122 years of US imperialism in Guantánamo: From torture to migrant detention

Donald Trump's expansion of migrant detention in Guantánamo Bay follows years of torture. Meanwhile, the people of Cuba have always fought for their land to be freed from U.S. imperialism.

By Abraham Marquez

Colonialist Christopher Columbus landed in Guantánamo Bay on his second voyage to the Americas in 1494. The empires of England, France, and Spain later disputed Guantánamo, a territory of 45 square miles.

This “discovery” of the Cuban island unleashed a Spanish extermination campaign against the indigenous population, through disease, starvation, and brutality.

What followed the genocide was the “vertiginous growth of the slave trade based in Havana”. As Harvard University's Hutchins Center for African and African American Research put it:

Cuba became the largest slave colony in all of Hispanic America, with the highest number of enslaved persons imported and the longest duration of the illegal slave trade. About 800,000 slaves were imported to Cuba— twice as many as those shipped to the United States.

Today, Guantánamo Bay remains occupied by the United States. It is used as a detention center by the most powerful military in history.

The U.S. routinely rejects the Cuban government’s call to hand back Guantánamo Bay to the Cuban people.

The camp’s status is extremely dubious, not only according to international law, but even by domestic U.S. standards. The government argues that those detained there are not entitled to certain rights under U.S. laws.

On January 29, 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order calling to expand migrant detention centers at Guantánamo.

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2015 banned the transfers of people imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay to U.S. soil. It also imposed a “Limitation on construction of new facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,” meaning the migrants detained there are confined in outdated, run-down facilities.

The prison consists of several camps, each with differing security levels, amounts of transparency, and detainees.

Former President Barack Obama promised to close the prison but never did in his eight-year presidential run.

In Trump’s first term, he pledged to not only keep the prison open but to utilize it to imprison more people there.

Former President Joe Biden promised to shut it down, but never did either.

Today, in Trump’s second presidential term, he is sending migrants to this notorious torture prison.

Nevertheless, this is not the first time a U.S. president has exercised this power. Therefore, it is essential to understand the history of Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and how this territory came to be a U.S. torture camp.

A history of U.S. imperialism in Cuba

The Cuban people have a rich history of opposing the unlawful U.S. military occupation of Guantánamo Bay.

Cuba fought valiantly for independence from Spain between 1895 and 1898.

After the USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor, killing 270 U.S. sailors, President McKinley declared war on Spain. Consequently, Cuba’s arduous fight for freedom was thwarted.

At the end of the war, the United States seized Spain’s former colonies, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam, expanding the U.S. empire.

In 1901, U.S. officials oversaw the drafting of Cuba’s constitution, which included a section known as the Platt Amendment. This granted the U.S. the right to militarily invade the country whenever it believed U.S. interests were threatened.

Between 1902 and 1912, Washington dispatched the Marines to Cuba four times.

Guantánamo Bay was “leased” to the United States in 1903. Although the U.S. government still controls it to this day, it does not technically consider it to be U.S. territory, because Washington rents the land from Cuba.

The Cuban government, however, has long refused to cash the rent checks.

Starting in 1902, Cuba was governed by President Tomás Estrada Palma. He had initially risen to prominence as a revolutionary fighting against Spanish rule, but later sought U.S. military intervention from President Theodore Roosevelt to suppress a worker-led uprising in the tobacco-rich Pinar del Río Province.

Later, U.S. troops went on to fight other worker-led uprisings in different towns throughout the country.

As a result, the Platt Amendment set the stage for U.S. imperialism to intervene in Cuban politics and society, giving them a base to operate on the island.

An uprising took place in Cuba in 1933, at a time of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy”. The movement resulted in the removal of U.S.-backed dictator Gerardo Machado.

The U.S. was forced to repeal the Platt Amendment in 1934. The Cuban people continued to demand rightful ownership of their land.

Due to its strategic position on the country's southeastern corner, Guantánamo Bay was initially intended as a coaling and naval station, as the U.S. Navy expanded worldwide. However, as time passed and the global class war took center stage with the rise of the Soviet Union, Guantánamo Bay’s role evolved.

The most controversial use of the territory began after September 11, 2001. The U.S. established a detention center on January 11, 2002, for militants captured during the “War on Terror.”

The territory’s uncertain legal status is one of the main reasons why the U.S. chose Guantánamo Bay as a detention site.

While the U.S. occupies Guantánamo Bay, the Cuban government retains full sovereignty over the soil. Washington has taken advantage of this legal ambiguity to detain people without complete protection from the U.S. legal system.

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 sought to formalize the prosecution of detainees. Still, it faced legal challenges, leading to key Supreme Court Rulings, such as Boumediene v. Bush (2008), which granted detainees the right to habeas corpus.

Guantánamo: A human rights nightmare

Guantánamo Bay has consistently captured the attention of the international community, facing severe criticism due to allegations of extreme human rights abuses.

Reports from organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented instances of indefinite detention, harsh interrogation techniques, and the use of torture.

