Enemy at Bay

Guantánamo is giving us three headaches—the prison, its inmates and the navy base itself, which has been in U.S. hands since the early 20th century. President Obama has ordered the infamous prison shut down within his first year in office; that’s a good start.

What to do with the detainees, as they are delicately called, presents nothing but aggravation to the new administration. Ship them back to their countries of origin? Conduct further military tribunals? Initiate federal court proceedings? These “enemy combatants” may have been neither enemy nor combative when we locked them up, but after a few years at Gitmo they could emerge as both. It’s a quandary, and one not easily resolved.

Finally there’s the 45-square mile base, which became part of the spoils from our brief intervention in Cuba’s successful war of independence from Spain more than a century ago. For decades prior to the War on Terrorism, Gitmo was a lazy Caribbean naval station with standard shipyard maintenance, training duties and intelligence activities. The lease agreement, which we compelled Cuba to sign in 1903, has no expiration date, and calls for us to send Cuba a check every year for an occasionally increasing sum; right now, it’s at $4085 annually. Cashing our check would acknowledge the legitimacy of the lease, something Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl have refused to do. Fidel has called it “un puñal clavado en el corazón de la tierra cubana” (a dagger plunged into the heart of Cuban soil), and his government insists that Guantánamo form part of any diplomatic rapprochement.

Here’s the solution to all three problems in one sweeping action: We turn the prison, the prisoners and the base itself over to Cuba. You want your land back, Castro brothers? It’s all yours. You dismantle the prison. The pesky inmates are now your headache. You use your land as you see fit.

What benefits does the United States reap from such an audacious proposal? Financial, legal and diplomatic. We save the enormous cost of dismantling “the least worst place,” as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called the choice of Gitmo for our prison. We avoid the legal morass of what to do with the suspects. And we break through the generations-old stalemate between ourselves and our neighbors 90 miles away. They’d be doing us a favor and we’d be doing them one.

I can hear your objections now, yet the international blight of our notorious prison, coupled with our stubborn refusal to join the rest of the world in recognizing Cuba, would finally dissolve. International respect and admiration, severely lacking since 9/11, would again be ours.