January 25, 2013: A U.S. appeals court overturned the war crimes conviction of Ali Hamza al Bahlul, a Yemeni national serving a life sentence at the detention facility at Guantánamo. Bahlul worked as a publicist for al Qaeda, posting training and recruiting videos on the internet for the organization. The dismissal of the charge is likely to…

This week, in 1927, writer K. C. McIntosh published an article on Guantánamo for the American Mercury, in which he described a scene of U.S. sailors drinking merrily at a tavern in nearby Caimanera, Cuba. The bartenders, soaked with perspiration and the splash of upset glasses, pass out the last round. Lean, nondescript dogs, their eyes glazed with…

“Guantánamo” has become an international symbol of the United States’ War on Terror and a lightning rod for debates about torture, detention, national security, and human rights. But the US naval station at Guantánamo Bay – also known by its military acronym “GTMO” or its nickname, “Gitmo” – was part of American politics and policy…

This week, three members of congress submitted a request to deliver a presentation to the Senate arguing that the U.S. government should broaden its powers to indefinitely detain people believed to be a threat to national security. The move seems to indicate that indefinite detention is becoming increasingly acceptable, and that Guantánamo’s exceptional legal status will…

BBC’s The World recently published an audio interview on the Guantánamo Public Memory Project and on the story of former base worker Alberto Jones, “Over the past century, thousands of Cubans have worked at Guantánamo as contract military and government employees, and domestic workers. That era officially came to end Friday when the last two Cuban…

Liz Ševčenko recently wrote an article for The Guardian on the importance of opening dialogue about Guantánamo, “…Guantánamo is much more than a prison: it’s made up of the thousands of people who worked there, grew up there, and served there, whose stories reveal the many things Gitmo is and can be. Refugees remember Gitmo as both a site of…

In museum representations of contested periods of US history, narratives are often based on rigid notions of who constitutes the victim and the perpetrator.  Examples include West As America’s revisionist interpretations of frontier art which implicated artists in the violence of westward expansion; Enola Gay’s highly critical depiction of the US and the atom bomb in…

The United States as empire.  The phrase seems unsettling or inappropriate.  Throughout a K-12 education, one comes to understand the US as leader of the free world, bastion of liberty, promoter of democracy and defender of the downtrodden.  Indeed, lobbying for Cuban inclusion in the peace treaty of their own independence, Cuban General García invoked…

Guantánamo is not exceptional. There has been enough scholarship-activism – enough debunking of myths and re-writing of histories – to make that abundantly clear. The history of the site is a history not of extraordinary, singular happenings, but of careful strategies. ‘Guantánamo’ could have been in Cuba or Haiti. Within Cuba it was selected from…

Before I was introduced to this project, I knew very little about the historical circumstances surrounding the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay (GTMO). I was aware of its location in Cuba and connection to the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, but understood next to nothing about the site’s legacy of political and military intermittence. This perspective,…