Established as America's first foreign naval base following the
Spanish-American War, Guantnamo is now more often thought of as our
Devil's Island, the gulag of our times. This book takes readers
beyond the orange-jumpsuited detainees of today's headlines to
provide the first comprehensive history of Guantnamo from its
origins to the present.
Occupying 45 square miles of land and sea, Guantnamo has for
more than a century symbolized the imperial impulse within U.S.
foreign policy, and its occupation is decried by Cuba as a
violation of international law-even though a treaty legally grants
the U.S. a lease in perpetuity. Stephen Schwab now describes the
base's role in American, Caribbean, and global history, explaining
how it came to be, why it's still there, and how it continues to
serve a variety of purposes.
Schwab views the base's creation as part of a broad U.S.
strategy of annexations, protectorates, and limited interventions
devised to create a strong sphere of influence in the western
Atlantic. He charts its history from this early belief that it
would prevent European powers from staking imperial claims in the
Caribbean and examines the crucial defensive role that Guantnamo
played as a convoy hub for strategic goods during World War II. He
then looks at clashes over Guantnamo during the Cold War,
culminating in LBJ's decision to make the base independent by
firing Cuban workers and building a desalinization plant. Schwab
also fleshes out Guantnamo's ongoing roles as the U.S. Navy's lone
forward base in the Caribbean, providing refueling for U.S. and
allied ships, as a Coast Guard station engaged in search-and-rescue
missions and counternarcotics operations, and as a U.S. facility
for processing undocumented aliens.
Even though the Castro government persistently protests
America's presence--and refuses even to bank the rent that the U.S.
dutifully pays--Guantnamo remains the only place where diplomatic
exchanges between the two countries occur, and Schwab documents how
the facility has served mutual interests as both a point of
nationalistic frictions and a center for diplomatic compromise. By
presenting Guantnamo's story within its broader historical
framework, his book gives readers a greater appreciation of
America's true stake in this controversial Caribbean outpost.
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