BEFORE Guantanamo Bay came to symbolise a more disquieting aspect of the War on Terror being waged by President Bush, it already had a strange recent history as a toehold of American adventurism dating back more than a century.
As the first detainees, all non-American, finally begin their trials on war crimes charges today before a tribunal of seven military officers, a useful primer is Guantanamo: Bay of Discord (Ocean Press) by a Cuban journalist, Roger Ricardo. This is a detailed view of the bay’s strange history and the oddity of America having a base in a country whose President it regularly denounces. However, despite living in Cuba, Ricardo presents both sides of the case for the base, one largely founded on treaties.
The US government first signed a permanent lease with the new state of Cuba in 1903 for mutual defensive purposes. It was ratified in 1934, giving America “complete jurisdiction and control” over the 735 acres, now including an 18-hole golf course and some interesting wildlife, for about $4,000 a year. Fidel Castro, who as Ricardo points out, has no other border with another territory, has never been happy with the arrangement and, in protest, refuses to cash the rent cheques.
The political geography of the base is also analysed in Across the Cactus Curtain: The Story of Guantanamo Bay (Putnam) by Theodore Mason, which takes its name from the sobriquet given to the watch towers, fencing, barbed wire and minefields that separate “Gitmo” from the rest of Cuba. Here is also a sober explanation for a political oddity. Mason is certainly used to writing about inhospitable places: his other books have been about the Antarctic.
Although much of the world has been unsettled by the fate of detainees at the base and the judicial process to which they are being subjected, American Gulag: Inside US Immigration Prisons (University of California Press) by Mark Dow puts it into a wider perspective. He has produced an piercing insight into the workings of the Immigration and Naturalisation Service, whose activities are largely invisible to Americans, but are highly so to immigrants and visitors. Dow travelled across the US, interviewing inmates, government officials and jailers to produce a highly critical portrait of an organisation that he suggests is both secretive and excessively powerful, holding immigrants in often inhumane conditions and subjecting to psychological torture those forced to wear the now familiar orange jumpsuits of detainees.
Advertisement
On a similar theme with similar testimonies is America’s Disappeared: Secret Imprisonment of Detainees and the War on Terror (Seven Stories Press) by Barbara Olshansky. Both books tend to bring out the outraged radical in everyone.