THE CASE OF GUANTANAMO BAY

By the late nineteenth century, U.S. commercial and military interests in Cuba and the wider Caribbean had deepened. When a Cuban uprising against Spanish control threatened to secure the island’s independence, American policymakers pursued military intervention, capitalizing on popular outrage at the mysterious explosion of the U.S.S. Maine, in Havana harbor, in February of 1898. In a nine-day battle for Guantánamo Bay, American soldiers, under Commander Bowman H. McCalla, and Cuban insurgents defeated the Spanish garrison. In June, the Cuban diplomat Manuel Sanguily wrote to a friend, “Now that they have seen Guantánamo, they will never renounce their control over it.”

He was not far off. The United States took possession of Guantánamo Bay through what might be called gunboat tenancy. While Cuba’s constitutional convention gathered in late 1900 and early 1901, Secretary of War Elihu Root listed provisions that “the people of Cuba should desire” for their constitution; these included granting the United States the right to intervene freely in Cuban affairs and access to land for naval bases. These demands went into the Platt Amendment, passed by the U.S. Senate on March 1, 1901, and submitted to the convention for adoption; the United States would withdraw its forces from the island only after the delegates incorporated it into their constitution. Cubans opposed the Platt Amendment in speech, pamphlet, and mass protest; Juan Gualberto Gómez, a delegate and a former general, charged that it would transform Cubans into a “vassal people.” Nevertheless, under pressure a divided convention adopted it.

The U.S. Navy moved quickly. Two 1903 agreements gave the United States control of forty-five square miles of land and water—a space about two-thirds the size of Washington, D.C.—for coaling and naval stations “and for no other purpose.” Rent was $2,000 a year, paid in gold; lacking a cutoff date, the lease was “for the time required.”

The terms were ambiguous from the start. Cuba retained “ultimate sovereignty,” for example, but the United States exercised “complete jurisdiction and control.” A second lease, signed in 1934, similarly embraced uncertainty. It raised the rent to $4,085, but provided no termination date. The agreement could be ended by American withdrawal or by a bilateral settlement, but not by Cuban action alone. The Navy had sprawled onto a thousand or so additional acres, but the new agreement did not say where they were: the base would continue occupying “the territorial area that it now has.”

At noon on December 10, 1903, the United States assumed “complete jurisdiction and control. Some Americans questioned the United States’ imposition of power beyond its borders. What would be the legal status of these newly conquered territories? Supreme Court Justice Melville Weston Fuller, dissenting in the 1901 Downes v. Bidwell case on the status of Puerto Rico, had warned that “if an organized and settled province of another sovereignty is acquired by the United States,” Congress would retain the power “to keep it, like a disembodied shade, in an intermediate state of ambiguous existence for an indefinite period.”

Others were more sanguine. As Woodrow Wilson, who was the president of Princeton at the time, put it in an April, 1907, address, “Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.” The corollary to this imperial proposition: once you wrested turf from somebody else, you found something to do with it.

The roughly twenty-year U.S. occupations of both Haiti and the Dominican Republic commenced with invasions from Guantánamo. The base was also useful to thousands of Cuban laborers who earned their livelihood on its wharfs and in its machine shops and warehouses.

Gitmo’s main purpose in the late nineteen-seventies and eighties was ostentatious, technological muscle-flexing: showing Cuba and the Soviets that the United States still held sway in the Caribbean, in what one captain called a “visible manifestation of interest.