Critics have condemned the detention center for operating outside the norms of both U.S. constitutional protections and international law.

In 2023, 150 human rights organizations sent an open letter to then President Joe Biden, organized by the Center for Victims of Torture, demanding that Guantánamo Bay be closed. They wrote:

Among a broad range of human rights violations perpetrated against predominantly Muslim communities over the last two decades, the Guantánamo detention facility — built on the same military base where the United States unconstitutionally detained Haitian refugees in deplorable conditions in the early 1990s — is the iconic example of the abandonment of the rule of law.

The letter noted that it costs approximately $540 million per year to operate the torture camp, “making Guantánamo the most expensive detention facility in the world.”

When Haitian refugees fled a 1991 U.S.-backed coup against democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the United States sent them to Guantánamo. Then Attorney General William Barr oversaw the operation. Barr would go on to serve as attorney general again during Trump’s first presidential term.

Additionally, U.S. authorities sent Cubans seeking asylum to Guantánamo. At its height, the camp held approximately twelve thousand Haitian refugees.

Separately, officials confined around 300 Haitian refugees diagnosed as HIV positive in a separate facility, often referred to as an “HIV prison camp.” District Court Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. later ruled that this practice violated the U.S. Constitution.

There are several distinct camps throughout Guantánamo Bay, with 12 publicly acknowledged sites where people are locked up. Camp Iguana, Camp Echo, Camp 7, and Camp X-Ray are the most notorious.

Running these detention camps is expensive. “Since 2002, it has cost the United States $6 billion, and the yearly cost of imprisoning each person is over $13 million,” states a Georgetown University Factsheet Report.

Efforts to close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility have seen political and logistical challenges throughout the decades.

Former President Obama campaigned to close the facility but failed to do so. During Obama’s two terms in office, the population fell from 242 to 41 people, but 48 people were designated to indefinite detention.

Public government reports do not mention the secretive immigrant detention facility, and only recently have details surfaced about its alarming conditions. In February 2024, the New York Times reported, citing the Department of Homeland Security, that authorities were holding four people at the secretive facility.

When Trump announced the order to send migrants to Guantánamo Bay, Amnesty International wrote:

Guantánamo Bay has been the site of torture, indefinite detention without charge or trial and other unlawful practices by the U.S. government. President Trump should be using his authority to finally close the prison there, not re-purposing the facility for offshore immigration detention.

How the Democrats are helping Trump

Like in Trump’s first term, Democrats have done very little to assist working-class families and immigrant communities affected by the president’s racist executive orders.

A few Democrats have merely offered lip service against the proposal to send 30,000 migrants to the torture camp at Guantánamo Bay.

Democrats have yet to offer a solution to halt the deportations in the U.S. that endanger families.

ICE has received orders to achieve a daily quota of 1,200 to 1,500 arrests, leading to numerous raids nationwide.

Moreover, punitive actions, such as cutting federal funding to sanctuary cities and states led by Democrats, indicate a lack of challenge to Trump’s policies.

The administration has instructed federal prosecutors to investigate and possibly file criminal charges against state and local officials who do not comply with ICE.

Furthermore, by declaring a national border emergency, the administration can deploy more troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, which further militarizes and endangers border communities.

Worldwide movement to return the land to Cuba

Each year, a protest takes place on January 11, calling for the U.S. government to shut down Guantánamo Bay.

The universal demand of human rights activists is to free the remaining prisoners held there.

The U.S. occupation of Cuba at Guantánamo Bay is a microcosm of U.S.-Cuba relations. While the Cuban government has long demanded the return of this territory, the U.S. continues to occupy the bay.

Furthermore, the overwhelming evidence of torture at the detention centers has exposed the cynicism of the United States’ claim to be a “beacon of democracy” or “defender of human rights”.

The bay is just one of many areas where the U.S. persistently infringes on civil rights.

On February 4, 2025, authorities transported the first group of deportees to Guantánamo Bay by flight, raising questions about the conditions they would face and the legality of their detention, given that U.S. laws do not protect people in those facilities.

Ironically, with no serious evidence, the U.S. continues to accuse Cuba of human rights violations.

In fact, Secretary of State Marco Rubio blamed the migration crisis in the country on Cuba’s government and not on the illegal six-decade-long U.S. embargo.

The hypocrisy is clear to the world. It is the U.S. government that funds and operates a torture camp, conducting daily atrocities on Cuban soil.

The U.S. occupation of Guantánamo Bay remains a stain on the history of humanity, an imprint of colonialism that symbolizes torture and human rights violations.

While Trump is operating an overtly barbarous campaign against immigrants, refugees, LGBTQ people, and other groups, the continued use of Guantánamo demonstrates that this is much bigger than just one president: the United States is a carceral-imperial state.

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Abraham Marquez is a freelance writer from Inglewood, California and a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ). He is a 2021 USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism fellow, and writes about social movements, sports, politics, and immigration. You can follow him on Twitter at @AbeMarquez3.