Smoke Break | U.S. Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (2014)
As the wheels of the small charter plane touched down at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in occupied Cuba, photographer Debi Cornwall stepped inside the dark heart of American empire. Military officials checked her passport and her papers without leaving a trace. “For the purposes of the US government, you haven’t left the country; you are still in the United States,” says Cornwall, a former civil rights lawyer working with innocent DNA exonerees.
After 12 years seeking justice from the very system that betrayed its own citizens, Cornwall left the courts behind to work as a photographer in 2014. First stop: Gitmo, the folksy name for the notorious detention camp made infamous under George W. Bush regime following 9/11. After the Bush II administration declared that “a federal district court could not properly exercise habeas jurisdiction over an alien detained at GBC (Guantánamo Bay, Cuba),” the first 20 detainees arrived at Gitmo in 2002 for “enhanced interrogation techniques” used extra-judicially on “enemy combatants” suspected of terrorism.
Activities went on unabated and the number of detainees swelled to 680 in 2003. That same year, the first reports of human rights violations began to come out. Over the next decade, stories of horror became the norm. At a 2014 press conference, then President Barack Obama acknowledged, “We tortured some folks” with casual disregard while making empty promises to close Gitmo. Like many Americans at the time, Cornwall thought Gitmo was a singular aberration in the nation’s history. “I was going to Guantanamo as a state of exception,” she says. “It’s unAmerican to hold people without charge, without trial, beyond the reach of US courts. Ten years later, I see it as representative of American power.”
It is an inconvenient truth many Americans can no longer ignore with the re-election of Donald J. Trump. On January 22, Trump ordered 1,500 active duty troops to begin a large-scale deportation program on the southern border. One week later, the President claimed that “we have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal aliens threatening the American people” even though It only held space for 130 prisoners. The Pentagon immediately ordered several hundred troops, including 170 Marines, to construct a new tent city at Gitmo to house deportees. On February 4, the first 10 migrants arrived at Gitmo, to the very same state media fanfare that inflamed the nation during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.
Paging through her first book, Welcome to Camp America, Inside Guantánamo Bay, published back in 2017, Cornwall explores the unspeakable depravity of Empire American Style, one that past muster of military handlers who wielded complete control over what could be seen, spoken, and shown. Taking a page from Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a US military escort materialized at Cornwall’s side the moment she arrived at Gitmo, shadowing her every move with a glimmering Colgate smile. “That’s when the messaging began,” Cornwall remembers.
Knowing the average American reads at a six-grade level, the script was simple and benign. “Gitmo is the best post a soldier could have!” “There’s so much fun to be had here!” It was no more ironic than the plush turkey vulture with the demonic red face casting an ominous silhouette inside the Gitmo gift shop. Between the decidedly not Olympic size swimming pool squeezed behind a high chain link fence covered by green tarp; an open air sporting arena featuring little more than high school bleacher seats; and an uninspired bowling alley, what more could an American soldier want?
The answer lay secreted behind the walls of the nation’s most infamous detention camp. Built in 1903, the naval base was designed as an occupation without end, providing the US government with a 45-square mile foothold in the Caribbean for the low, low price of just 2,000 gold coins (now $4,085) a year. Known as “the pearl of the Caribbean” during Cuba’s storied heyday as an American puppet state, the naval base became point of conflict between the two nations after Fidel Castro seized power in 1959. The two countries severed relations in 1961 with the understanding that the U.S. would continue to do as it pleased at the naval base.
Three decades later, in 1991, then President and former CIA Director George H.W. Bush directed the Pentagon to build the Guantanamo Bay detention camp to house Haitian refugees who fled the brutal US-backed puppet regimes he helped put in place as Vice President under Ronald Reagan. By 1994, thousands of Haitian and Cuban refugees were imprisoned in tent cities covering much of the base, with Haitians eventually deported and Cubans ushered into the United States. These histories can only be told in part, so much having been disappeared, erased, and whitewashed.
Knowing this, Cornwall went straight to the source, sharing the stories and faceless portraits of 14 men who were imprisoned as terrorists only to be freed and cleared of crimes they never committed. Her sterile images of the empty prison, devoid of all signs of life, become evidence of crimes for which there is no justice. What we see of Gitmo is only what the government wants us to see. If not for Cornwall’s tireless work to tell these mens’ stories, all that might remain is the rapacious specter of impunity that goes by the name “public relations.” Taken together, spectacle and reality spiral into the abyss, like an endless episode of the “Twilight Zone.”
After Cornwalls’ photographs were published by Public Radio International in 2014, a person named John wrote in the comment section, “I was stationed at GTMO for about 6 months in 2008 – Ms. Cornwall’s photos capture my memories very well. It is a lonely place, almost haunted. We often hear the line about GTMO being ‘the best place a soldier can be posted’, but the R&R and moral activities felt like a thin veneer on top of the world we occupied.”
Archival inkjet print, medium-format negative hand-developed on site under watch of military escorts
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