From GITMO to Gaza–Technology, Genocide, and U.S. Neocolonialism
Via AfroCubaWeb
I. Technology and Genocide under US neocolonialism in Cuba (Guantánamo) and Palestine (Gaza) in the 20th and 21st centuries
In May and June of 1912, the newly formed Cuban government, under the direct support and advisement of the United States, committed genocide with indiscriminate brutality and violence targeting Black Cubans in the Eastern region of the island (Oriente). The murder and disappearance of 5,000 Black Cubans happened under the guise of defending Cuba against the rebelling Black “racists” of Cuba’s first Black political party, El Partido Independiente de Color (PIC). In the period of modern colonialism and neocolonialism, the 1912 massacre proved itself as a testing ground for technological advancements and new and advanced weaponry later used during WWI, as well as in the US occupation of Haiti and the Dominican Republic in 1915 and 1916, respectively. Nevertheless, this genocide also allows us to understand the context of Cuba and the greater Caribbean under colonial and neocolonial control before 1959.
Connecting to genocide in our contemporary society and paralleling Israel’s genocide of Gaza, the use of facial recognition through print media demonstrates modernity at the root of this massacre. The Cuban government and newspaper used official PIC organizational photos and circulated them, but indiscriminately murdered Black people in Eastern Cuba with high-tech and high-grade US weapons, designating them all as PIC-affiliated and as supporters. The US/Cuban context reflects and replicates the use of media, rudimentary but modern biometric facial recognition technology, and technologically advanced weapons as the fundamental base of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Occupation and militarization from GITMO to Gaza show the nuances of technology and genocide under US neocolonialism in Cuba (Guantánamo) and Palestine (Gaza) in the 20th and 21st centuries as layered, connected, and a part of the same colonial timeline.
The massacre that occurred one hundred and thirteen years ago is usually (and rightfully) compared to the Morant Bay Rebellion of Jamaica (1865) and the nadir period (1878-1920) of mass lynching and terrorism experienced by Black Americans in the United States. However, the role of technology through media and military weaponry within the context of US neocolonialism is a less explored perspective in how genocide happens under the control and consent of the United States government by “self-governed” state appendages, which Cuba was before 1959 and Israel is currently. The context of 1912 Guantánamo passes through the landscapes of space and time, and layers into the genocide in Gaza of the past two years.
II. Genocide and the Formation of GITMO–U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo, Cuba
Led by Cuban Independence-era liberation army veterans of the 30-year anticolonial war against Spain (1868-1898), Evaristo Estenoz (PIC President), Pedro Ivonnet, and Gregorio Surín founded El Partido Independiente de Color (PIC) in 1908. They established PIC during the second U.S. occupation of Cuba as a majority Black/working and peasant class/anti-colonial political organization. The massacre was in response to the uprising of Black veterans in Oriente province who organized within the PIC. Cuban filmmaker Gloria Rolando* explores the layered and nuanced aspects of the 1912 massacre in her three-part documentary film. The passing of the “anti-racist” Morúa law in 1910 stands as an integral moment in constructing narratives and introducing legal processes for the 1912 genocide that ensued.
Note: *Gloria Rolando was friends with the late Assata Shakur and produced a 1997 documentary on Shakur’s life in Cuba narrated by the late Nehanda Abiodun.
The Partido Independiente de Color became a nuisance for the white Cuban political elite. Along with the Platt Amendment calcifying Cuba’s neocolonial status after almost four years of US occupation (1898-1902), universal male suffrage was codified into the Cuban constitution, making Black Cuban men a third of the electorate and a concentrated voting bloc in Eastern Cuba. On May 2, 1910, the Morúa Amendment was adopted, banning the Partido Independiente de Color, labelling it a racist organization based on racial distinction and Black-centered racial justice at the center of the political party’s platform. From 1910, PIC leadership was persecuted and imprisoned for short periods of time. In 1912, while still in active negotiations with Cuban president José Gomez to legalize PIC and repeal the Morúa Law, PIC moved to Oriente, or Eastern Cuba. Guantánamo became the headquarters.
The Black political organization’s strongholds were in Guantánamo and Santiago de Cuba due to PIC’s platform appeal to distribute land to Liberation Army veterans (the majority of whom were Black), and their activism against the US government’s claims over resource-rich lands in Guantánamo to establish the naval base. With fifteen associations in Guantánamo, PIC challenged U.S. occupation and was anticolonial at its core. PIC directly questioned the position of Black people within Cuba’s “racial democracy.”
