Friends,
Join us at the Capitol on
January 12 to tell Obama to close Camp Gitmo.
Kagiso,
Max
Monday, January 11, 2016
Send Obama to Gitmo
President Barack Obama signed an executive order on January 22,
2009, to close the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within a year.
Nearly six years later, the prison for terrorism suspects remains open. (Photo:
Getty Images)
President Obama should be given props for the progress made in
thawing US-Cuban relations, but there’s a piece of unfinished business that he
could—and should—still attend to: returning the US Naval Base in Guantanamo to
the Cuban people. In doing so, he could also solve another dilemma that has
plagued his administration: closing the Guantanamo prison.
In November 2015, CODEPINK brought 60 delegates to the city
of Guantánamo for an international conference about the abolition of foreign military
bases. To delve more into the impact of the Guantánamo naval base on the Cuban
people, we took a trip to Caimanera—a small town of 11,000 people that abuts
the US Naval Base on the southeastern coast of Cuba.
Caimanera is hot and humid. Small, colorful but dilapidated
houses pack the narrow town streets. There are crowded sidewalk cafes where
highly coveted WiFi is available. In the middle of town there’s an impressive
central plaza, decorated by statues of Cuban revolutionary heroes, and on the streets
around the square there are schools, a community cultural center, Committee of
the Defense of the Revolution offices, and more.
Since 1903, Caimanera has been a neighbor to a 73-square-mile US
naval base. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Caimanera bustled with
visiting American civilians and Marines from the base who poured million of
dollars into the tourist industry—mostly from bars and prostitution. Thousands
of Cubans were employed on the naval base. After the revolution led by Fidel
Castro, the US severed relations with Cuba and US military personnel were
restricted to the base. The Cuban government stopped cashing the US annual
$4,085 rent checks and demanded that the land be returned to the Cuban people.
As our buses pulled into the town, it was as if the entire
community had come out to greet us. Men in suits, women in work uniforms,
people holding large banners calling for the closure of foreign military bases,
and hundreds of children in their school uniforms all lined the streets, smiling
at us and waving Cuban flags. In fact, the whole town had come out to greet us,
and they looked positively thrilled.
We spent the day touring the town with the mayor of the town and
the governor of the province of Guantánamo. We visited a lookout point where we
could see Cuba’s unwelcome neighbor through binoculars. The US naval base, we
were told, is an illegal occupation of Cuban land that violates the territorial
sovereignty of the island. The base sits on a critical part of the bay that
would vastly improve the local economy if the land were returned. They believe,
as Raul Castro has said, that the closure of the base is a condition for the
full normalization of relations between the two nations.
One part of the US Naval Base that our Cuban hosts found to be
particularly egregious is the infamous Camp X-Ray and the other buildings that
form the US military prison that has housed 779 prisoners from the US “war on
terror” since January 11, 2002. The Cubans are well aware of President Obama’s
2008 campaign promise to shut down the prison and his subsequent failure to
follow through. Seven years later, 105 prisoners are still there.
January 11 marks 14 long years since the first prisoners arrived
at the notorious prison. Human rights activists and advocates across the world
are demanding Obama utilize his executive powers to close the prison and put an
end to this blight on America’s history.
Blaming Congress for the hold up in closing the prison,
President Obama has run out of excuses. Some of Obama’s top Guantánamo experts have argued that
the President doesn’t need Congressional approval to close the prison. After
all, President Bush didn’t get Congressional approval when he opened it. They
claim that according to the Constitution, Congress cannot specify facilities in
which particular detainees must be held and tried.
In his last year in office, President Obama must right two
wrongs that would help salvage his legacy: close the US military prison and
announce the willingness to close the U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo and return the
land to the Cuban people.
President Obama has said he’d like to visit Cuba before leaving
office. Wouldn’t it be grand if he visited Caimanera to make an announcement
that the prison would be closed and the lovely Cuban seaport would finally be
returned to its rightful owners? The people of Caimanera—indeed people the
world over—would come out to cheer him.
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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