In the spring of 1992, 37-year-old Harold Koh traveled to Guantánamo Bay because he was suing the government. Koh, then a professor at Yale Law School, was leading a group of law students and human rights attorneys in an effort to free Haitian refugees detained at the military prison in southeastern Cuba. He met some of the refugees in an aircraft hangar, where he told them, “My father was a refugee, like you, and people helped him get to America. That’s why I’m here.”
Afterward, the attorney and his team were escorted to where the refugees lived — an area he could only describe as a “prison camp.”
“They were surrounded by barbed wire, and little children were standing next to the barbed wire,” he says. “If somebody protested out of frustration, they would throw them on the ground and tie them up with plastic ties, like you used to tie a garbage bag. And they all wore bracelets that had barcodes, like a piece of meat in the grocery store.”
Catholic charities had provided clothing for the refugees, so Koh saw flashes of Miami Dolphin aqua and orange as the refugees clung to the barbed wire fence.
“Harold! Harold!” they yelled. Then, in Creole, “Free us!”
Koh watched the blood flow from the people’s hands. He thought about how they were being treated like prisoners because they’d fled a crisis for a new home. Then, he thought, “I’ve gotta get them out.”
He ultimately did: His case, Haitian Centers Council v. Sale, succeeded the next year. But now, nearly 40 years later, Koh still thinks about those kids and their bloodied grasp on the barbed wire fence — especially as Guantánamo Bay falls back into the spotlight.
In a Senate hearing late last month, Marine Corps General Francis Donovan said that part of Guantánamo Bay will be used to house Cubans fleeing the increasingly desperate situation in their country. Since the US capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro — a key Cuban ally and source of oil — the Trump administration has tightened the decades-long embargo on Cuba. Necessities like fuel, food, and medicine are in short supply, and the infant mortality rate has spiked.
“Are we prepared for any kind of humanitarian crisis in Cuba — the possible flow of refugees, other civil disorder that may threaten our interests, especially if the decrepit, corrupt Castro regime finally falls or flees?” US Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, asked the general.
“We would set up a camp,” Donovan said, “to deal with those migrants or any overflow from any situation in Cuba itself.”
Reacting to the general’s words, Koh put it bluntly. “When will they ever learn?” he asked. “Administration after administration discovers Guantanamo and thinks it’s a solution to some problem, but then they have no exit strategy.” For their part, the Department of Defense did not respond to questions about how long refugees would be held at the “camp,” or whether they’d have access to legal representation for asylum claims.
General Donovan also mentioned an executive order President Donald Trump signed in early 2025 to expand detention facilities on the island. Thus far, the administration has fallen far short of their plans to deport and hold up to 30,000 immigrants in Guantánamo Bay. Yet as of this writing, dozens of Cubans have been held on the island in legal limbo and putrid conditions.
Lee Gelernt, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, is involved in two cases against the government: one to ensure Cubans detained on the island can make phone calls to their families and attorneys; another challenging the government’s authority to send immigrants from the US to Guantánamo Bay.
“This is the first time ever that any president, Democratic or Republican has ever tried to send immigrants from the United States to be detained at Guantánamo,” he says, noting that past immigrants have been arrested at sea then taken to the island prison.
Later, Gelernt adds, “I think this whole thing has been political theater to scare immigrants and to act tough about it.”
Meanwhile, attorneys, experts and advocates warn that the Trump administration’s chokehold on Cuba threatens the kind of humanitarian crisis Cotton asked about.
“Cuba is not just the president,” says Anley Benitez, a 42-year-old Cuban who works in tourism. “Cuba is the people, and the people are hurting.”
On one of the final days of March, Benitez woke up even earlier than normal. He had a 34-mile bike ride ahead of him.
Because of the US blockade and the isolation caused by decades of American meddling, vital resources like fuel are scarce on the island. Blackouts have become a daily occurrence; most days, large swaths of the island have no power. The day before Benitez’s long bike ride to see his girlfriend, the Trump administration had briefly lifted their blockade and allowed a Russian oil tanker to dock in Havana. It was some much-needed respite, though not nearly enough.
“People say something, and their faces say something else,” Benitez says of the Cubans struggling in the current crisis. “When they’re not happy, you can see it in their faces. We have a saying here that’s translated into, ‘We smile in order not to cry.’”
Benitez was raised in the countryside, and before he worked in tourism, he was an English teacher and taxi driver. He now lives in Bayamo, the capital city of the Granma Province in eastern Cuba, and he leads tours to the mountains and the former rebel camp of Fidel Castro. The crisis in Cuba has troubled him for many years, but he says the situation has devolved even further in the last several months as fuel has become harder to come by.
