After Washington announced plans to imprison thousands of immigrant workers on the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo, Cuba’s Ministry of the Exterior responded Jan. 29. The U.S. rulers seized Guantánamo Bay in 1903 as spoils of their victory in the 1898 Spanish-American War, a war that announced the imperialist epoch. It has continued to occupy it in violation of Cuba’s sovereignty. The first flight carrying detained migrants from the U.S. landed Feb. 4 as the Donald Trump administration threatens to expand a detention center there. The ministry’s statement is reprinted below.
Cuba rejects the decision announced by the President of the United States to use the Guantánamo Naval Base to imprison tens of thousands of migrants he has set out to forcibly expel. It is a demonstration of the brutality with which that government is acting to supposedly correct problems created by the economic and social conditions of that country, by their own governmental management and its foreign policy, including hostility toward countries from where the migrants hail from.
Many of the people that the United States is expelling or intends to expel are victims of the government’s own plundering policies and meet the labor needs that have historically existed in agriculture, construction, industry, services and various sectors of the U.S. economy. Others are the result of facilities at the border to enter the country; of selective, politically motivated regulations that welcome them as refugees; and also of the socioeconomic damage caused by unilateral coercive measures.
A significant number of them contribute and have contributed to the economy of that country. They are employed, have homes, have formed families and have planned to make their lives in the United States.
The territory where [the U.S. government] intends to confine them does not belong to the United States. It is a portion of Cuban territory in the eastern province of Guantánamo, which remains militarily occupied illegally and against the will of the Cuban nation. This military installation is internationally known, among other reasons, for housing a torture and indefinite detention center, outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, where people have been held for up to 20 years without ever being judicially processed or convicted of any crime.
Its irresponsible use would generate a scenario of risk and uncertainties in that illegal enclave and its surroundings; it would threaten peace and would lend itself to errors, accidents and misinterpretations that could alter stability and provoke serious consequences.