Obama’s Unfulfilled Promise on Gitmo

The failure of a winning presidential candidate to complete electoral promises in the United States should not be news. In fact, the country’s major corporate media corroborates this when, as a rule, it avoids highlighting such faults.

But in the case of the current President Barack Obama — whose victory had so much to do with the relatively bold promises that allowed him to overcome the strong winds against him, due to his race, social origin and age, among other things — his failures have placed him in a scenario that may well result in hostility toward his party in the 2016 elections.

A very clear case of this, though infrequently recalled by the media, was when, during his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama called “Gitmo” — as the illegitimate military base, which is operated by the superpower on 45 square kilometers next to Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay, is known as in the United States — “a sad chapter in American history” and promised that, if elected, he would close the prison in 2009.

Shortly after achieving victory in those elections, the new president reiterated his promise to close Gitmo in an interview broadcast by ABC.

Nevertheless, in November 2009, Obama had to admit that it was not possible to set a “specific deadline” for closing Gitmo, but announced that it would probably take place on some unspecified date in 2010.

On Dec. 15, 2009, a presidential memorandum issued by Obama ordered the closure of the detention center and transfer of the prisoners to the Thomson Correctional Center in Illinois. But shortly after, Attorney General Eric Holder, in a letter to Congressman Frank Wolf — who exerted himself to get a proposal to prevent the transfer of Guantanamo prisoners to Thomson approved — declared that such a transfer would violate legal prohibitions which he was determined to enforce.

This give and take has continued until today, a clear demonstration of how weak the White House is when faced with decisions by the de facto powers that, in truth, determine the destiny of the superpower — beyond the popular will that is supposedly represented in the elections. However, note that nothing in this story referred to the fact that the very existence of Gitmo is indefensible and that a true solution would have to include, as a main step, the return to Cuba of the territory it occupies on the island.

“There is virtually nobody in the United States — apart from me and a few historians, academics and diplomats — who is saying that [the base] has to be returned … the problem is how to get the issue into the general conversation,” affirmed Jonathan Hansen, an associate professor at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, to the Spanish agency EFE during a workshop with Cuban experts on the 110 years of United States occupation of Gitmo recently held in Havana.

The United States occupies that portion of the Cuban territory thanks to a written agreement of indefinite duration concluded with Cuba in February 1903, sheltered by an epigraph to the Platt Amendment which was introduced as an appendix to the rising Cuban republic’s constitution by pressures from Washington.

The American occupation forces were placed on the island which only had the option to accept the amendment that permitted the United States to establish military bases in Cuba or to accept the continued North American military occupation that it had been suffering since 1898, following the North American intervention that put an end to the Iberian colonial occupation. Spain, weakened by the progress of the Cuban independence struggle, was an easy victim of the United States military forces, whose government had ambitions, and thus was able, to build itself up with the remnants of the Hispanic colonial empire. That empire, beyond Cuba, contained other much-desired territories for Washington, in particular the Philippines.

Cuba has always tried not to give the United States a pretext to attack it that would implicate any Cuban claim of recovering by the use of violence that which, by virtue of international law and reason, belongs to it. Cuba has never renounced that piece of its territory, nor will it accept such a dispossession.

Sooner or later, Gitmo will disappear and that enclave of disgrace will be just one more sad page in the imperialist history of the United States.