Naval Base in Guantánamo . Installation located illegally in an area of 117.6 square kilometers of the national territory of Cuba, occupied since 1903 against the will of the Cuban people. [1]
It was the result of an Agreement for Coaling and Naval Stations signed between the Government of the United States and the Government of Cuba , chaired by Tomás Estrada Palma , in circumstances in which the Island did not have practically any independence after the imposition of an approved amendment by the United States Congress and signed by President McKinley in March 1901 , which became known as the Platt Amendment , while the Cuban territory was occupied by the United States Army, after his intervention in the war of independence of the people of Cuba against the Spanish metropolis.
Summary
[ hide ]
- 1 History
- 1 Antecedents
- 2 Enmienda Flat
- 3 Permanent Treaty
- 4 Cuban-American Relations Treaty
- 5 Constitution of 1940
- 6 After the Triumph of the Revolution
- 6.1 Aggressions from the Naval Base
- 6.2 The Naval Base in Guantánamo after the enactment of the Helms-Burton Act
- 7 Base of detention and torture
- 2 References
History
Background
In 1898 , using the bombing of the battleship Maine as a pretext , the United States declared war on Spain . President William McKinley signed the Joint Resolution of April 20, 1898 , which declared
“…that the people of the island of Cuba are and by right should be free and independent”, “…that the United States hereby declare that they have no desire or intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction or dominion over said Island, except to its pacification, and affirm their determination, when this has been achieved, to leave the government and domain of the Island to its people.” [two]
The Joint Resolution authorized the President to use force to eliminate the Spanish government in Cuba.
After the signing of the Treaty of Paris between the representatives of the Queen Regent of Spain and those of the President of the United States, Cuba would be occupied by the United States on a temporary basis.
Leonard Wood . Military Governor of Cuba between December 1899 and May 1902 .
Leonard Wood , the North American military governor, issued Order 301 of July 25, 1900 , which decreed the holding of a general election for delegates to a Constituent Assembly that should meet in the city of Havana at 12 noon on the day of first Monday of November 1900, with the aim of drafting and adopting a Constitution for the people of Cuba.
General Wood, representing the President of the United States, declared the Assembly constituted. Wood advanced the purposes of the United States government:
“When you have formulated the relations that, in your opinion, should exist between Cuba and the United States, the government of the United States will undoubtedly adopt the measures that lead to a final and authorized agreement between the peoples of both countries, to in order to promote the advancement of their common interests.” [3]
The 1901 Constitution [4] provided in its Article 2 that
“make up the territory of the Republic, the Island of Cuba, as well as the adjacent islands and keys that with it were under the sovereignty of Spain until the ratification of the Treaty of Paris on December 10, 1898.”
Once the Constitution was drafted, it was time to define the political relations between Cuba and the United States. For this purpose, on February 12, 1901, a five-member commission was appointed to study and propose what would proceed to the stated purpose.
On February 15, Governor Wood invited the members of the commission to a fishery and offered them a banquet in Batabanó, the main access route to the Isle of Pines , as it was known, then also occupied by United States troops who participated in the War of Independence of Cuba. In Batabanó itself , he presented them with a letter from the Secretary of War, Elihu Root , in which the fundamental aspects of the future Platt Amendment were contained . According to instructions received from Washington, the relations between Cuba and the United States had to be regulated by several aspects. The fifth of these was that, in order to facilitate the performance of the United States in the performance of such duties as would fall upon it by the provisions already expressed, and for its own defense, the United States might acquire title to, and hold, land for naval stations and keep these at certain specific points.
When the Cuban Constitutional Convention learned of the conditions demanded by the United States government, it approved, on February 27, 1901, a position opposed to that of the North American Executive, in which the establishment of naval stations was eliminated.
Enmienda Platt
The United States government agreed with the Republican senator from Connecticut , Orville Platt , to present an amendment to the Army Budget Bill that would make the installation of US naval bases on Cuban soil a fait accompli.
