Human Rights in Cuba

In a couple of months, if all goes according to plan, President Obama of the United States will be visiting Cuba. ‘It is thought’ (as the BBC and even the VOA so cautiously put it) that Obama will urge an improvement in Cuba’s human rights record.

Yes indeed. There is a concentration camp in Cuba where people are held indefinitely — often for many years; some have died in captivity — without trial; without even any specific charge. They are kept in small cages rather than ‘proper’ cells, and they are relentlessly tortured to extract ‘confessions’.

This concentration camp is in Guantanamo Bay. That’s in Cuba, but it’s not controlled by the Cuban Government. It belongs to the American Government. The prison, its officers, its torturers, are American.