CUBA. Guantanamo Bay. 2017. A guard hides her face at Guantanamo Bay. Most of the base looks like a strip mall, with a general store, McDonald’s, an Irish pub, and a gift shop, where you can buy a pink T-shirt that says “Lil Princess, Guantanamo Bay” with a logo of a skull and crossbones and a pink bow in its hair. The housing is generic suburban tract stock, pleasant and comfortable. The open-air movie theater was playing La La Land that night. The previews began with a salute to America’s armed forces, with everyone standing for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The next day at the prison camp, I ran into a soldier I knew from Wisconsin, who was a prison guard and the cousin of a friend of mine who had his leg blown off by a rocket in Baghdad. We exchanged back- slapping hugs.
The media tour at Guantanamo is pretty generic. You are shown prison cells, and some of the walls are smeared with feces thrown at guards. Idyllic watercolors (boats, the sea, sunsets) painted by the detainees are on display, and the library has eleven copies of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, as well as every Harry Potter book. At the end of the tour, a soldier went through every one of my pictures to make sure the detainees’ faces weren’t visible and deleted anything that he found objectionable, claiming, “It’s the Geneva Convention rules.” However, journalists have no opportunity to ask for consent from the prisoners for photographs or interviews, and visits to the prison common area, where the detainees can be seen through one-way glass, only last for about 15 minutes.