Guantánamo’s Secret History
Trump isn’t the first U.S. president to use the military base to incarcerate migrants.
SEPTEMBER 30, 2025
It began with a raft, if you could call it that. Really it was two broad clusters of irrigation tubes with a tarp thrown over them and a tractor motor fixed to the back. But it floated and it had a propeller, and for the 14 people who climbed aboard it that August afternoon, that was enough. They set off from a place called Playa Martí, a stretch of beach on the northern coast of the Cuban province of Matanzas. The shoreline there is flanked by a maze of keys that separate the Bay of Santa Clara from the expanse of the Florida Straits. One man aboard the boat knew how to navigate the mangroves and sandbars of the keys, and with the late summer sun beating down on the rafters, the boat pushed out feebly into the open ocean. The de facto captain oriented himself by motoring northwest along the coast towards Havana. Eventually, though, the vessel had to pivot north in the direction of Florida, the group’s intended destination. At last came the moment when the small craft drove hard to the right, away from the island and towards the United States. Their homeland receded behind them, and all was waves and horizon.
That was when the fear set in, especially on those aqueous nights so dark and moonless that you could not make out the surface of the water. Soon the gasoline ran out and a storm swept in, visiting its fury upon the vessel. The grown men trembled and wondered about death; it was unclear how many days had passed when a plane circled overhead, looped about the raft and then returned towards the direction from which it came. Some hours later a U.S. Coast Guard boat appeared. The Coast Guard pulled the rafters aboard — they were saved, and presumed their rescuers would swiftly deliver them to Florida. It was not to be so. Instead, the boat arrived alongside a second, much larger Coast Guard vessel, “el barco madre,” the rafters called it — the mothership. Aboard the cutter they saw other groups, hundreds of compatriots, all of whom sought the United States. They would soon realize, much to their dismay, that they were in fact en route to the U.S. naval base Guantánamo Bay, and not to Florida at all. In a matter of hours, they were summarily deposited inside that otherwise unreachable enclave on the eastern end of the same island they had fled.
Over the 1990s, Washington seized on that opacity to transform the base into a theater of extraterritorial mass incarceration to hold tens of thousands of Haitian and Cuban asylum-seekers fleeing political violence and economic collapse in their home countries.
In August of 1994, 35,000 Cubans would undertake a similarly harrowing sea journey in hopes of reaching Florida. The majority of them eventually made it to the United States, but not before being intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard and imprisoned in refugee camps at Guantánamo Bay. Each became part of the political and historical phenomenon termed the balsero crisis, so named for the balsas, or makeshift rafts, that carried the refugees out into the Florida Straits. As they descended the Coast Guard cutters alongside their compatriots, the balseros joined a legacy of largescale internment at Guantánamo.
The U.S. presence at Guantánamo has a sinister significance as a site of extraterritorial detention. Most people know the military base as an extralegal prison where nearly 800 men and children were indefinitely detained and systematically tortured amidst George W. Bush’s “War on Terror.” But Washington’s practice of mass incarceration at the base predates the arrival of those first blindfolded and jumpsuit-clad men in January of 2002. For over a century, the United States has coercively maintained the base against the wishes of the Cuban government, an arrangement prompting political and legal debates surrounding the territory’s ambiguous sovereignty. Over the 1990s, Washington seized on that opacity to transform the base into a theater of extraterritorial mass incarceration to hold tens of thousands of Haitian and Cuban asylum-seekers fleeing political violence and economic collapse in their home countries. That chapter in the base’s long history set the legal precedent for its subsequent use in the War on Terror.
Now, less than a year into the second Trump administration, Guantánamo carceral legacy has been revived amidst the federal government’s sweeping immigration crackdown. As of this summer, The Department of Homeland security has transferred an estimated 500 migrants to Guantánamo before deporting them elsewhere or returning them to immigrant detention centers in the continental U.S. The number of new prisoners passing through Guantánamo is alarming, though significantly less than the 30,000 immigrants Trump promised to send to the base upon first announcing his plan in January. Guantánamo’s long history thus marches on, with Washington using it as theater to carry out operations that would otherwise be illegal on U.S. soil — a place to solve the government’s security concern du jour while sidestepping accountability.