The Partido Independiente de Color fought to build alliances and networks connecting thousands of working-class people and the Cuban peasantry throughout Cuba outside of the two-party system (Liberal versus Conservative), mobilizing Black voters concentrated in Oriente province. In addition to a political position against the occupation of Cuba by the US, social demands, such as an 8-hour workday and free primary and secondary education for all Cubans, were inclusive and interracial in their appeal. Their members, which included whites, believed in an inclusive and integrated “Cuba Libre” as outlined by the vision of José Martí and Antonio Maceo (Lt. General José Antonio de la Caridad Maceo y Grajales). Members and leadership were lawyers, workers, and peasants who addressed anti-Black racism, especially the exclusion of Black people holding management positions in government and private industries.
III. Modernity, Labor, Repression, and Genocide
Adding to our understanding of technology, colonialism, and racial capitalism, Meredith Whittaker’s “Origin Stories: Plantations, Computers, and Industrial Control” explores the history of racial capitalism, plantation systems, and chattel slavery as fundamental to the creation of modern computing codesigned by Charles Babbage at the eve of British abolition. Whittaker discusses surveillance, mechanization, and industrialization through labor – the British elite move from enslaved Black labor to racially diverse alternatives in the impending post-emancipation era, but repression and control of Black people within these colonial spaces are also key in this transition. The circumstances that led to the post-emancipation genocide of Black Jamaicans in St. Thomas, Jamaica, in 1865 depict technological advancements in repression that align with state/colonial enforcement of modernized and fine-tuned labor structures. Thus, the rearticulation of plantation modeled “technologies of control” developed by Babbage’s labor theories and engines parallels modern technologies of repression executed in the post-emancipation periods.
In advocating for critical biometric consciousness, within Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Brown states: “a critical biometric consciousness must acknowledge the connections between contemporary biometric information technologies and their historical antecedents. …[It] must contend with the ways that branding, particularly within racial slavery, was instituted as a means of population management that rendered whiteness prototypical through its making, marking, and marketing of blackness as visible and as commodity.” In terms of the 1912 massacre in Cuba, this includes the “making, marking, and marketing” of Blackness and brownness as expendable in terms of genocide.
Modernity and technological advances around narrative creation and building through media, especially in the post-emancipation periods (for Cuba, officially after 1886), elicited white fear, fragility, and vulnerability to precipitate genocide. Through technological advances of photographs, film, mass-circulated print media, and transnational communication, the post-emancipation/neocolonial era brands Black and brown bodies as “anti-white racists”, “terrorists” or rebels; as adversarial and enemies to civilization and the interests of Western society; and as criminals and sexual deviants prone to murder of those designated as pure with purity denoted as white/European. In addition to branding and commodifying Black and brown people, it brands and prepares people as bodies ready for genocide.
Browne and Whittaker’s respective works show us how plantation economies served as central features within technological advances of modern systems of labor and control and marketing of Blackness as a commodity. Their positions provide insight into the post-emancipation period and neocolonial era use of modernizing and advanced technology for repression and surveillance. As Cuba stood at the intersection of a post-emancipation period, with slavery abolished in 1886, and neocolonial U.S. occupation after the Spanish American War of 1898, the 1912 genocide that ensued demonstrated to Black Cubans and the Black and brown world (colonized Global South) the limitation of recourse and response to marginalization in a modern, heavily supremacist, and technologically advanced world order.
IV. How does this context parallel the Israel-U.S. Genocide of Palestinians in Gaza?
A. Facial Recognition and Biometric Identification in Genocide
Facial recognition and biometric identification were at the core of the modern genocide of Black Cubans in Oriente by the U.S./Cuba. In collaboration with the pre-1959 Revolution Cuban government, the periodicals that claimed the PIC as a “racist” and anti-white organization plastered the images of PIC national and local leadership throughout their well-read papers. Official leadership photos and family photographs were used specifically to target these Black men and their families. Although rudimentary forms of facial recognition exist, the wide circulation of these official photographs in print media across Cuba and internationally by the Cuban government serves as a vital form of biometric identification. In 1912, these photographs went viral and aligned with the violent targeting of all Black Cubans.
