Estrada Palma's legacy an insult to the homeland

On February 16, 1903, in an intimate ceremony at the Government Palace in front of long-faced Cuban officials and exultant U.S. diplomats, President Tomás Estrada Palma signed the agreement to lease Guantánamo Bay as a naval base for as long as necessary, thus beginning more than a century of affront to Cuba's national sovereignty marked by the Platt Amendment, imposed on the Cuban Constituent Assembly by the U.S. government, who blackmailed the Island by stating that only after the acceptance of the amendment as an appendix to the Cuban Constitution would the Yankee troops be withdrawn.

The Platt Amendment gave the US Congress the right to intervene in Cuba, oversee all its diplomatic and commercial, and use in perpetuity the bays of Nipe, Bahía Honda, Cienfuegos and Guantánamo for naval or coal bases; however, in view of the Cuban people’s strong rejection of the infamous imposition, the request was limited to the latter.

Many officials of the Estrada Palma government were so humiliated by such invasive practices that no high-ranking representative participated on the December 10, 1903 ceremony held on a U.S. battleship in Guantanamo Bay which marked the beginning of the occupation.

When Manuel Sanguily learned that a U.S. squadron was in Guantanamo, he told his friend Enrique Trujillo: "They have seen Guantanamo, they will never give up their possession of it" and his words were prophetic.

The base in Cuba was of strategic importance for a rising empire that was gaining a foothold in the region and elsewhere and crowned its supremacy in the area with the construction of the Panama Canal, completed in 1914.

Not only did the Naval Base serve those purposes of the empire; during the liberation struggle its airports were also used to supply fuel and ammunition to the dictatorship's airplanes that bombed the peasants of the Sierra Maestra.

With the triumph of the Revolution, the Guantanamo Naval Base soon became a platform of permanent aggression against the country and material support for counterrevolutionary organizations and CIA networks, and was even chosen for a sinister plan of self-aggression involving mercenaries in order to justify an invasion of the country.

As a result of these attacks, Cuban border patrol members Ramón López Peña and Luis Ramírez López were murdered in 1964 and 1966, respectively, and other Cuban soldiers were wounded. Also murdered at the base in 1961 was Rubén López, a humble worker and well-known revolutionary who left nine children orphaned; and in 1962 the fisherman and militiaman Rodolfo Rosell was found in his boat near the perimeter of the base with his clothes in tatters and evident signs of torture, crimes that the U.S. has never clarified.

Since 1994 there has been a climate of détente in the border area thanks to Cuba's willingness to avoid provocations on the perimeter of the base, also illegally used as a detention and torture center for prisoners as a consequence of the so-called war on terrorism, as human rights institutions everywhere have repeatedly denounced.
Cuba will never renounce its right to recover the territory occupied by the Guantanamo Naval Base to put an end to an affront that started over a century ago, with the signature in the morning of February 16, 1903 of the humiliating agreement that handed over a piece of the country to the empire.