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The United States first seized Guantánamo Bay in 1898, when Washington intervened in the last throes of Cuba’s thirty-year struggle for independence from Spain. Though the Cuban nationalists’ victory was all but assured, the United States entered the fray and swiftly imposed a military occupation over the island. As part of the terms ending the four-year-long occupation, Washington required that Cuba integrate something called the Platt Amendment into an appendix of the island’s 1901 constitution. The Platt Amendment stipulated the United States’ continued right to intervene in Cuba’s affairs whenever it deemed necessary, and mandated the lease of Guantánamo Bay with no termination date, to be annulled only upon the agreement of both the United States and Cuban governments. The stated purpose of the lease was to ensure that, by granting the U.S. a space for a coaling and naval station in perpetuity, it would “enable the United States to maintain the independence of Cuba.”
Over Washington and Havana’s largely fruitless attempts at diplomacy during the Cold War, both parties considered the base as a bargaining chip of sorts, a leverage to pull in the interest of military de-escalation or possible normalization of diplomatic relations.
As the twentieth century progressed, Cuba managed to abrogate its versions of the Platt Amendment and establish new constitutions. But those developments failed to expunge Washington’s enclave. Under renewed coercion in 1934, Cuba and the U.S. signed a new lease on Guantánamo, again with no termination date. By 1959, the bearded and charismatic revolutionary Fidel Castro, who had consolidated his power over the new government in Havana, pointed to the base in eastern Cuba as an unjust and flagrant violation of Cuban sovereignty, a physical instantiation of the U.S. imperialism that he so proactively sought to exorcise from the island. Over Washington and Havana’s largely fruitless attempts at diplomacy during the Cold War, both parties considered the base as a bargaining chip of sorts, a leverage to pull in the interest of military de-escalation or possible normalization of diplomatic relations. Castro’s repeated attempts to reclaim Guantánamo came to naught. Today, the United States Treasury still sends the Cuban government a check of $4,085 annually for “leasing” Guantánamo. The Cuban government doesn’t cash the check.
In the decades following the Cuban Revolution, Washington maintained its naval presence at Guantánamo, with military personnel and their dependents enjoying the base’s pristine Caribbean beaches and the Defense Department considering it a security bulwark against the communist menace residing just over the enclave’s fence line. The base’s first use as a site of mass incarceration began in 1991 in response to a flood of outmigration from the neighboring country of Haiti. When a violent coup overthrew Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, 40,000 Haitian asylum seekers set out by boat towards the United States. As would happen to the balseros some years later, the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard intercepted the Haitian rafters in international waters and brought to Guantánamo. There they languished in improvised tent cities without potable water and exposed to eastern Cuba’s punishing heat. Roughly 14,000 Haitian refugees were still there awaiting the processing of their asylum cases when the balseros began arriving. By then, most of the original Haitian population detained at the base had been forcibly repatriated across the Windward Passage, despite the widespread accounts of murder and torture the country’s military conducted as it swept the Haitian countryside following Aristede’s ouster. Of the 14,000 remaining in Guantánamo at the time of the balseros’ arrival, the vast majority would be returned to the violence they had fled across the Windward Passage.
The thousands of balsas that set off from Cuba towards the United States in late summer of 1994 did so amidst the most dire humanitarian crisis that had beset the island since the 1959 Revolution. The Special Period, as it was called, was prompted by the decline and collapse of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of the economic lifeline Moscow had extended Cuba since the early years of the Revolution. Between 1991 and 1993, the Cuban economy shrank by more than fifty percent. For most on the island, life became almost unlivable. Rolling blackouts blanketed homes in darkness and dust collected on the shelves of markets and pharmacies where food and medicine once sat. Florida — a mere ninety miles north of Havana — seemed to many the only immediate solution.
The balseros who arrived at Guantánamo would quickly learn that they had not escaped calamity when they departed Cuba but had rather moved from one crisis to another. Joint Task Force 160 (JTF 160), the organization established on May 18, 1994, to oversee the uptick in circum-Caribbean immigration in those years, constructed as many tent cities as quickly as it could. It erected some 20 camps on the base, each surrounded by chain-link fence and barbed wire. Inside each camp, sprawls of rickety structures covered with olive-green military tarps housed anywhere from 500 to 3,000 people. The Marine Corps general who headed JTF 160 told reporters during a press conference he was “mayor of the fastest growing city in the United States.” Balseros were arriving on the order of a thousand new people every day.
