The Fate of Migrants Detained at Guantánamo

Situated on the southeastern coast of the island of Cuba, Guantánamo was the site where U.S. troops first landed during the Spanish-American War, in 1898. The United States secured access to the base in 1903, through a postwar agreement that pressured the Cubans into leasing out some of their territory in exchange for independence. After a coup d’état in September, 1991, against Haiti’s first democratically elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, tens of thousands fled on packed boats to escape a Haitian military; some of its leaders had been trained in the U.S. Haitians were detained at Guantánamo, along with Cubans who were also seeking asylum in the United States. Whereas the Cubans were considered to be fleeing political persecution, the Haitians were generally labelled as economic migrants, which made them less likely to be granted asylum expeditiously, if at all. To pass the time, detainees stared at the mountains in the distance and played soccer and dominoes. They sang and prayed and waited, sometimes for months.

“It was one of the loneliest places on earth,” Carl Juste, a Miami Herald photographer who travelled to Guantánamo twice in the nineteen-nineties, recently told me. “People felt as though they’d been dropped in the middle of nowhere. If not for the sea, you might think you were in the desert somewhere.” Trailed by military escorts, Juste and other photographers were allowed to document only approved scenes, but he and fellow-photojournalists circumvented that, he said, by focussing closely on details of the detainees’ experience: a child grasping a woman’s finger; hands interlaced over crestfallen faces, their expressions signalling tèt chaje—we’re in serious trouble.