The Platt Amendment, incorporated as an appendix to the 1901 Constitution of Cuba, stated in its articles:
” Article I : The Republic of Cuba hereby leases to the United States for as long as it needs them for the purpose of establishing in them coal or naval stations, the extensions of land and water located on the island of Cuba that are subsequently describe: (…)”
” Article III : Although the United States for its part recognizes the continuation of the definitive sovereignty of the Republic of Cuba over the extensions of land and water described above, the Republic of Cuba consents, for its part, that, during the period in which the United States occupies said areas under the provisions of this agreement, the United States exercises complete jurisdiction and dominion over said areas (…)”
This amendment gave the United States the right to intervene in Cuba, and was imposed on the text of the 1901 Constitution as a condition for the withdrawal of US troops from Cuban territory.
Some members of the Constitutional Convention maintained the thesis that they were not empowered to agree to the Amendment requested by the United States, since this implied limiting the independence and sovereignty of the Republic of Cuba. Then the military governor Leonard Wood hastened to issue a new Military Order, on March 12, 1901, in which it was declared that the Convention had the power to agree on measures whose constitutionality was in doubt.
Other members of the Convention, such as Manuel Sanguily , were of the opinion that the Assembly should be dissolved before agreeing on measures that in such a way offended the dignity and sovereignty of the people of Cuba. But in the session of March 7, 1901, a commission was appointed again to draft a response to Governor Wood, the paper corresponding to Juan Gualberto Gómez , who recommended rejecting, among others, the clause related to the leasing of naval or coal stations.
Subsequently, the commission that would travel to Washington was elected, made up of Domingo Méndez Capote , Diego Tamayo , Pedro González Llorente , Rafael Portuondo Tamayo and Pedro Betancourt , who arrived in the United States on April 24, 1901. The following day they were received by Root and Wood, who had previously traveled to his country for that purpose.
The Secretary of War of the United States sent a letter to the Cuban Constituent Assembly where he stated that the Platt Amendment should be approved in its entirety without any clarification, since that is how it appeared added to the North American Budget Law, and indicated that, otherwise, his country’s military forces would not be withdrawn from Cuba.
On June 12, 1901, in another secret session of the Constituent Assembly, the incorporation of the Platt Amendment as an appendix to the Constitution of the Republic was put to the vote, approved on February 21 : 16 delegates voted yes and 11 voted yes. against. Leonard Wood sent a confidential letter to Theodore Roosevelt on October 28, 1901 in which he stated:
“Of course Cuba has been left little or no independence with the Platt Amendment and the only thing indicated now is to seek annexation. This, however, will require some time, and during the period that Cuba maintains her own government, it is highly desirable that she have one that will lead to her progress and improvement. It cannot make certain treaties without our consent, nor borrow beyond certain limits, and it must maintain the sanitary conditions that have been prescribed for it, for all of which it is quite evident that it is absolutely in our hands and I believe that there is no European government that considers it for a moment something other than what it is, a true dependency of the United States, and as such deserves our consideration. “With control that will no doubt soon become possession, soon we will practically control the sugar trade in the world. The island will gradually become Americanized, and in due time we shall have one of the richest and most desirable possessions in the world…”[5]
By virtue of the Amendment, the Agreement for Coal and Naval Stations was signed, signed in February 1903 in Havana and Washington , respectively, which actually included two areas: Bahía Honda and Guantánamo , although a naval base was never established in the first.
Permanent Treaty
In addition to this agreement of February 1903, on May 22 of that same year, a Permanent Treaty of Relations between Cuba and the United States was signed , in which the 8 clauses of the Platt Amendment are taken verbatim and converted into articles of the Treaty. [6]
In 1912 , the Secretary of State of Cuba, Manuel Sanguily , negotiated a new treaty with the US Foreign Ministry whereby the United States renounced its rights over Bahía Honda in exchange for an extension of the limits of the Guantánamo station.