Small trailers carrying water tanks and portable toilets were brought into each compound, though some camps eventually received more adequate plumbing over the course of the detention operations. It took time for JTF 160 to establish a viable system of food distribution at Guantánamo, which eventually took the form of some 600 pounds of rice per day, cooked in cavernous four-foot-tall pots, served with beans and whatever other protein and seasoning were available. A former balsero, Amado Amador Crespo, told me that before those logistics were established he had taken to hunting and cooking iguanas that meandered through the Guantánamo tent cities, a wince of disdain rippling across his face at the memory.
For the refugees living through the crisis, the change in Washington’s immigration policy and the brutal conditions that they endured were hard to square with everything they had come to understand about the United States.
The balseros’ incarceration was a marked departure from the experience of Cuban Refugees who had gone before them. In the first years following the Revolution, Washington extended an uncharacteristically warm welcome to the Cuban exile community in what was likely an expression of the belief that Castro’s hold on power would not last. It also had something to do with race and capital. The first wave of Cubans to depart in large numbers came to be known as the “Golden Exiles” — largely wealthier, whiter and more eagerly welcomed by Washington, who saw in their departure an opportunity to undermine the increasingly radical government in Havana. So keen was Washington to seize upon the optics and implications of Cuban exile that in 1966 the U.S. Congress passed the Cuban Adjustment Act, conferring upon those Cubans who arrived in the United States after January 1, 1959 an expedited path to citizenship and voting rights after two years of residence in the country. The act’s provisions would also apply to all Cubans arriving in the United States moving forward, and were bolstered in 1976 when amended legislation shortened Cuban nationals’ parole status in the United States from two years to one year and a day before they could become lawful permanent residents. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, Cuba-watchers in Washington no longer saw the same political utility in welcoming Cuban refugees, assuming that the Special Period heralded the imminent collapse of Castro’s rule. Following in the footsteps of George H.W. Bush administration only a few years earlier, Bill Clinton set his sights on Guantánamo as a solution to the rafter crisis.
Amongst the balseros there was thus both confusion and outrage that they were not being permitted entry into the United States, as had been the case for so many waves of Cuban refugees before them. Theirs was not the experience friends and relatives had relayed to them in letters and phone calls from South Florida. For the refugees living through the crisis, the change in Washington’s immigration policy and the brutal conditions that they endured were hard to square with everything they had come to understand about the United States. As one-NGO supplied psychiatrist wrote of the Guantánamo camp conditions and their effects on the incarcerated asylum seekers’ mental health: “[The rafters] felt persecuted in their country and left for a country which represents the ‘Bastion of Freedom’ in their eyes; Psychologically [sic] they are having a hard time understanding why a country and a people who proclaim freedom as a basis of their society, [sic] places them in a detention camp [and] deprives them of the most basic freedoms.”
Beginning with the Haitian internment in 1991, Washington seized on Guantánamo’s ambiguous sovereignty to illegally and indefinitely detain asylum-seekers. The White House claimed that the base was not technically U.S. territory, and thus Washington was under no formal obligation to uphold international refugee law there. Questionable as this argument is, it nevertheless draws upon the language of the original 1903 lease that established the U.S. naval station at Guantánamo Bay. According to the 1903 agreement, the Republic of Cuba maintained “ultimate sovereignty” over the territory; the U.S., for its part, was granted “complete jurisdiction and control over and within said areas.”
Limited sovereignty still implies that a territory operates within some type of legal regime, even if certain national security bureaucrats have argued that the base’s location rendered it beyond the reach of U.S. law. Thus, as Washington began testing the limits of legality at Guantánamo through immigrant detention, lawsuits proliferated. By and large, however, those cases did little to grant asylum-seekers legal protections, whether at the base or in the international waters that surrounded it. In 1992, the case Haitian Refugee Center Inc v. Baker ruled that the U.S. could withhold constitutional rights to those refugees detained at Guantánamo, thereby legally establishing the base as outside of the United States. In 1993, in the pivotal case Sale v. Haitian Centers Council, the Supreme Court ruled that the president could order the Coast Guard to repatriate Haitian refugees intercepted in international waters, thus establishing that neither U.S. law nor the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention protected refugees in Guantánamo from refoulement.
