U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth visited the Guantanamo Bay military base located on the southeastern coast of Cuba yesterday.
Hegseth, who serves as deputy secretary of war, met with U.S. troops stationed at the base and warned Cuba not to acquire military weapons that could threaten naval facilities or the U.S. mainland.
The visit to Hegses, where Cuba has long called for the return of the United States, is likely to be provocative. Especially since U.S. officials called Cuba a national security threat as recently as May.
Havana and Washington have been locked in a standoff for months, with the White House steadily increasing political pressure on the island following the January operation to arrest former Venezuelan president and longtime ally Nicolas Maduro.
In recent years, Cuba’s political leadership in particular has been subject to increasingly punitive measures from the Trump administration.
Last week, the United States announced sanctions against Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel and several prominent Cuban politicians, including the sons and grandsons of former president and revolutionary leader Raul Castro.
U.S. authorities also indicted the elderly Castro in late May on charges of shooting down two humanitarian planes in 1996.
In response to the indictments and sanctions, Cuba’s top diplomat in the United States, Ambassador Liannis Torres Rivera, accused the North American superpower of creating a “pretext” for military intervention in Cuba.
The Guantanamo Bay naval base, leased to the United States as part of a 1903 treaty between the two countries, is likely to become a major battlefield if the United States decides to intervene militarily in Cuba.
Hegseth’s warning to the Cuban government about the dangers of an attack on the base was likely in response to an Axios report last month. The report states that the Cuban military has acquired more than 300 drones and is considering using them to attack Guantanamo Bay, U.S. warships and even Key West, Florida.
Jonathan Hansen, a historian and senior lecturer in sociology at Harvard University who has written extensively about Guantanamo Bay and its history, said: Latin America Report It discusses the significance of Hegseth’s visit to the military base and the facility’s broader relevance to current and historic U.S.-Cuban relations.
“Hegseth’s visit to a U.S. naval base was intended to keep Cuba guessing and on high alert… (and) to see how useful the base would be and how vulnerable it would be if the U.S. and Cuba went to war,” Hansen claimed.
“Even taking into account the degraded state of the Cuban military over the past 30 years since the end of the Cold War, Guantanamo would be extremely vulnerable. The base is surrounded by Cuban highlands, and one can imagine the scene of Cuban drones attacking the base from the air,” the historian continued.
According to Hansen, these weaknesses, combined with the relative proximity of U.S. Southern Command in Florida to important targets in Cuba such as Havana, the high economic and logistical costs of supplying a base entirely on Cuban soil, and the absence of fighter jets at Guantanamo, make the base strategically unimportant to the United States.
Instead, the Harvard lecturer pointed out, the base gains importance from its symbolic value.
The base is “symbolically useful to Trump and Rubio to remind Cuba that we are not far away. Trump and Hegseth like Guantanamo because they like its reputation for toughness.”
This reputation largely stems from the base’s transformation into a detention center for terrorist suspects after the 9/11 attacks. Prominent human rights groups reported that suspects were subjected to inhumane treatment and torture at the base.
Mr. Hansen also expressed hope that the reassurance of Cuban sovereignty over Guantanamo would be part of a final negotiated settlement between the United States and Cuba, which are still engaged in negotiations despite heightened tensions.
“At some point, Guantanamo must be returned to Cuba. The principles of justice, fairness and national sovereignty demand this. The Cubans are as intractable a people as any other people. But a good (Cuban) friend told me: “No matter how divided Cubans are, we agree on one thing: Guantanamo must be returned to Cuba.”
“It will be the culmination of Cuban independence, 128 years overdue, with the end of the embargo,” Hansen concluded.
Featured image: Guantanamo Bay base.
Image source: RUSMCUSA via Wikimedia Commons
patent: Creative Commons License