In that same year, when the uprising of the Partido de los Independientes de Color took place , which the government of President José Miguel Gómez of the Liberal Party brutally repressed, US troops left the Naval Base in Guantánamo and occupied different towns in the former province of East, near the cities of Guantanamo and Santiago de Cuba , under the pretext of “protecting lives and property of US citizens.”
This is what the Guantánamo Naval Base looked like in 1916
In 1917 , due to the uprising known as ” La Chambelona ” in Oriente , carried out by elements of the Liberal Party who opposed the electoral fraud that led to the re – election of President Mario García Menocal , of the Conservative Party , Yankee detachments from the Base went to various points in that Cuban province, for which they used “the protection of the water supply to the Base” as a pretext.
Treaty of Cuban-American Relations
On November 24, 1933 , President Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the United States issued an official statement in which he encouraged the conspiracy of Batista and the Ambassador in Havana, Sumner Welles , against the Grau government , which included the offer to sign a new trade agreement and repeal the Platt Amendment. Roosevelt explained that
“…Any provisional government in Cuba in which the Cuban people show their confidence would be welcome.” [7]
On May 29, 1934 , as a result of the struggles of the Cuban people that overthrew the pro-American government of Gerardo Machado and in the spirit of the American “Good Neighbor” policy, under the presidency of Roosevelt, which sought to continue dominating Latin America under different conditions but with the same objectives, in a more favorable way, a new Treaty of Relations between the Republic of Cuba and the United States of America was signed, which repealed the one of 1903, and with it the Platt Amendment.
The government known as the One Hundred Days Government – which the United States never recognized – had already been overthrown by a conspiracy from the US embassy in which Fulgencio Batista played a leading role as representative of the interests of the United States, so much so that the government that emerged from the coup is known as Batista, Caffery , Mendieta , with Batista being the head of the army, Jefferson Caffery the United States ambassador, and Carlos Mendieta the president appointed by the coup plotters.
In this new Treaty, Bahía Honda was also definitively excluded as a possible base, but the permanence of the Guantánamo naval base and the full validity of the regulations that governed it were maintained. The new Treaty of Relations provided for the suppression of the right of intervention of the United States in Cuba and that:
“The Republic of Cuba and the United States of America, animated by the desire to strengthen the bonds of friendship between the two countries and to modify, to this end, the relations established between them by the Treaty of Relations signed in Havana on 22 May 1903, (…) have agreed on the following articles:
” Article 3 .- As long as the two contracting parties do not agree on the modification or abrogation of the stipulations of the Agreement signed by the President of the Republic of Cuba on February 16 , 1903, and by the President of the United States of America on the 23rd of the same month and year, regarding the leasing to the United States of America of land in Cuba for coal or naval stations, the stipulations of that Agreement regarding the station will remain in force. Guantanamo Navy. With respect to that naval station, the supplementary agreement regarding naval or coal stations, concluded between the two governments on July 2, 1903, will also remain in force, under the same forms and conditions. As long as the United States of America does not abandon the said Guantánamo naval station or while the two governments do not agree on a modification of its current limits, it will continue to have the territorial extension that it now occupies, with the limits that it has on the date of signing this Treaty.” [8]
The United States Senate ratified the new Treaty of Relations on June 1 , 1934 , and Cuba, on June 4 . Five days later, on June 9 , the ratifications of the Relations Treaty of May 29 of that year were exchanged in Washington, with which the Platt Amendment formally disappeared, but the Guantanamo Naval Base remained.
The territory of the “naval station” was gradually fortified and conditioned until, in the spring of 1941, the Base was established as a naval operations station under the following structure: naval station, naval air station and marine corps base and warehouses. The Base continued to expand and in 1952 , the United States Secretary of the Navy decided to change its name from “ US Naval Operating Base ” to “ US Naval Base ”, and even then it had a structure that included the Training Center.
Constitution of 1940
At the beginning of 1938 , the agreement between Batista and Grau to hold a Constituent Assembly was made public. The Constitutional Convention was inaugurated on February 9, 1940 and finished its work on June 8 of that same year.
