Guant%C3%A1namo: An American History

Guant%C3%A1namo has been in the headlines as a prison for so many years that its history as a naval base, a source of contention with Cuba, and a symbol of America's century-old hegemonic ambitions in the Caribbean have become obscured. Hansen, lecturer at Harvard (The Lost Promise of Patriotism), presents Guant%C3%A1namo's military, political, and cultural history in a work combining comprehensive research and critical perspective. He begins with the arrival of Columbus in 1494, analyzes the geology that made Guant%C3%A1namo Bay one of the Caribbean's strategic focal points, and describes its occupation by U.S. Marines in 1898 during the Spanish-American War. Hansen presents that as merely one element of America's systematic discounting of the Cubans' contribution to Spain's defeat%E2%80%94and the accompanying conviction that Cubans were unfit for self-government. The 1903 cession of Guant%C3%A1namo as a naval base confirmed Cuba's dependent status and was a subject of contention even before Fidel Castro's 1959 seizure of power. Since then Guant%C3%A1namo's status as a political symbol has come to outweigh its significance as an operational base. Hansen approvingly quotes a senior officer who dismissed Guant%C3%A1namo as adding "absolutely nothing to the navy" strategically. Yet Cubans can also foresee the U.S. presence "as salutary as it is humiliating"%E2%80%94a refuge for dissidents fleeing Castro's regime. 16 pages of b&w illus.; map. (Oct.)