Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez today recalled the 1903 occupation by the United States of the territory of Guantánamo, where it maintains a naval base.
The island’s top diplomat said in his profile on the social network X, that 121 years ago that northern power usurped 117 square kilometres of Cuban soil, which it holds illegally against the will of the nation.
In his message, the Cuban foreign minister stressed that at the Guantánamo Bay naval base, the US government has tortured prisoners with impunity and systematically violated their human rights.
On 16 February, President Miguel Díaz-Canel recalled in X that the leader of the Cuban Revolution, Raúl Castro, defined the base as “a dagger stuck in the side of the homeland; a dagger that we will remove peacefully, in a civilised manner and by upholding the principles of international law”.
On that day in 1903, the presidents of Cuba, Tomás Estrada Palma, and of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, signed an agreement whereby they ceded the portion of land located in the eastern province of Guantánamo, “for the necessary time and for the purposes of a naval and coal station”.
This was preceded by the Platt Amendment, imposed on the Cubans in their first republican Constitution during the US military occupation, which allowed the United States to establish coaling or naval stations.
The agreement came about under the threat of US military intervention on the island, which experts consider illegal in light of the United Nations Declaration on Military, Political or Economic Coercion in the Conclusion of Treaties.
Since its creation, the US base has been a spearhead of aggression against Latin American nations, as well as provocations against Cuba since 1959.
Following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 in New York, the US decided to open a detention centre there, which it maintains despite allegations of egregious human rights violations against the prisoners.