In South Florida, the Cuban-American community was incensed at their loved ones’ extraterritorial incarceration, and many in that community were quick to let their outrage be known. Hundreds of exiles flooded the streets of Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood in protest. “Miami sí, Guantánamo, no!” they chanted, decrying a politics of immigrant deterrence and detention that — with the exception of the Mariel Boatlift, another massive sea exodus in 1980 — Cuban refugees had been largely immune.
Building upon Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the historical phenomenon of rightlessness among refugees, Paik notes how Washington managed to produce rightlessness by suspending its own claim to statehood at Guantánamo even as these so-called safe havens operated under direct orders from the U.S. executive.
On October 24, 1994, the Cuban American Bar Association (CABA) filed a class action lawsuit against the U.S. federal government. The complaint filed in CABA v. Christopher decried the “deplorable conditions of the camps,” the barbed wire, the restrictions on freedom of movement, the “needless risk of medical deterioration and infectious diseases while being denied access to adequate medical care.” It argued that the arbitrary and indefinite detention the refugees endured “violates their substantive and procedural due process right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution,” and that it also violated their “fundamental human right to be free from arbitrary detention” in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 31 of the 1951 Refugee Convention. Unfortunately for the balseros and the prosecution seeking to end their detention, the two Haitian Refugee Center cases in 1992 and 1993 had already established that constitutional protections and the terms of the 1951 Refugee Convention did not extend to those intercepted in international waters and detained at Guantánamo.
The U.S. district court of South Florida ultimately ruled against CABA; the decision established that domestic litigation did not automatically apply beyond U.S. borders and was instead contingent upon prior authorization from Congress. It also established that Haitians and Cubans at Guantánamo had no right to legal counsel, due process or equal protection under the law. As scholar A. Naomi Paik has written on the legacy of these particular immigration rulings, the regime Washington established in its extraterritorial spaces was one that intentionally produced rightless subjects. Building upon Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the historical phenomenon of rightlessness among refugees, Paik notes how Washington managed to produce rightlessness by suspending its own claim to statehood at Guantánamo even as these so-called safe havens operated under direct orders from the U.S. executive.
From today’s vantage point, we can see how easily this logic was exploited once the Department of Defense began indefinitely detaining War on Terror prisoners at the base only six years after the crisis with Cuban migrants ended. As scholar of American Studies Amy Kaplan noted, the logic that cohered through the suspension of claims to statehood at Guantánamo was that “because the U.S. lacks formal sovereignty, it can do whatever it wants there.”
The Trump administration, for its part, has made clear its intention to do whatever it wants wherever it wants. Trump’s contempt for legal norms and Guantánamo’s legacy of ambiguous legality are thus a fitting match, however disturbing that compatibility may be.
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A person who has never been to Cuba might not know how palpably Cuban the Guantánamo base is. They might see the base’s McDonalds, its elementary school, its protestant churches or its ubiquitous American flags and assume it was any small, patriotic town inside the continental United States. But the balseros who arrived at Guantánamo Bay were under no such illusions. They already knew Guantánamo’s oppressive August heat. They had seen the arid terrain that ran along the sea cliffs — terrain a foreigner might not associate with a Caribbean island. They could recognize the foothills of Cuba’s eastern mountain ranges visible from the base, the verdant peaks where in the late 1950s Fidel Castro’s bearded guerrillas waged their campaign to oust Fulgencio Batista. The imprisoned balseros were not all strangers to the iguanas or large banana rats that scurried through their camps.
