Guantanamo Naval Base: 119 years of affront to the Homeland

The stillness of the morning of December 10, 1903 was broken in Guantanamo Bay by the 21 cannon shots fired from the modern battleship Kearsarge to hail the raising of the Stars and Stripes to announce the beginning of U.S. jurisdiction over a good part of this part of eastern Cuba as a naval and coal base.

Such was the humiliation caused by that plundering among the Cuban people that no high representative of the insular government took part in the event that on that day, and since, gave way to foreign occupation.

The legal appearances of the farce was soon supplemented, on February 16, 1903, 119 years ago, with an intimate ceremony at the Government Palace attended by satisfied U.S. diplomats in which the annexationist President Tomas Estrada Palma, surrounded by his top aides, signed the agreement to lease the naval base for as long as necessary.

Thus began the fulfillment of the provisions of the Platt Amendment, imposed on the Cuban Constituent Assembly by the United States as a tool of blackmail that made the withdrawal of the Yankee troops contingent on the acceptance of the text as an appendix to the Cuban Constitution that gave the U.S., among other prerogatives, the right to intervene and to use in perpetuity the bays of their choosing for military purposes.

The Guantanamo base allowed the U.S. to have a stepping-stone to supremacy in South America and its routes to Europe and to control communication between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans with the subsequent opening of the strategic Panama Canal in 1914.
With the triumph of the Revolution, the Guantanamo Naval Base quickly became a platform to unleash permanent attacks against the country and support counterrevolutionary organizations and CIA networks from the base, chosen for a plan of self-aggression led by mercenaries with weapons stockpiled right in the premises to justify an invasion of the island.

As a result of those aggressions, border combatants Ramón López Peña and Luis Ramírez López were assassinated in 1964 and 1966, respectively, as were in 1961 Rubén López, a humble worker and well-known revolutionary, and in 1962 the fisherman and militiaman Rodolfo Rosell. These crimes have never been cleared up by the U.S. authorities.

Since 1994, a climate of détente has prevailed in the border area thanks to Cuba's willingness to avoid provocations near a U.S. facility that also became an illegal detention and torture center for prisoners in the wake of the so-called war against terrorism, repeatedly denounced by human rights institutions around the world.

Although the Miami mafia, represented in the U.S. legislature, has not given up its old dreams of turning the base into a scene of provocations, it is now promoting an unprecedented initiative before President Joe Biden to transform the military enclave into a place of large-scale reception of Cubans requesting U.S. visas, taking into account the current suspension of the consular services provided by the U.S. embassy in Havana.

The promoters of the cock-and-bull story hold that, if any "disorder" happens at the base or in its surroundings, the military authorities could respond to what they would call an attack on the national security of the United States.

Cuba will reject this new provocation and will not relinquish its right to the return of the area occupied by the Guantanamo Naval Base to put an end to the affront to the homeland consummated with the shameful agreement that handed over a piece of the country to the empire on that distant February 16, 1903.