A Review of A New No-Man’s Land: Writing and Art at Guantánamo, Cuba

A New No-Man’s Land: Writing and Art at Guantánamo, Cuba by Esther Whitfield (University of Pittsburg Press, 2024, 215 pages)

One of the marks of this sophistication is the way Whitfield weaves individual and global stories into an interpretation of the role Guantánamo has played in recent history. This approach combines a comparative inquiry into the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay alongside the surrounding Cuban territory or what Whitfield calls “Cuban Guantánamo.” This dual attention to a U.S. Guantánamo and a Cuban Guantánamo opens up to scrutiny a vast cultural and documentary corpus. Whitfield thus gives the reader insights into each of those symbolically and politically charged places and their inhabitants while simultaneously rendering them both as asymmetrical doubles or “sinister analogues” of state overreach and colonial violence (9)— a necessary step towards rejecting that given binary and questioning their official narratives. 

This exercise begins with a rigorous questioning of how, through cultural texts, we come to (not) know Guantánamo as a key discursive site of Cuba’s war on imperialism on the one hand and of the United States’ War on Terror on the other. Once considered and refuted, the faulty binaries of the Cold War and of the War on Terror give way in later chapters to unexpected and instructive encounters. Whitfield then moves seamlessly, back and forth, from that planetary scale to the core engine of the book, “the asymmetrical and unpredictable paths that individual gestures of care take at Guantánamo” (31). Filled with in-depth discussions of cultural texts of rare beauty that are even more rarely read and analyzed together, Whitfield helps us as readers and agents of that shared history to sort out our own cares and complicities vis-à-vis the many sites and stories that make up Guantánamo, expertly orienting us through a comprehensive collection of poetry, art, memoirs, graphic novels, documentaries, zines, photography, broadcast signals and more. 

To achieve those multi-layered juxtapositions, Whitfield’s own storytelling craft proves compelling, especially given the complex and sometimes harrowing experiences the book touches upon. We find unexpected crossings and encounters between persons and animals, between texts and concepts, between real places and ideological maps. Each chapter foregrounds one of five key organizing categories: borderland, translation, guards, home, the future. In the process, these critical terms are themselves subjected to critique. The chapter named “Guards,” for example, examines what it means to guard as both a practice of surveillance and of protection in the play between prison and literature: prison literature, guard literature, literature as prison, literature as safeguard. These variations appear here in all their forms to make us wonder who guards whom, and in whose name, in this borderland and its contested representations. The art and the writing that emerge out of interactions between guards and detainees, for instance, centers the colonial and racist structures of global modernity that make their encounters possible to begin with, engaging how sovereign fictions of the nation state exert real and symbolic violence onto imagined communities always under construction. 

Examining these interactions in light of aesthetically reimagined communities, Whitfield shows us the paradoxical planetary connections that play out in this seemingly isolated outpost of the Americas, where a Puerto Rican guard, a Jamaican contractor, a Cuban rafter or a Haitian refugee can lose and find their homes and themselves alongside the detainees who languish awaiting processing after years of torture and uncertainty, amidst the spectral traces of those who died in the landmines or were shot by border guards in the perimeter of the base, all while surrounded by the rich flora and fauna that sustain a Caribbean island shoreline in the trenches of the unfolding climate emergency. By staging these encounters, the book showcases cultural representations and aesthetic forms both as instruments of oppression and of agency, bringing them into relief against the prisons of representation that nationalist and imperial dreams build on violent apparatuses of control. Against the cumulative weight of analogous asymmetries of cruelty and suffering on both sides of the Guantánamo borderland, Whitfield stacks evidence in favor of the forms that solidarity, care and creativity take in those conditions, stressing the role of cultural practices and of interpretation in the creation and maintenance of “paths of compassion” (30). 

These paths of compassion lead to groundbreaking reflections on the role of cultural archives in the making and unmaking of operative categories of political modernity such as nation, citizenship, security, freedom, identity. The book illuminates the practices that condition their accessibility and legibility, as much as the labors of care by artists, translators, scholars, activists and readers who bring alternative archives of experience into being. Whitfield’s side-by-side discussions of three paradigmatic renderings of this borderland are a powerful case in point, bringing together José Ramón Sánchez’s poetic reimagining of the Guantánamo detainees’ experiences, the poems and memoirs of the detainees themselves, and the poetry of jailed Cuban dissident Nestor Rodríguez Lobaina. With this gesture, Whitfield demonstrates how a comparative reading can inform each of their literary projects as much as our own imaginations as readers and subjects of a shared recent history. In this literary encounter—one that becomes a real, in-person conversation between Sánchez, Ahmed Errachidi and Whitfield in the book’s afterword—the Cuban prisons in Guantánamo managed by the Cuban state and the Guantánamo Base prison managed by the U.S. state can both be seen anew beyond their respective narratives of exceptionalism. Furthermore, the book’s attention to non-human elements and to the material dimension of these renderings—the infrastructures, the landscape, the fauna, the flora and the Caribbean Sea—extends other paths of interpretation as well, positing the reinvention of the limiting categories of political life we take for granted and of the oppressive operations that they rely upon. 

This is a book that ought to have an immediate, long-lasting impact on the many fields of study with which it directly engages. Undergraduate students, graduate students and seasoned scholars alike will find model scholarship in methodological and conceptual terms, and, along with the general reader, a compelling demonstration of how both the future lives and the non-human agents of the Guantánamo borderlands are intimately tied with our own. 

Paloma Duong is Associate Professor of Latin American Studies and Media at MIT. She is the author of Portable Postsocialisms: New Cuban Mediascapes After the End of History (University of Texas Press, 2024).