial Age was hard, see, an' if a country wanted ta' play on th' world stage, well, some eggs'uz gonna hafta git broke. These pre-Maine-mindset eggs included things like the wimpy Teller Amendment, which was replaced with the far ballsier Platt Amendment in March, 1901.
In fact, Platt's amendment to the 1901 funding measure supporting the post-war occupation of Cuba was so ballsy that the incarcerees at Guantanamo can trace the ground beneath their very cages to it. At the behest of Secretary of War Elihu Root, Senator of Connecticut Orville Platt submitted to Congress one of the most vile pieces of imperialist legislation ever conceived as part of a Republican re-visioning of the US-Cuba relationship. The Platt Amendment stipulated that:
Cuba would cede the naval base at Guantanamo Bay to the United States
Cuba would not transfer Cuban land to any entity other than the United States
Cuba could not contract foreign debt that it couldn't pay for
Gave the US the right to intervene in Cuban affairs as the US saw fit
and
Cuba was not permitted to negotiate treaties with nations other than the US
When Roosevelt withdrew the Marines in 1902 - leaving a few at Guantanamo, of course - a few among the Cuban power elite cautiously came out in support of the US policy. In 1903, the Cuban-American Treaty (the enabling legislation for the Platt provisions) was signed by a Cuban toady named Tomas Estrada Palma, who had the Platt amendment basically written into the new Cuban constitution. US economic suzerainty over Cuba was ensured through manipulation of the sugar market, and the Marines only had to be sent in a couple of times over the next few decades.
Good Neighbors and Guantanamo Bay
The next Roosevelt to inhabit the White House was inclined to try to undo some of the foreign policy damage done in Latin America during the reign of his relative. Accordingly, FDR's "Good Neighbor" policies were extended to Cuba, which took the opportunity to revisit and repeal the hated 1903 treaty. Well, repeal almost all of it - the US would not allow Guantanamo to be put on the table. In pigheadedly sticking to the immediate demands of the Navy, the US was effectively manufacturing nationalist ammunition for Fidel Castro to use in a revolution still 20 years off - diplomatic insults capped with territorial claims tend to remain long in a national memory.
Guantanamo remains in US hands on the basis that the contract for the lease (Cuba doesn't cash the checks) on the base can only be revoked by both parties, meaning the land belongs to Washington until Washington says it doesn't. Cuba has attempted to find legal recourse to having a foreign power declare gulag rights on her sovereign soil, basing its claim on Article 52 of 1959 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. This article states that treaties are void if they were procured by the threat or use of force, but the United States has responded that Guantanamo was freely given by a Cuban president who was not being coerced, but was, in fact, just being a good little sell-out. And almost lost in the discussion is what role the idea of "implied threat of force" - eg, rattling the big stick - played in Cuban decision-making in 1903 and afterwards.
Historiorant
The history of the US possession of the Guantanamo Bay naval base is like the current operations there: repugnantly imperialistic, an anachronism from an era that is best remembered as a warning, rather than an example. The base is held on the shakiest of legal arguments, its status as an extraterritorial limbo makes is the perfect Black Hole, and the star-chamber secrecy surrounding it is a blight on all things American. Guantanamo Bay must be shut down.
The Pony Express has organized a campaign around accomplishing just that. You can show your solidarity with the effort by wearing an orange bandana as an armband on Fridays, or by reading and following the links in outstanding recent diaries by Avila.