Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

A Huge Blot Against America
Updated: Monday, July 27th, 2015

           Lisa Monaco is an important lady. {Photo courtesy: Mandel Ngan/AP}. She is President Obama's Deputy Security Advisor. She made headlines last weekend with an important speech at the Aspen Security Conference in Colorado. She said that shortly she will present to the U. S. Congress a plan to close America's most infamous prison -- Gitmo, which Amnesty International calls "The gulag of our time." Gitmo is on U.S.-occupied territory at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ms. Monaco said: "This doesn't mean just unlocking the door and have somebody go willy-nilly to another country. It means a painstaking establishment of security protocols that would govern the transfer of that individual. Let's look at this: Why hand over this albatross to the President's successor?" As usual, Ms. Monaco's words pertaining to Gitmo make total sense. But, as usual, what makes total sense to the rest of the world routinely faces strong opposition in the U. S. Congress. Ominously, Ms. Monaco said she will deliver her proposals for Gitmo to Senator John McCain, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. That, of course, is where many sane proposals go to die.

         Yet, it is Senator John McCain himself who defines the infamous prison at Guantanamo Bay as, "A blot on the image of the United States." Senator McCain turns 79-years-old next month. He was born on the Coco Solo U. S. Military Base in Panama. Both his father and grandfather were 4-star admirals. McCain himself is hailed as a war hero by almost everyone not in Vietnam or not named Donald Trump. He has been in the U. S. Congress since 1982 and in the Senate since 1986. As Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee he viciously opposes most of President Obama's peaceful diplomatic efforts around the world -- especially Cuba, including the famed Gitmo prison as well as the U. S. occupation of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

        Lisa Monaco, a Harvard grad who was born in Boston 47 years ago, this week will begin earnestly dealing with a Republican-dominated U. S. Congress in her quest to remove Gitmo first and Guantanamo Bay second as a Bush-Cheney-Congress blot on both democracy and the United States. Her first approach was to appeal to patriotism, namely the anti-American image that Gitmo and the Guantanamo Bay occupation presents to the world. That didn't work. Patriotism, it seems, is on Congress's back-burner these days. So now, in a new draft that she will shortly present to Senator McCain, Ms. Monaco stresses the economic factor. She points out that U. S. taxpayers are paying $3 million a year to imprison each of the hundreds of prisoners at Gitmo while it would cost only a fraction of that amount if they were transferred to U. S. soil and housed in Supermax prisons. Her data to Senator McCain will state that presently there are 116 prisoners at Gitmo, which is down from the 242 that President Obama inherited. Under the plan she will present to Senator McCain, Ms. Monaco suggests that 52 of the current prisoners should be released to other countries and the remaining 64, considered dangerous, would be transferred to U. S. soil.

          This White House photo shows Lisa Monaco, a very patriotic American, explaining her Gitmo/Guantanamo Bay plans to President Barack Obama. In 2008 he inherited a host of Bush-Cheney problems -- from Gitmo to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that spawned terrorist armies and not just terrorist cells or individuals. When he became President in 2008, President Obama vowed to close Gitmo and to use diplomacy, not war, as the fulcrum or cornerstone of America's foreign policy. He has had some remarkable successes, including some sanity finally imparted to U.S.-Cuban relations. But many of President Obama's most worthy projects have been thwarted by a war-like, belligerent U. S. Congress that caters mostly to the financial power of special interest groups, not excluding the Military Industrial Complex that a war-hating Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower, warned Americans about back when he left office in 1960.

                 A powerful Cuban, Josefina Vidal -- reminiscent of Lisa Monaco -- has some pertinent thoughts in regards to Gitmo and Guantanamo Bay. She too wants Gitmo closed and she wants Guantanamo Bay returned to Cuba. As Cuba's ultra-important Minister of North American Affairs, Vidal realizes that the rest of the world, including the UN, agrees with her that Guantanamo Bay was stolen from Cuba shortly after the U. S. gained dominance over the island following the easy victory in the 1898 Spanish-American War. "I am surprised," she says, "that the American people care so little about their democracy that they are willing to accept the opprobrium the rest of the world, especially the Caribbean and Latin America, showers upon the U. S. concerning the imperialist theft of Guantanamo Bay. The military base and the God-awful prison merely exacerbates the image that shames America. A decent American President, Mr. Obama, has greatly improved relations with Cuba. But Guantanamo Bay is now a two-step process -- close the prison first and then return Guantanamo Bay to Cuba. The U. S. has hundreds of bases, many in Florida and on the East Coast within a few minutes airtime of Cuba. It has nuclear-armed submarines in our shared waters. Guantanamo Bay simply represents a means for extreme Cuban exiles and their Republican associates to hurt or embarrass Cuba as a part of their revenge for not being able to overthrow the Cuban Revolution. The harm it presents to America's image is of no concern to that faction. To the world Guantanamo Bay's continued occupation means that the U. S. is still living in the archaic imperialist stone-age that the Cuban Revolution rebelled against decades ago."

       The sheer brilliance and determination of Josefina Vidal is largely responsible for the improved relations between Cuba and the United States. She, more than anyone else including Obama himself, is the reason that, for the first time since 1961, the Cuban flag now waves over a Cuban embassy in Washington; and on August 14th Secretary of State John Kerry will be in Havana to raise the U. S. flag at its embassy in Havana. Josefina Vidal orchestrated that and much more, against implacable odds. She also did even more impossible things -- such as returning the imprisoned Alan Gross to Maryland when anti-Cuban zealots were gleefully using his imprisonment to harangue against Cuba. She also engineered the return of the famed Cuba 5 to Cuba, including the last one that had been sentenced in Miami to two life terms plus 15 years in a U. S. federal prison. And, perhaps most amazing of all, Josefina Vidal got Cuba removed from the U. S. State Department's debilitating Sponsors of Terrorism list, a listing that dated back to the 1980s and which allowed Miami courts to successfully sue unrepresented Cuba on a myriad of often innocuous charges. Now Josefina Vidal aims to have Guantanamo Bay returned to Cuba. Like some other diplomatic moves she has accomplished, Guantanamo Bay is considered an impossible task for her because ultra-powerful Cuban-Americans and members of Congress consider it the Crown Jewel of their revenge, economic, and political successes against Cuba. But underestimating Josefina Vidal has helped loosen the tight grip extremists have had on America's Cuban policy. The pertinent question now is this: As hard as she has worked to improve U.S.-Cuban relations, would Vidal be willing to sacrifice all of it if Guantanamo Bay is not returned to Cuba?? The answer is significant because the answer is: Yes.

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