Facial recognition and biometric identification form the technological basis of recent, present, and future genocides–particularly what is taking place right now in Gaza, Palestine. The New York Times’ article “Israel Deploys Expansive Facial Recognition Program in Gaza,” documents Israel’s cyber-intelligence division Unit 8200’s facial recognition program run by the private Israeli company Corsight. The program and technology specifically use Google Photos to “enable Israel to pick faces out of crowds and grainy drone footage.” At the beginning of Israel’s genocide on Gaza, poet Mosab Abu Toha’s face was scanned, and he was identified by an artificial intelligence program as being on an Israeli list of wanted persons. In line with his 3-year-old son, the IOF was able to pick Abu Toha out of the crowd and recite personal information, even though he was not affiliated with Hamas. Microsoft was recently outed by a Guardian article and former employees about Unit 8200’s use and storage of Palestinian surveillance data (particularly phone calls) in the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. Due to the protest, the company stated that they are blocking usage by the Israeli military.
Israel’s Lavender AI war-machine and its accompanied campaigns, such as “The Gospel”, have mechanized and automated genocide, bringing acts against humanity and mass atrocities into the 21st century. There are entire Wikipedia pages and sub-pages outlining how entrenched Israel’s AI usage in war is, its effects and influence on the present and future of military aggression and occupation in other regions, the abducting and killing of healthcare workers, and the targeting of journalists in Gaza.
B. The targeting of journalists
At the turn of the 20th century, journalism served as an integral method to dispel anti-Black narratives produced by mainstream white Cuban and U.S.-supported publications. The PIC President Evaristo Estenoz established the newspaper Previsión, which expressed the views and vision of the political organization. PIC leadership and members protested the prospective passing of the Morúa law through Previsión. In March of 1910, President Gomez retaliated. Hundreds of leaders and members, many from Oriente, were arrested and taken to Havana for a mass trial for treason and producing illegal propaganda, mostly through periodical publications, specifically the accusation that PIC was attempting to create a Black Republic. The subsequent detention of PIC leaders and members stalled ongoing protests of the Morúa amendment, allowing it to pass the Cuban Congress in 1910, banning the Partido Independiente de Color.
Although the law was proposed by a Black Cuban integrationist political leader and rationalized as an antiracist effort, it effectively destabilized Black Cuban organizations. Connected to the age-old fear of a Black Republic, PIC was accused of “divisionism and racism.” This fear was deeply associated with the conception of foreign Blackness and rebellion. These claims were propagandized by the mainstream press, which had highlighted PIC’s outspoken and “anti-white” rhetoric within Previsión.
Journalism from Gaza and Gazan journalists and media workers are brutally and openly targeted by the Israeli military and occupation forces and affiliated militaries. Since October 2023, Israeli forces have killed more than 270 journalists, some being official Al Jazeera journalists–Samer Abudaqa, Hamza Dahdouh, Ismail al-Ghoul, Ahmed al-Louh, Hossam Shabat, Anas Al-Sharif, and Mohammed Qreiqeh. Most recently, Al Jazeera’s Mohammad Salama, Hussam al-Masri of Reuters, Mariam Abu Daqqa of the Associated Press, as well as Ahmed Abu Aziz and Moaz Abu Taha were murdered in a targeted drone double-tap attack on al-Shifa hospital.
Many of these journalists have large and far-reaching social media platforms, where they not only give official documentation of the genocide and starvation through international media outlets, but also provide a day-to-day and minute-to-minute view of the realities inside Gaza. Their perspectives are unjustly depicted by Israel as “Hamas propaganda,” and journalists are often “outed” by the Israeli military’s social media as “Hamas operatives,” providing cover for Israel’s impending assassinations. Yet, Gaza’s journalists “refuse to succumb to the threats and pressure tactics employed by the Israeli authorities to silence them.”
Hossam Shabat was assassinated by Israel on March 24, 2025, by a drone while travelling in his car. Claiming responsibility for the attack, the Israeli army accused Shabat of being a “sniper” for Hamas. In June of 2024, Shabat stated in an interview: “I wear a press vest, as well as a helmet. We always try to be identified as journalists so that the occupying army has no argument to target us… Israeli forces deliberately attack journalists.” Five months later, and less than two months ago, his close friend Anas al-Sharif was also murdered by Israel.
Via BBC
V. From 1912 to 2025, and the Future of Genocide
As a response to the ineffective and neocolonial governance of Cuban President José Miguel Gómez and socio-political anti-Black racism, the Partido Independiente de Color initiated a military uprising in Eastern Cuba in 1912. Under the battle cry “Down with Morúa Law,” on May 20th, 1912, the 10th anniversary of the Cuban Republic, PIC members rebelled with shotguns, revolvers, and machetes. On June 6, 1912, in an effort to stop pending U.S. intervention, along with a demand of white Cuban communities to stop “a racist war” that could involve torching, mass rapes of white women, and assaults, President Gómez began calls to create white-led militias.
