If you have an ounce of historical awareness (and basic empathy), the name “Guantánamo Bay” triggers images of torture and pain. It’s a site where the deprivation of the powers that be has been on full display. But what if Guantánamo wasn’t such a downer? What if it became a “prosperous charter city”? That’s the proposal coming from the most recent group of libertarian tech weirdos trying to rebrand Guantanamo with the help of a little modern-day slave labor.
Since taking office, President Donald Trump has been courted by several groups proposing “charter”, “startup”, or “freedom” cities in the United States. Exempt from taxes and regulations, these cities propose themselves as wonderlands where business (like clinical trials) can be conducted without governmental oversight. But their sites aren’t limited to the U.S. alone. In February, one of the groups, the Charter Cities Institute, released its proposal to transform Guantánamo through “governance autonomy, private-sector investment, and immigration reform.”
The group honed in on Guantánamo due to its legal status as a site under U.S. jurisdiction with “minimal local legal complexity.” Compared to domestic sites where the group encounters “multi-tiered hurdles” like zoning boards and city regulations, setting up a charter city on Guantánamo would be a breeze. In its proposal, CCI wrote, “By transforming Guantanamo Bay into a charter city, the U.S. government can catalyze economic growth, manage immigration flows, and project America’s unparalleled capacity for innovation and statecraft — all while requiring no legislation.”
Generally, Trump has been receptive to so-called charter cities and previously suggested using protected federal land to build them. In March, Trump compared their efforts to “past generations of Americans” who “pushed across an unsettled continent and built new cities in the wild frontier.” He also said that building these cities would “reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people, all hardworking families, a new shot at home ownership and, in fact, the American dream.”
Trump’s words echo portions of CCI’s proposal, which also pitched a Guantánamo charter city as an opportunity for “undermining Cuba’s community regime.” It all sounds corny because it is. While groups like CCI propose their developments as innovative structures where cutting-edge tech can prosper, all they’re really doing is bringing back company towns. However, Trump isn’t completely off in his comparison. CCI’s ambitions are similar to past generations of Americans who relied on, you know, genocide and slavery.
In its proposal, CCI pitched Guantánamo as a “unique opportunity to rethink immigration pathways while balancing economic opportunity with security concerns.” The proposal went on to suggest housing immigrants at Guantánamo for a “probationary period” while “evaluating their contributions to the local economy and society.” CCI also pitched a “Guantanamo Bay Tech Visa” to fast-track high-skilled workers into “market integration.”
The idea of housing immigrants at Guantánamo isn’t far-fetched. In the early 90s, HIV-positive Haitian asylum seekers were detained at Guantánamo in horrific conditions. Earlier this year, Trump also ordered the expansion of detention centers at Guantánamo. Although Trump aimed to detain up to 30,000 migrants on the bay, fewer than 500 people have been held there, per a New York Times report published this week.
It’s possible to go on for days about how ugly and weird CCI’s proposal is. Trying to rebrand Guantánamo as a place of prosperity while simultaneously proposing modern-day slavery is foul. Immigrants are already dying in detention facilities due to medical neglect and suicide. As Joseph Margulies, a Cornell professor and author of Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power, told the New Republic, “[The proposal] contemplates the creation of a place where human beings exist solely to demonstrate their capacity to participate in a neoliberal experiment. That’s just horrific.”
Beyond the lack of humanity, CCI’s proposal is shaky from a legal perspective. It relies on the notion that Guantánamo is a regulation-free zone, but that’s not necessarily the case. Regardless, CCI and all these charter city bozos should be treated as the losers they are and booed anytime they talk. Instead, these organizations have the backing of tech billionaires like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Balaji Srinivasan, and an administration that’s in full agreement.
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