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.
…
For Assata Shakur and Refaat Al-Areer