We stood, cameras at our sides, looking south across the delta of Guantánamo Bay. A severe drought had extended into summer and the hills were gray-green. The expanse of water, too, was grayish, from the deepest part of the bay out to the ocean. It all looked surprisingly small. But the geographical features that had motivated various empires—Spain, Britain, the United States—to covet the bay were immediately evident: its large, deep, protected harbor; its vantage on the edge of the Caribbean archipelago; and the proximity of the settlement now known as Guantánamo City, important in Spanish efforts to develop commerce and to Christianize the indigenous population as early as the seventeenth century.¹ The U.S. military base—albeit distant, nearly a mirage, a set of structures dispersed at the edge of an expanse of sea—appeared weighty, even unwieldy. The bay, incontrovertibly part of the Cuban landscape, is at the same time a nodal point in the history of crossings and recrossings, unexpected intersections, and sometimes inconceivable violence that has shaped countless Caribbean lives.

Flanked by fence lines and walls of cactus, the international borders separating the base from Cuban territory were virtually invisible in the light haze of the afternoon. The arid terrain became a space in which to parse the logic of an expansive empire that has increasingly turned to discourses about freedom to justify incarceration, torture, unlawful detention, and other infractions of basic rights that for many have become virtually synonymous with ‘Gitmo,’ the oldest and most controversial of all overseas U.S. military bases.

Here at the lookout point called La Gobernadora , the closest we could get to the base without official permission from Cuban authorities, we chatted with two of our Cuban hosts, Ana Luz and Raúl, both affiliates of the local branch of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (or UNEAC, in Spanish). A few young French tourists came up the steps behind us, but otherwise the area was strikingly empty. The reflections off an airplane hangar, a desalination plant, and the large fuel tanks of the base were visible in the distance. Contemplating the surroundings, one of us mused, “No puedo creer que estoy aquí, es un sueño.”

The words ran the risk of sounding terribly wrong. Why would anyone dream of looking out upon a place that has often championed, to borrow Susan Sontag’s words, “a culture of shamelessness” and “unapologetic brutality”?² Yet the statement formed part of a larger dialogue involving months of email exchange, a common interest in the history and literature of the Caribbean region, and new friendships cultivated through conversation, shared meals, and a visit to Guantánamo City’s Casa de la Historia , where we presented a paper that included the rationale for this volume. Moreover, for us, as Americans, this was a mythified place, one we were by and large forbidden to visit—central to the history of our nation, yet essentially off limits to the vast majority of its citizens.

Guantánamo—meaning the bifurcated U.S. and Cuban space—embodies a complex of issues that are crucial to understanding the past, present, and future of imperial power. Guantánamo Bay has figured in plans for military defense and economic development for hundreds of years. Even before its seizure by the United States, it was the landing site for the British when they invaded Cuba in 1742. Later, in 1765, the Count of Ricla recognized the bay’s strategic importance, planning for its designation as a center of defense for El Oriente . Just a few decades afterward, Spanish authorities underscored its significance when they established that permanent naval and terrestrial forces were to form part of a vast system of regional defense in which Veracruz, San Juan, and Cartagena acted as key installations.³ Today, the bay offers a critical window on key aspects of evolving global history, with the U.S. military prison off its southeast banks and the larger base a contemporary focal point of national security interests and arguably unsuccessful responses to Islamic terrorism. Moreover, we assert, the location of the U.S. base in the Caribbean is crucial—not coincidental—to understanding its global significance.

In this volume, we bring together texts by a diverse group of scholars and writers, including previously unpublished work from within Cuba. The project is grounded in our conviction that the humanities offer a powerful and productive set of tools and conceptual resources for responding to violations of freedom linked to the U.S. presence at Guantánamo, including the ongoing operation of the infamous military prison, arguably the most controversial political issue of the early twenty-first century. Thus, the questions and arguments offered in the chapters that follow are worldly, outward looking, and politically engaged. The literary texts, films, artwork, historical archives, and political commentary contextualized in this volume contribute to its diversity of voices, in part through relaying memories and perspectives of people who have experienced the base first hand (including asylum seekers, those detained and held captive there, members of the U.S. military, and Cubans living in the vicinity).

