Close Guantanamo—then give it back to Cuba

I have long wondered why Cuba lets the USA have the prison and naval base at Guantanamo. The USA controls 46.8 square miles at the entrance to Guantanamo Bay. If that territory were perfectly square, it would measure 6.8 x 6.8 miles.

Cuba and the U.S. signed a lease for Guantanamo Bay in 1903, and the lease was renewed in 1934, but why does it continue today?

On 17 Aug 2007 Fidel Castro published an essay in the party newspaper Granma titled, “The Empire and the Independent Island.” In it, Castro said the USA pays Cuba $4,085 a month in rent for the Guantanamo naval base. Castro said he has always refused to cash the checks as a protest against the “illegal” U.S. occupation of the land which he said was now used for “dirty work.” He said the U.S. checks are made out to the “Treasurer General of the Republic,” a position that ceased to exist after Cuba’s 1959 revolution. He said that only one U.S. check was ever cashed — in 1959 because of confusion in the early days of the leftist revolution.

(In a television interview years ago, Castro showed the checks stuffed into a desk drawer in his office. Or so says Reuters.)

The U.S. Navy established the Guantanamo base in 1903 to store coal for ships that were used to guard the approaches to the Panama Canal. Castro said the USA “illegally usurped” the enclave, adding that the base no longer had any strategic military purpose in the age of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers packed with fast fighter-bombers.

Anyway, the Guantanamo base has a McDonald’s (seen below) plus also Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, Starbucks Coffee, and so on. The fast food joints do not exist in Cuba outside the base, but now they will, because of the normalization of relations between the USA and Cuba.

Average Cubans will be very excited by the influx of gringo money and gringo culture. Older Cubans know what is coming, but younger ones will dismiss them as fools.

Soon there will be mass privatization throughout Cuba, and with it, mass layoffs.

Free education and health care will vanish.

Unemployment will skyrocket.

The gap between the rich and the rest will become extreme.

Rich college kids from the USA will descend on Cuba for Spring Break.

Cuba will re-establish relations with Israel (which were broken in 1973) and will build a huge museum to the Jewish holo-hoax lie.

There are only 1,500 Jews in Cuba (one in 7,445 people) yet Jews will occupy top positions throughout the Cuban government.

American pharmaceutical and bio-engineering companies will take ownership of Cuban medical research facilities (which are very advanced) and use them to boost their profits.

Cubans will eat fast food, and develop diabetes, and they will not be able to pay for medical treatment.

When hurricanes hit, the damage will be worse than ever, since all sense of community will be lost. Cubans will no longer talk to their next-door neighbors.

As all this is happening, Cubans will be in denial, and the corporate media will say it is all wonderful. Economists will use sophisticated bullshit to claim that hell is paradise.

Eventually, average Cubans will admit that they were betrayed. As they starve in poverty, they will long for the past when there were stable jobs and free health care.

According to Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic magazine, Fidel Castro told Goldberg that, “No one has been slandered more than the Jews.”

“Over the course of our five-hour discussion, Castro repeatedly returned to his excoriation of anti-Semitism. He criticized Ahmadinejad for denying the holocaust™ and explained why the Iranian government would better serve the cause of peace by acknowledging the unique history of anti-Semitism and trying to understand why Israelis fear for their existence.”

”I was surprised to hear Castro express such sympathy for Jews, and for Israel’s right to exist (which he endorsed unequivocally).”

Nauseating, but is it true? I don’t know. Castro was 84 when he supposedly said those things. If I have Alzheimer’s disease when I am 84, please shoot me.
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