Over their many months of incarceration, the Cuban refugees organized and revolted, in some instances breaking out of their detention camps. They quickly realized, however, that they could not go far unless they intended to return to Cuba. Eventually, though, their fortunes changed. Two new bilateral agreements forged between Washington and Havana over the course of the crisis paved the way to their eventual transfer to the United States. The first, a Joint Communique on Migration signed September 9, 1994, sought to bring an end to mass outmigration from Cuba by establishing that the Castro government would do all it could to prevent further departures by sea; the U.S. government, for its part, officially declared that it would no longer admit those rafters it rescued in the Florida Straits into the country and would instead take them to Guantánamo, as it had already been doing unofficially for over a month. The Joint Communique also established that the United States would admit a minimum of 20,000 refugees every year, which appealed to the Cuban government as a pressure valve of sorts to ease internal political tensions during the Special Period, and because emigration to Miami portended future remittances sent back to the island. The second bilateral accord, the Cuban Migration Agreement signed May 2, 1995, dictated that those Cuban citizens attempting to enter the United States who were intercepted at sea would be returned to Cuba, while those who reached U.S. soil would be placed in “exclusion proceedings.” Over the course of those exclusion proceedings, Cuban refugees who had made it onto U.S. soil could apply for asylum. Those intercepted at sea were immediately repatriated to Cuba and were therefore unable to apply for asylum. Together, the agreements established what would become known as “wet foot/dry foot.”
Washington began transferring the Cuban refugees detained in Guantánamo into the United States at the rate of approximately 500 people per day, in order of medical priority and, subsequently, according to a lottery system. The process to transfer the 30,000-plus migrants took nearly a year. Guantánamo’s safe haven operations formally ended on January 31, 1996, when the last 124 balseros boarded a 727 airplane and made the hour-and-a-half flight to Miami. The last woman to leave the camps, a 33-year-old named Margarita Uría Rodríguez, departed carrying an image of la Caridad del Cobre, the Virgin of Charity and Cuba’s patron saint, which had kept watch over the refugee tent city called Camp Bravo. All told, the detention of the population that comprised the Cuban rafter crisis in summer of 1994 lasted over seventeen months and cost the U.S. government $250 million.
Washington’s extraterritorial detention practices have sprouted Guantánamo-like tendrils elsewhere.
One of the most startling legacies of the safe haven operations came to bear on the two hundred babies born to incarcerated mothers in the camps. Washington argued that because the babies were not born on U.S. soil, they had no right to U.S. citizenship — a foreshadowing of the regimes of rightlessness Trump has pursued since returning to power. Cuba, meanwhile, claimed no obligation to extend citizenship to the babies born inside the coercively leased territory. In a gesture that echoes Washington’s broader attempts to produce rightless subjects at Guantánamo, the United States government left those 200 children stateless. Five years later, as their families were facing challenges in establishing residency and matriculating their children into the public school system, a volunteer organization in south Florida waged an advocacy campaign on their behalf. “How are they going to tell me my child isn’t a U.S. citizen if she was born on a U.S. base?” a mother of a five-year old asked a reporter from El Nuevo Herald in February of 2000. Another mother, referencing her five-year-old daughter, expressed a similar sense of absurdity: “Where is she from then? Jupiter, perhaps?”
When just over a year later, in September of 2001, the George W. Bush administration declared its global War on Terror, it likely would have made good use of the legal vacuum a place like Jupiter could offer. But as the Department of Defense moved hundreds of men and children through CIA black sites and military bases across the Middle East and South Asia, that type of stateless, legal vacuousness did not exist on this earth’s surface. Guantánamo would have to do.
The late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once described Guantánamo as an animal, claiming that “there is no other like it.” Many of the base’s survivors have similarly described the singularly horrific nature of those 45 square miles in eastern Cuba. And yet, amidst the Trump administration’s draconian innovations to the U.S. immigration regime, Washington’s extraterritorial detention practices have sprouted Guantánamo-like tendrils elsewhere. One of the most clearcut examples is the transfer of migrants held in the U.S. to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, a mega-prison instituted under the country’s authoritarian leader Nayib Bukele. Earlier this year, the Trump administration deported 252 migrants, largely Venezuelans, to Bukele’s notorious prison, which one warden there described as a “cemetery for the living dead.” Over four months, in which the deported captives endured beatings and torture, the Trump administration argued that the men’s fate was now beyond the reach of U.S. authorities and constitutional protections like due process because they were no longer on U.S. soil. In the early 1990s, the Bush and Clinton administration’s legal logic behind Guantánamo operations was much the same. Such is the problem with so-called spaces of exception, these dark laboratories of extralegality. Like weeds, they proliferate, somehow managing to crop up anew.
PHOTO: Operation Sea Signal Base, Guantanamo Bay, 1994 (Department of Defense. American Forces Information Service. Defense Visual Information Center, via Wikimedia)
✺ Published in The Dial