The Constitution was signed on July 1 , 1940 and promulgated on the 5th of that month. The new Law of Laws established in its Article 3 :
“The territory of the Republic is made up of the Island of Cuba, the Island of Pines and the other adjacent islands and keys that with them were under the sovereignty of Spain until the ratification of the Treaty of Paris on December 10 , 1898 . The Republic of Cuba will not enter into or ratify pacts or treaties that in any way limit or undermine national sovereignty or the integrity of the territory.” [9]
The oligarchy would make an effort to prevent the materialization of the most advanced postulates of that Constitution or at least to restrict its application as much as possible.
After the Triumph of the Revolution
Since the triumph of the Revolution, the Revolutionary Government has denounced the illegal occupation of that portion of its territory.
As of January 1 , 1959 , the United States turned the usurped territory of the Guantánamo Naval Base into a permanent focus of threat, provocation and violation of Cuba’s sovereignty, with the purpose of creating difficulties for the revolutionary process [10] . Said Base has always been present in the plans and operations conceived by Washington to overthrow the Revolution.
The annual symbolic payment of $3,386.25 dollars for the lease of the territory occupied by the Guantánamo Naval Base was maintained until 1972, when the US side readjusted it on its own to $3,676 dollars. In 1973, a further correction of the value of the old United States gold dollar was made, and for this reason the check issued by the Department of the Treasury has since been raised to $4,085.00 per year. That check is charged to the United States Navy, operational manager of the Naval Base.
The checks made by the United States government as payment for the lease are directed in favor of the “General Treasurer of the Republic of Cuba”, an institution and official who for many years ceased to be part of the structure of the Cuban government. and are sent through diplomatic channels every year. That corresponding to 1959, due to simple confusion, was converted into national income. From 1960 to today they have never been collected and remain as proof of a tax lease.
Assaults from the Naval Base
- Launches in territory free of flammable materials from planes coming from the Base.
- Provocations by US soldiers, including insults, throwing stones, throwing cans of flammable material, and shooting with pistols and automatic weapons.
- Violation of the jurisdictional waters of Cuba and Cuban territory by US military vessels and aircraft coming from the Base.
- Preparation of self-aggression plans at the Base to provoke a large-scale armed struggle between Cuba and the United States.
- Registration of the radio frequencies used by the Base in the International Frequency Register , within the space corresponding to Cuba.
- On January 6, 1961 , the worker Manuel Prieto Gómez , who had worked there for more than 3 years , was barbarously tortured by Yankee soldiers at the Guantánamo Naval Base for the “crime” of being a revolutionary . [eleven]
- On October 15 of that year, the Cuban worker Rubén López Sabariego was tortured and later murdered .
- On June 24, 1962 , the fisherman from Caimanera , Rodolfo Rosell Salas , was assassinated by soldiers from the Base . [12]
Likewise, the alleged intention of fabricating a self-provocation and deploying US troops in a “justified” punitive invasion against Cuba, at all times had the Guantánamo Base as a trigger. An example of this is one of the actions included in the so-called ” Operation Mongoose “, when on September 3 , 1962, US soldiers stationed in Guantánamo had to shoot at Cuban posts.
During the October Crisis , the Base was reinforced in military technique and troops, the number of the latter rising to more than 16,000 marines. Given the decision of the Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev to withdraw the nuclear rockets deployed in Cuba without previously consulting or informing the Revolutionary Government, Cuba established the firm position of the Revolution in the so-called “Five Points”. The fifth demanded the withdrawal of the Guantánamo Naval Base.
On February 11, 1964 , President Lyndon B. Johnson reduced the Cuban personnel working at the Base by approximately 700 workers. They also confiscated funds accumulated from the retirement of hundreds of Cuban workers who had worked at the Base and illegally suspended the payment of pensions to retired Cuban workers.