Our own initial perspectives on Guantánamo—the prison , the base, the province, the larger regime—were based largely on our reading and critical analysis of various types of texts in Spanish and English: poetry , articles, books, news stories, historical records, and human rights reports. Our vision of Guantánamo in its divergent incarnations was powerfully nuanced by actually being in the region, as well as by academic activities dedicated to the topic, teaching about Guantánamo in our classes, conversations with people who have worked on the base (lawyers and members of the military), and dialogue with this volume’s contributors. As the project unfolded, we became increasingly aware of the need to present perspectives from both sides of the trade/travel/information embargo in order to get at what is truly at stake in understanding the significance of ‘Guantánamo.’

Several military outposts lay along the remote road that took us from Guantánamo City to the lookout point on that hot August afternoon. Encountering almost no traffic, our Russian Lada passed a few children walking along the side of the road and a couple of horse-drawn taxis filled with people who lived in the area. The absence of walls, barricades, and other structures that might block our view was striking. Large pieces of Cuban military equipment, including mortars, battle tanks, and towed artillery, were displayed in the open relatively near the road, behind barbed-wire fences that could have been in a rural part of west Texas. Dull green and gray, much of the equipment appeared to date to the era in which the Soviet Union had provided the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces with military assistance. We drove through two checkpoints and saw a few uniformed soldiers, probably members of the Border Brigade, practicing in the sun. The sobering landscape brought to life a show of might reminiscent of that surrounding the Granma Memorial at the Museum of the Revolution, which we had visited in Havana the week before. Clearly the Cuban military is no match for the world’s major military powers; nevertheless, it appeared poised to defend the country, to make any invasion a precarious and costly endeavor.

The conversation with our hosts at La Gobernadora provoked questions about what we had assumed was a common foundation of shared knowledge relating to the region. In discussing issues ranging from hunger strikes by Haitian asylum seekers detained at the base in the 1990s to the U.S. military’s Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, the habeas corpus rights that had been denied to “unlawful enemy combatants ,” and the association of torture with bright orange jumpsuits, we discovered that information about these topics was in fact not as ‘universal’ as we had believed. Like most Cubans on the island, our hosts had limited access to both North American news sources and to much of the recent academic scholarship on controversies surrounding the base, very little of which has been translated from English to Spanish or other languages.⁴

Of course, the two Cubans who accompanied us to La Gobernadora , as well as others with whom we spoke during our visit, also shared a wealth of information and knowledge unfamiliar to many in the United States and other parts of the world, including many who believe they have more information than they could ever need right at their fingertips. As performance artist Laurie Anderson learned in preparing her 2015 installation ‘Habeas Corpus’ with former Guantánamo captive Mohammed el Gharani, “There’s so little information about Guantánamo in the U.S. And so much resistance and fear.”⁵ Her collaboration with Gharani, like this project’s engagement with Cubans and others who are interested in connections between Guantánamo Bay and empire , celebrates increased awareness and fearlessness, what Anderson has alluded to as questions about “the right to find things out for ourselves” and “the right to be free.”⁶

Looking from the deck of La Gobernadora down the length of road that led to the arid terrain surrounding the base, a couple of vultures soaring in the sky above, we remembered those people who had perished in attempts to cross la frontera and seek refuge in U.S. territory. We tried to imagine the mixture of desperation and hope that had contributed to their deaths. Our hosts spoke of Cubans who had died and others who had obtained entry into the base and become long-term residents, working alongside contract employees from places such as Haiti, Jamaica , and the Philippines . Someone pointed to the remote northeast gate through which a large cohort of Cubans working as federal employees of the U.S. government had come and gone, some for as long as five decades. All of us found it difficult to articulate precisely why—in the midst of significant animosity across 50 years of severed diplomatic relations—our respective governments had long allowed any workers to continue to commute.

And yet everyone somehow felt more optimistic about relations improving. Only wayward livestock had recently lost their lives to the deadly landmines , and in the last year the Cuba...