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Ninaj Raoul has vivid images that have stuck with her from her visits to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in the United States. Raoul, the co-founder and executive director of Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, an immigrant advocacy organization based in Brooklyn, served as a translator for Haitian asylum seekers detained at Guantanamo in the early 1990s. During her many visits there, she recalls that the base was always unbearably hot. There were no nearby trees, just endless rows of brown and olive-green tents set on cement and surrounded by airport hangars, portable toilets, barbed wire, and guard towers. Most of the tents were stiflingly hot, with people packed in like canned sardines. Some detainees were with their children, while others were separated from them. Privacy was nearly impossible, except when people tried to create it by hanging sheets between field bunks. The camp was overrun with mice, the air was thick with flies, and prisoners got soaked even in their tents when it rained. Iguanas and cat-sized rodents known as banana rats roamed the perimeter. I recently asked Raul to recount her memories in light of Donald Trump’s January 29 directive to expand the Guantanamo Migrant Operations Center into a 30,000-bed detention center. Scenes like the ones she describes were captured by photojournalists who visited the base during that period. Their work, presented here, now reads like a preview of what was to come.
Photo by William Campbell/Getty
Photo by William Campbell/Getty
Situated on the southeastern coast of Cuba, Guantanamo Bay was where American troops first landed during the Spanish
Sourse: newyorker.com