- On July 19, 1964, in a rude provocation by North American border sentinels against the Cuban Border Guard posts, the young 17-year-old soldier Ramón López Peña was assassinated at close range , in the casemate where he was doing his guard duty.
- In similar circumstances, on May 21, 1966 , shots coming from the Base killed soldier Luis Ramírez López .
Ruben Lopez Sabariego
Rodolfo Rosell Salas
Ramon Lopez Pena
Luis Ramirez Lopez
In just 21 days of the month of May 1980 , more than 80,000 men, 24 ships and some 350 combat planes participated in the Solid Shield-80 maneuvers, which among its dynamics included the landing of 2,000 Marines at the Base Naval and the reinforcement of said installation with another 1,200 troops.
In October 1991 , during the IV Congress of the PCC in Santiago de Cuba , planes and helicopters from the Base violated Cuban airspace over the city.
In 1994 , the Base served as a support point for the invasion of Haiti : US military aviation used the airports in that enclave. More than 45,000 Haitian émigrés came to be concentrated in the Base in the middle of the following year.
Similarly, in 1994 there was the well-known migration crisis caused by the tightening of the blockade and the harshest years of the special period, the breach of the 1984 Migration Agreement signed with the Reagan administration , the considerable reduction in agreed visas and the encouragement of illegal emigration, including the Cuban Adjustment Act , billed by President Johnson more than 40 years ago.
As a consequence of the unleashed crisis, a declaration by President Clinton on August 19, 1994 turned the Base into a migratory concentration camp for Cuban rafters, numbering close to 30,000.
Finally, on September 9, 1994, a Joint Communiqué was signed between the Clinton administration and the Cuban government, through which the United States undertook to prevent intercepted illegal emigrants from entering its territory and to grant a minimum of 20,000 visas. for family reunification, those who would travel safely to the United States.
On May 2 , 1995 , as part of the migratory negotiations, the governments of Cuba and the United States additionally agreed on what this time was called the Joint Declaration, establishing the procedure for the return to Cuba of all those who continued trying to emigrate illegally to the United States. States and were intercepted by the US Coast Guard.
The foundations were laid for a sinister business: human trafficking. The Killing Law stood. Cuba would be the only country in the world subjected to such a whip. While approximately 250,000 people have traveled safely without the slightest risk, the number of women, children and people of all ages who have perished in the prosperous traffic of immigrants is incalculable.
As of the migration crisis of 1994, by agreement of both governments, regular meetings began between the military commanders of each party. A strip of land littered with mines was sometimes inundated by tropical storms and overflowing rivers. Not in a few occasions the Cuban sappers risked their lives to save people who crossed that military zone restricted by those places, even with children.
Between 1962 and 1996 , 8,288 major violations were recorded from the Guantanamo Naval Base, including 6,345 air violations, 1,333 naval violations, and 610 land violations. Of the total rapes, 7,755 occurred between 1962 and 1971 .
The Naval Base in Guantánamo after the enactment of the Helms-Burton Act
The Helms-Burton Act , signed by President William Clinton on March 12, 1996, in Title II on “assistance to a free and independent Cuba”, Section 201 related to “policy towards a transitional and elected government democratically in Cuba”, establishes in its paragraph 12 that the United States must
“be prepared to negotiate with a democratically elected government in Cuba the return of the United States Naval Base in Guantánamo or renegotiate the current agreement under mutually convenient terms.”
In the manifest Oath of Baraguá , of February 19 , 2000 , it was stated that
“In due time, since it is not a priority objective at this moment, although it is a very just and inalienable right of our people, the illegally occupied territory of Guantánamo must be returned to Cuba.”
At that time, the Cuban people were involved in the struggle for the return of the kidnapped boy Elián González and the economic consequences of the brutal blockade.
Base of detention and torture
Two events and new facts have occurred in the international sphere that have affected the situation on that base: the Kosovo War in 1999 and the war in Afghanistan and later in Iraq after the terrorist attacks of September 11 . In both, the United States has played a leading role.
