July 16th 2015:  Cuban President Raul Castro addressed the nation’s National Assembly in a speech calling for a new relationship with the United States. President Castro called for an end to the animosity between the two nations, dating back to the end of the Cuban revolution in 1959. This speech is part of the recent on-going effort to normalize US-Cuba relations. While the…

July 4th 2015: A group of over 90 British politicians, activists, musicians, writers and actors signed an open letter to U.S President Barack Obama urging him to release Shaker Aamer from GTMO. Aamer, a British resident has been detained at GTMO since February 14 2002 shortly after being captured by bounty hunters in Afghanistan who…

In the past few weeks there have been some very exciting developments for GPMP….. First off, three weeks ago GPMP was granted funding from LAMP (Latin American Microform Project) for digitization of The Guantanamo Bay Gazette. Old editions of the Gazette are now being digitized and uploaded to GPMP’s online GTMO archive, hosted by Dloc (The Digital…

Over the past few months, we’ve slowly been adding new interviews to our online collection. Produced by students at the University of Miami and Northeastern University, these interviews share the memories of people with unique and important experiences of Gitmo. We collect and make these interviews available in the hope that they will inspire people…

Throughout my experience contributing to the Guantánamo Public Memory Project, I often found myself considering the contradictions of attempting to capture memories regarding a time and a place that many people who experienced it firsthand do not wish to remember. In discussing the guiding principles of the Guantánamo Public Memory Project, the project website asks…

While researching for and carrying out this project, one of the major ethical concerns I encountered was the issue of speaking for another person or group. Although one of the Guantánamo Public Memory Project’s main goals is to allow people to relate their own memories of Guantánamo, I found that such personal memories are incredibly difficult…

How can we trust memory? As historians, we strive to be objective as possible. We gather evidence, often basing our arguments on documents that we find in archives. Yet, we have to be able to trust our sources. Oral histories and people’s memories are hardly perfect. Who can remember what exactly happened five or ten…

The oral history process begins far before the interview starts. The dialogues are far longer than the soundbite portraits they often become. The process by which a lead – possibly just a name or a phone number – becomes a historical source, is incredibly personal and fraught. A person’s memories are a vast and interesting…

“The law operates through practices and principles that purport to be objective, impersonal, and neutral, but are, in fact mired in hidden subjectivities and unexamined claims which often serve to denigrate the experiences of marginalized subjects and populations, experiences that contradict or challenge these unquestioned assumptions.” A. Naomi Paik, “Testifying to Rightlessness: Haitian Refugees Speaking…

How often are we subjected to the harsh criticisms of Guantanamo Bay? News of the base consists of much of the same: detainees, imperialist presence, and torture. But what of the people who are stationed there? What do we know of them, their experiences, and their lives? Is GTMO only filled with hardened soldiers inflicting…