By Michael Faulkner – January 25, 2009
By the time you read this Barack Obama will have been President of the
United States for nearly two weeks. It is not only in the United States, but
throughout the whole world that great things are expected of him. The world’s
farewell to his predecessor may be aptly summed up in two words: Good Riddance.
It will be left to the writers of Bush’s political obituaries to decide which
position to accord him amongst the worst three or four presidents of all time.
In two weeks from now he will be a fast-fading bad memory. But the burden he
has placed on his successor is a huge and a grave one.
One needs only to recite the problems that top the list to get an idea of
how formidable his task will be: the global financial and economic crisis;
climate change; Iraq; Afghanistan; Israel-Palestine and the Middle East. In
every one of these cases the legacy of the Bush administration is a poisoned
chalice for Obama. But over all of them looms the terrible damage inflicted on
the reputation of the U.S. throughout the world by the previous
administration’s assault on civil liberties and human rights both in the United
States and abroad. The abuse of human rights and the use of torture in the name
of the ‘war on terror’ are grimly expressed in the names ‘Abu Ghraib’ and
‘Guantanamo’.
It has been reported that on his first day in office Obama intends to issue
executive orders explicitly banning the use of torture and calling for the
closure of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay. All further military commissions
and hearings at the camp are to be suspended pending closure. So, by the time
you read this (25th January) I assume such orders will have been
issued. None too soon.
Guantanamo Bay: a forgotten shameful
history.
The detention centre in Cuba has rightly been described as a ‘moral and
legal black hole’ where, beyond the protection of the media and international
law, human rights have been persistently violated. The U.N. demanded in 2006
that the camp should be closed. But, in all the coverage that has been given to
the appalling treatment suffered by detainees at Guantanamo, one question seems
never to be asked: how does the United States come to have a naval base in Cuba
in the first place?
The answer is that the base at Guantanamo Bay has been held for more than
one hundred years on the basis of an unequal treaty imposed on Cuba following
its independence from Spain. By the Treaty of Paris, 1899, at the conclusion of
the Spanish-American war, the U.S. took Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the
Philippines from Spain. Secretary of State, John Hay, celebrated the outcome of
‘a splendid little war.’
Cuba was the last colony in the Americas to break free from Spanish rule
following a bitter and prolonged struggle that reached its climax in 1898.
There is no doubt that the Cubans, unaided, could have achieved complete
independence from Spain, but the blowing up of the USS Maine in Havana harbour
provoked a U.S. intervention, which, within a few months led to the end of
Spanish colonial rule in Cuba. Ostensibly, the intervention was to help the
Cubans win their independence. In fact, the outcome was to turn Cuba into a
colony of the United States in all but name.
In 1899, following the evacuation of Spanish troops, an American military
occupation under General Leonard Wood, was instituted. In 1901 Wood imposed a
constitution on Cuba which virtually dictated the terms of a treaty with the
United States. The U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, a prime strategic location on
the far east of the island, came out of this unequal treaty.
The so-called ‘Platt Amendment’ was forced on the Cuban constitutional
delegation. This was a set of articles passed by the U.S. Congress defining
Cuba’s relations with the United States. Every article in the Platt Amendment
restricted Cuban sovereignty. Article III gave the U.S. the right to military
intervention in Cuba. Article Vll compelled the Cuban government to ‘lease to
the U.S. the land necessary for coaling and naval stations at certain specific
points.’ It made clear to the Cubans that failure to incorporate the Platt
Amendment into the constitution of the new republic would result in a permanent
military occupation. The armed Cuban revolutionaries who had defeated Spain in
a liberation struggle lasting three years at a cost of the lives of an
estimated 10% of the population, were completely ignored.
The Platt Amendment remained in place for more than thirty years, during
which time successive corrupt governments did little or nothing to challenge
U.S. political and economic hegemony. In 1934, by which time there had been
several U.S. military interventions, a short-lived reforming government
succeeded in winning the abrogation of the Platt Amendment – with the sole exception of Article VII, which gave the U.S. the right to retain the naval base at Guantanamo Bay.
In 1959 Fidel Castro’s revolution overthrew the brutal and corrupt
dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, which from its inception in 1952 had enjoyed
the support of the United States. For the first time since 1902 Cuba now had a
government which was committed to full independence, political and economic,
from the U.S.A. But, as long as part of Cuban territory remained occupied by a
foreign power, independence was considered incomplete. Referring to the
pre-revolutionary period, New York Times journalist, Herbert Matthews, wrote in 1959:
‘The practical effect of the Platt Amendment – and
this was intentional – was to forestall a social revolution in Cuba and
ensure order and stability for Cubans and for American investors who were
acquiring huge tracts of land very cheaply and embarking on banking and
economic control of Cuba.’
Concerning Guantanamo the record of U.S.-Cuban relations since 1959 is
instructive. Even before Castro’s victory, the Eisenhower administration in
1958 allowed Batista’s planes to refuel at the base and loaded them with bombs,
which were used against the guerrillas and civilian population. Three hundred
rocket warheads were delivered to Batista’s forces through Guantanamo despite
the U.S. promise to stop arms supplies to his regime in March 1958.
After 1960 presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy did all they could to overthrow
Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government. The acts of sabotage, attempts to assassinate
Castro and the U.S. sponsored invasion at the Bay of Pigs, are all well
documented. They all failed. An economic blockade was imposed in 1961. It is
still in place. Immediately after the revolution Castro demanded the removal of
the Guantanamo naval base. In the early years before the 1962 missile crisis,
he feared – with good reason - that the U.S. might concoct a fake Cuban
attack on the base to provide a casus
belli for invasion. While scrupulously avoiding any unilateral action
against the Guantanamo base, Castro has never abandoned the demand for its
return to Cuba. During the crisis of October 1962, following Khrushchev’s
decision, under U.S. pressure and without consulting the Cubans, to withdraw
Soviet missiles from the island, he made no secret of his extreme displeasure
at what he regarded as the Soviet leader’s betrayal of trust and slight to Cuban dignity. To
Khrushchev’s annoyance, Castro stated that ‘nobody has a right to dispose of
Cuba’s sovereignty.’ The five point programme that he proposed to guarantee
peace in the Caribbean included the demand to end the economic embargo, and,
pointedly, for the withdrawal of the Guantanamo base. In 1989, when it was
already obvious that Soviet support for Cuba was about to end, he said,
referring to Guantanamo, ‘we are not even ninety miles away but just a few millimetres, a few microns from a
piece of our territory illegally occupied by them.’
It has taken the revelations of systematic abuse and torture of detainees to
draw the world’s attention to the ‘black hole’ of Guantanamo. The demand for
the detention camp to be closed, though essential, is insufficient. The very
existence of the U.S. naval base on Cuban soil is an affront to the Cuban
people. By any reasonable standards it is illegal. It symbolises the arrogance
and impunity of U.S. power throughout the whole hemisphere. Those who want to
see an end to such illegality should support the Cuban demand for a complete
withdrawal of the naval base and the return of the territory it occupies to the
Cuban people. 