The Guantánamo Public Memory Project is thrilled to announce that Karen J. Greenberg will speak on December 14 at NYU’s King Juan Carlos Center as part of Why Remember Guantanamo? , the 2-day national dialogue to launch our traveling exhibit. Karen J. Greenberg, a noted expert on national security, terrorism, and civil liberties, is Director of the Center on National Security. She is the…

A year before 9/11 meant anything in the United States, I found myself cornered at a dinner party in Santiago, Chile, trapped into a conversation with a middle-aged man, a friend-of-a-friend of a second cousin of my host parents. He was trying to teach me about Pinochet and human rights, and I will never forget…

When the September 11th terrorist attacks occurred, I was a young teenager developing a personal interest in the world around me and the politics that controlled it. However, there wasn’t much to discuss in the aftermath of 9/11. President Bush had announced that “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” and…

If you are a politically conscious person in the least, you probably have an opinion on Guantánamo Bay, the American Naval Base cum Temporary Detention Center for Haitian/Cuban Refugees cum Indefinite Detention Center for Enemy Combatants, quixotically located on the southeastern edge of Communist Cuba. Though the existence of the base has been public knowledge…

The location of a space is not merely geographical, mappable via GPS and defined by a specific longitude and latitude or address. A space is also a concept, positioned within an ambiguous region (e.g. the South) or only in a perceptual region (e.g. the good old South), and is defined by integral sociopolitical characteristics. The latter…

In the course of doing research on whether the Guantánamo base can be closed, and if so, what to do with the space when the U.S. is no longer using it for Navy operations, the question of how to best use the site has become more difficult than I originally thought. At the beginning of…

During previous graduate work, I taught two sections of Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, a 1000-level course that fulfilled a social science credit. Near the end of our textbook, there was a section about “War and Violent Conflict” in various cultures. Since my content specialization concerned American civil defense during the Cold War, I generally supported the lectures and readings…

The author of Guantánamo Blues (anonymous Naval Wife) describes the accounts she had heard describing life in Guantánamo Bay for Naval families: “Cuba sounded romantic, she recalls; “it was the fleet’s winter base. There would be dancing, swimming, sailing, horse-back riding, and all other things I love.”   The world in which I grew up, the…

  “The conscious, deliberate decision to abandon the Geneva Conventions and the entire fiasco that is Guantánamo will undoubtedly be viewed by historians as an even more disgraceful chapter in our history.”  On June 19, 2008, Major David J.R. Frakt spoke these words during his argument for a pre-trial dismissal of a case against a…

For centuries America has used Guántanamo as an uncharted land to execute procedures that would otherwise be illegal in the states. Exploitation of Cuba’s location and resources is not a new idea. In the 1860’s American farmers relocated to Cuba around the time slavery had been abolished in hopes of making a lot of money…