• Five years after his
election, the U.S. President has not closed the prison on the illegally held
Guantánamo Naval Base
By Manuel E. Yepe
THE failure to
fulfill electoral promises made by candidates who win U.S. presidential
elections is not news. In fact, this is corroborated by the corporate press in
that nation.
However, in the
case of current President Barack Obama – whose triumph had much to do with the
relatively daring promises which allowed him to overcome the odds against him,
given his ethnic and social origins and age, among other aspects – his failure
to meet his promises has placed him in a position which could prove damaging to
the Democratic Party in the 2016 elections.
One glaringly
evident case little mentioned in the media is that, during his 2008 presidential
campaign, Obama described the case of Gitmo (as the illegally naval base is
identified in the United States) as “a sad chapter in American history,” and
promised that, if he were to be elected, the base would closed in
2009.
Shortly after
his election, the new president reiterated his promise to close the base in an
ABC television interview.
However, in
November 2009, Obama was forced to acknowledge that it was not possible to set a
specific date for the closure, while announcing that it would most likely occur
at some undetermined point in 2009.
On December 15,
2009, a presidential memorandum issued by Obama ordered the closing of the
prison camp and the transfer of the detainees to the Thomson Correctional Center
in Illinois. Shortly afterward, in a letter to Congressman Frank Wolf, who was
making every effort to avoid the transfer of the Guantánamo detainees to
Thomson, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder stated that such a move would violate
legal prohibitions which he was determined to uphold.
And thus this
vacillation has continued to date, in a clear demonstration of the President’s
unwillingness to confront the issue, despite popular will as expressed in the
elections.
It should be
noted that there has been no media reference in recent history to the fact that
the base’s very existence is indefensible and that a genuine solution must
include, as a principal step, the return to Cuba of this occupied territory.
During a
workshop with Cuban experts on the 110-year occupation of Guantánamo by the
United States, which took place recently in Havana, Jonathan Hansen, associate
professor at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies,
affirmed that few in the United States acknowledge that the base must be
returned to Cuba, and that the problem is how to make this matter an issue for
discussion.
The United
States occupies this portion of Cuban territory in virtue of an unjust agreement
of indefinite duration imposed on Cuba in February 1903, as one of the addendums
to the Platt Amendment, introduced as an appendix to the Constitution of the
nascent Cuban Republic through pressure from Washington.
Sooner or
later, Guantánamo must disappear and this ignominious enclave will remain as one
more sad page in the history of U.S. imperialism.
November 28, 2013