The first produced a large number of Kosovar refugees. The United States Government made the decision to use the base as a shelter for a number of them. Such decisions are always made unilaterally. Cuba is never asked for its prior opinion, it was not even informed. But on that occasion, for the first time, the decision made was communicated, arguing the reasons for it. The response was constructive. Although opposed to that war, Cuba had no reason to oppose the help that the Kosovar refugees might need. He even offered cooperation if necessary for medical care or any other service they needed. Ultimately they were not sent to the Guantánamo naval base.
Camp Delta, Guantánamo Naval Base (AP Photo)
Beginning in 2002 , a small portion of the base was used to house prisoners suspected of links with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban army who were captured in Camps X-Ray, Delta, and Echo. Afghanistan.
The peculiar legal status of the Guantánamo Naval Base was a factor in choosing it as a detention center. Because the illegal Guantánamo Base resides in Cuba, the US government argued that the people detained at Guantánamo were legally outside of their country and did not have the constitutional rights that they would have if they were detained there. During 2004 , the Supreme Court rejected this argument in Rasul v . George W. Bush , with the majority decision, establishing that Guantánamo prisoners have access to US courts, citing the fact that the United States has sole control over the Guantanamo Bay Base .
The United States classifies the prisoners locked up in the Delta and Echo camps as illegal enemy combatants , but does not contemplate the article 5 of the court that is required by International Law to endorse them. This gives prisoners the rights of the Fourth Geneva Convention (GCIV), as opposed to the Third Geneva Convention (GCIII), which deals exclusively with prisoners of war. On November 9, 2004, Judge James Robertsonof the US District Court ruled that the George W. Bush administration overstepped its authority by treating those prisoners as enemy combatants in a military tribunal and denying them access to evidence used against them. It is proven that many prisoners were transferred to the Base on secret CIA flights with the complicity of various European governments.
On November 30, 2004, The New York Times published excerpts from an internal Bush administration memo, in which it referred to a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross ( ICRC ).). The report indicated several activities that were said to be “equivalent to torture”: exposure to noise or annoying music, extreme temperatures for a long time or beatings. The existence of a behavioral science team (BSCT), also called Biscuit, and the communication of sensitive medical information to interrogation teams by base doctors (weaknesses, phobias, etc.) were also reported, giving as a result, the loss of confidence in the doctors by the prisoners on the base.
The ICRC’s access to the base was conditional, as it is normal for ICRC humanitarian operations for reports to be confidential, some sources reported discussions taking place at ICRC headquarters, as some of those involved wanted to make public the report, or take on the US administration. Newspapers reported that the administration and the Pentagon saw the ICRC report in July 2004, but rejected its conclusions. The story originally appeared in several newspapers, including the UK ‘s The Guardian , and the ICRC reacted to the article when it was leaked in May.
In May of the same year, the UN Committee Against Torture called on the United States to close the Guantanamo detention center for violating international law. On June 10, 2006 , three Muslim prisoners (two Saudis and one Yemeni) committed suicide inside the base. The rear admiral of the naval base mentioned that it was “an act of asymmetric warfare”; However, these suicides raised criticism from the European Union , which through its representative, Javier Solana , described as flippant to consider suicides as an act of propaganda.
In November 2010 , former US President George Bush publicly defended the use of violent interrogations in prison, insisting that the information obtained in this way helped prevent terrorist attacks [13] .
Later President Barack Obama announced, during his election campaign, the definitive closure of the Guantanamo Prison within a period of no more than one year. When he came to power he suspended the trials that were taking place in it. However, four months after that arrangement, he announced the reestablishment of the prison. In late 2010 White House spokesman Robert Gibbs stated that the prison at the US base in Guantánamo would not be closed in the near future. He argued legal and legislative problems that prevented the transport and subsequent maintenance of prisoners.
In 2011 , former Turkish-German prisoner Murat Kurnats told the press that illegal medical experiments were being carried out on prisoners at the Base. In March of that year there were 170 prisoners in Guantánam
