Jana Lipman’s Guantánamo is a history of the women and men who worked at the U.S. Naval base in Guantánamo Bay (dubbed GTMO by the U.S. military) during the Cold War era. The creation of GTMO was authorized by the 1903 Lease Agreement — an extension of the 1901 Platt Amendment — which sanctioned the creation of naval bases and coaling stations in Cuba under the “complete jurisdiction” of the United States while simultaneously maintaining Cuba’s “ultimate sovereignty” over these territories. Lip-man illustrates the historical roots of this legal anomaly, which predates the detention of accused terrorists on the base by the U.S. government during the “War on Terror.” She convincingly demonstrates that it was GTMO’s multinational labor force comprised of native Cubans and West Indian immigrants that first confronted this neocolonial relationship. Her study departs from recent scholarly emphasis on the cultural dimensions of U.S. imperialism by offering a...

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