With a newly established Cuban Navy, the Cuban Military, Rural Guard, and militias set out to stop the rebels. As a U.S. neocolonial outpost, the Cuban military used modern state-of-the-art weaponry such as Krag-Jorgensons, New Springfields, Winchester 1903 systems, Colt revolvers, Gatling machine guns, and Schneider mountain pieces.
The Cuban and US governments brutally and violently repressed the uprising, leading to the massacre of up to 5,000 Black Cubans. Historian Jana Lipman asserts that the United States threatened to invade if the Cuban government did not crack down on Black protest and protect U.S. property. The U.S. government demonstrated a forceful presence, she notes that “seven U.S. battleships patrolled Cuba’s southeastern coast, and approximately 1,500 marines entered and occupied Guantánamo.”
The United States was a partner and advisor in the genocide of Black Cubans. The same role is mimicked in the U.S. position in Israel’s genocide of Gaza. With many asserting the military occupation and brutality as a U.S.-Israeli War on Gaza and genocide of the Palestinian people. However, with billions of military aid and technological collaboration with Israeli technology firms and a growing military industrial complex, there is still a bit of delusion (and collusion) within Western mainstream media centering the United States’ role.
In July 2025, New Yorker writer Dexter Filkins published “Is the U.S. Ready for the Next War?: With global conflicts increasingly shaped by drones and A.I., the American military risks losing its dominance.” As if the Pentagon and U.S. military industrial complex were siloed and left out of the “new ways of fighting …being invented in Ukraine, Israel, and Silicon Valley.” The U.S. government is a fervent investor in this technology boom and supports the testing of some of the most unconscionable and dangerous weaponry in these proxy wars. For the past 80 years, the US has provided Israel with more than 310 billion dollars, the vast majority for its military infrastructure, occupation, and expansion–particularly into Palestine. Additionally, Israel’s military infrastructure and projected supremacy is endowed by the US government through a 2008 law–this parallels an updated Cuban-style Platt Amendment, linking the US with the regional supremacy of its entity. With Israel’s most recent financial windfall of more than 20 billion-dollar investment rising in the last 2 years, censorship from the state department and Congress is a growing priority, with a new bill designed to strip US citizens of their passports due to “anti-Israel” speech, but it was quickly changed when exposed.
Israel’s use of Artificial Intelligence is outlining the future of war, in which to find and kill one alleged enemy, hundreds must be murdered. Such is the case of Hamas leader Ibrahim Biari and the 125 civilians who lived in his vicinity. Drones and AI mechanized assaults have recently been used in Sudan by the UAE-funded paramilitary RSF, targeting and killing more than 70 people, including children, in a mosque in Darfur. Additionally, in Haiti, newly installed American-run Blackwater mercenaries targeted a child’s birthday party in Port-au-Prince with a kamikaze drone strike, murdering 8 children.
As the occupation military bombs and burns multifloored buildings and nylon tents with quadcopters, drones, B-52s, and self-detonating robot vehicles, Israel’s military has confessed that 83% of Palestinians murdered have been non-combatant civilians–with children, elderly, and the disabled openly targeted, as well as young Palestinian boys and teenagers seeking aid at American-run GHF distribution sites. Antony Loewenstein documents Palestine as a laboratory for the billion-dollar Israeli military-industrial complex. Israel is the ninth largest arms dealer in the world, with a mix of weapons, surveillance technology, and architectural techniques, creating a comprehensive system to control “‘difficult’ populations and is based on years of experience in Palestine.”
With the death toll reaching 680,000 Palestinians around April 2025 (almost 400,000 being children five and under) and the current besieging of North Gaza and Gaza City, Israel’s genocide in Gaza has reached unimaginable levels of destruction with ecocide, scholasticide, and theriocide. Additionally, the 9/11-War on Terror politicized Guantánamo into a GITMO prison camp interlinking U.S. occupation of Cuba with U.S./Israel occupation and destabilization of West Asia. A space designated for the interment of U.S.immigrants with the Migrant Operations Center (MOC), the U.S. State Department has threatened to send anti-genocide protestors and activists, citizens and non-citizens, to the GITMO prison, identifying many through biometrics and social media activity. To understand Israel’s genocide, or holocaust, of Gaza and those before, occurring concurrently in the Congo and Sudan, and the ones that may come after, it is vital to analyze U.S. involvement, leadership and support of modern nation-states; and the use of advanced technology to control and militarize resource rich regions creating “tourist-trap riverias” and “military bases”.
For Assata Shakur and Refaat Al-Areer