Artists in residence

At the eastern tip of Cuba, two territories enclose a bay: the province of Guantánamo and, inside it, “Gitmo”, the naval station leased in perpetuity to the US in 1903. The first is a neglected region whose salt and fishing industries were devastated by the construction of the base; in the early 1960s locals also lost the right to work there. Entry permits are required for Guantánamo’s border towns, cast as bulwarks against imperialist incursion. The second territory, the base itself, ringed by watchtowers, fences and mines, is a 45 square mile enclave where American navy families play baseball, where Cuban defectors from the 1960s grow old, and where (until the regime softened a decade years ago) Muslim abductees were horribly abused as part of the “war on terror”.

It is between these ideological, economic, moral and social incompatibilities that Esther Whitfield seeks to find “common ground” – a recurrent phrase in A New No-Man’s-Land – through writing, art, photography and film; to reconceive the two spaces as a “tenuously cohesive region” whose implications resonate worldwide. Across four chapters – “Translation”, “Guards”, “Home”, and “The Future” – a cat’s cradle of parallels emerges between the differently fraught positions of Guantánamo’s residents. The natural focus is on detainees, but all are revealed to be prisoners in one sense or another.

The happiest instance of a transcendence of barriers is provided by nature: the hummingbirds and iguanas that roam both sides, thanked in several detainee memoirs for “bringing light into our lives” while helping the disoriented men to identify where on earth they were. Human empathy too can leap fences: in various works the local poet José Ramón Sánchez dared to project himself into the physical and psychic situation of those frequently innocent victims, drawing in part on their own poetry.

Yet any manifestations of solidarity or defiance take place against a more paradoxical “common ground” – namely the apparatus of enmity itself, the poisoned air in which province and base evolved. Both Cuba and the US have consistently framed their relationship to Guantánamo in the language of war. The Revolution’s rhetoric insists that “[Cuban] citizens always be engaged in battle, mentally if not physically”. And its war against imperialism overlaps with a war against “counterrevolutionaries”, as those who attempt to flee the island are branded; no matter how tired the ideology is by now, some border Cubans still report “enemies” spied swimming across the bay. Dissidents and failed migrants fill Guantánamo’s own abusive prisons. On the other side, when the Americans stopped fretting about communism, they replaced it with the war on terror. At its height, post-9/11, this voided the most basic norms of constitutionality owing to the juridical limbo in which the base, and hence the camp, exists – hailed by Donald Rumsfeld as “the legal equivalent of outer space”.

A still more striking commonality is the condition of indefiniteness. The station’s lease is indefinite; the war on terror is indefinite, even if it has lately subsided; the captivity of “terrorists” (and the trauma of many after their release), is indefinite, and so is the Cuban Revolution, whose Ur-slogan, “Venceremos” – we shall overcome – is the future promise made to a present endured for more than sixty years as “the endlessly deferred fulfilment of a socialist society”.

Most of the cultural efforts at dissolving this frozen convergence of hostilities are equally forced to suspend the present. Dissident bulletins call for a national conciliation and rights-based democracy that are not currently on the menu. Among international speculative projects, the Guantánamo Bay Museum of Art and History is typical: an online, continuing work of memorialisation by the transdisciplinary artist Ian Alan Paul that treats the camps as already closed, “in a future in which apology, atonement, and repair have already been made”. Here the symbolic powers of art and conscience are stretched to the limit. Such initiatives are ultimately abstract – much like the tone of this book, based on archival sources. Nevertheless, its most arresting chapter, “Guards”, after probing the conflicts of Cuban border and prison officials through literature, is vividly experiential when quoting from memoirs to trace the development of bonds between terror detainees and US soldiers. Some friendships sprang from enforced daily intimacy; some from shared interests in books or music. Black and Hispanic guards especially found themselves receptive to consciousness-raising by men like the British Pakistani Moazzam Begg. Several guards, deeply impressed by the detainees’ spiritual strength, converted to Islam.

One encounter brings brutality and humanity together. In his Guantánamo Diary (2015), Mohamedou Ould Slahi describes a naked Sergeant Mary rubbing against him while a male officer yells: “You’re having sex with American whores and you’re praying?” Later, Mary becomes “the closest person to me”. That A New No-Man’s-Land doesn’t explore this emotive shift suggests the limitations of its author’s academic approach. Perhaps Slahi understood that Mary had been humiliated too. For me, their unfathomable discovery of common ground crowns all the conciliatory moments and practices that Esther Whitfield reclaims from the obsolete divisions of Guantánamo.

Lorna Scott Fox is a journalist, editor and translator

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