“We would set up a camp to deal with those migrants or any overflow from any situation in Cuba itself.” – General Francis Donovan
Havana is largely deserted. With precious medication available, mosquito-borne diseases run rampant, leaving the elderly especially vulnerable, and at least three million people — roughly 30% of the island — are suffering from water shortages.
As Benitez sees it, most people are so focused on survival that they have little time to be upset at their president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, or politicians in the US. “The feeling is, if they don’t have the power, they cannot find out who’s responsible for what’s happening,” he says. “Either of the two sides, they cannot say, ‘Hey, I’m mad with this guy, because it’s his fault.’ If they don’t have a source of information, what can they do? They just worry about food and their lives.”
The latest moves by Trump to isolate Cuba from the global stage are part of a long saga of antagonism from the US. For decades, doctors were one of the island’s proudest exports, as well as a consistent source of income for the state (which claims part of their salaries). Over the last year, the Trump administration has effectively coerced countries into booting Cuban doctors from their shores.
Because of these steps, as well as the oil blockade, University of Central Florida professor Luis Luis Martínez-Fernández agrees with Benitez: The situation is more dire than ever. “The material conditions in Cuba have never been great, but now, in the last four or five years, they’ve been worse than ever,” he says.
There was a moment, a little over 10 years ago, when it seemed the US-Cuba relationship would shift. President Barack Obama took steps to normalize relations with the island, though any progress he hoped to achieve was eliminated in Trump’s first term. Trump took aim at the country’s economy, prohibiting transactions with the military-run conglomerate that runs many of the businesses in Cuba. He also severely restricted the flow of remittances — money sent from the US to relatives or friends in Cuba — and, for the first time, made it possible for Americans to sue companies that used property confiscated by the Cuban government. It was a move to deter foreign investment in Cuba, as was his designation, shortly before he left office in 2021, that Cuba is a state sponsor of terrorism.
Michael Bustamente, a professor of history and Cuban-American studies at the University of Miami, explains that “Cuba is not high on the priority list” when Joe Biden enters office. The COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on tourism — another major source of income for the country — exacerbated the already severe shortages of food and medicine created by international isolation.
In July 2021, people took to the streets in the highest numbers seen in decades. The protests were met with a violent crackdown and hundreds of arrests, as well as mass condemnation for surveillance and unfair sentencing. President Biden called Cuba a “failed state,” which, in Bustamente’s analysis, ended any “residual hope” that the then-US president may attempt something similar to Obama’s reconciliatory gestures.
As people started leaving the island in what would become Cuba’s largest exodus in history, Biden did indeed reverse some of the restrictions that Trump placed on Cuba in his first term. But it didn’t work, Bustamente says. “People continue to leave, and the Biden administration continues to essentially let them in at the border, albeit with a whole panoply of different kinds of legal statuses,” he says.
This created a pathway to permanent citizenship status for some Cubans, but also left hundreds of thousands of others with no clear pathway to citizenship — roughly the same amount as the number of Cubans who left during the first period of the Cuban revolution, Bustamante says.
The historian says the Biden administration’s efforts ultimately amounted to “small fries,” including the removal of Cuba from the state-sponsored terrorists list that Trump undid as soon as he entered office the second time.
Now he says Trump is in the middle of a “concerted campaign to cut off money from the Cuban state,” and there’s no clear strategy other than creating more submissiveness and suffering.
There is, for example, no propping up of an opposition figure who could succeed Díaz-Canel. Bustamente, an expert on Cuban politics and history, isn’t even convinced the Trump administration wants Díaz-Canel out. “He definitely seems like a lame duck kind of a guy in many ways, but whether the Cubans are actually willing to make him the sacrificial lamb here, and whether that would be enough for Washington, is also unclear.”
Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, a security official and grandson of Raúl Castro, is reportedly the Americans’ main contact for negotiations. However, earlier this year, a senior Trump administration official told Axios that the US isn’t necessarily negotiating with Cuba; they’re having “‘discussions’ about the future.”
Shortly afterward, Secretary of State Marco Rubio — the son of Cuban immigrants — said, “Cuba needs to change. It doesn’t have to change all at once.”
Bustamante has been closely following this talk of negotiations (or “discussions”) and he says it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s manufactured. He just knows the situation worsens every day for Cubans.
“Conditions are really, really difficult,” he says. “And as this parlor game plays out of a negotiation or some semblance of that, the Cuban people don’t have time. They don’t have time.”
Benitez’s bike ride took longer than he thought. “I met friends along the way,” he says, “and [saw] people’s faces and life.”
He’s cheery, a perfect trait for a tour guide who loves showing off his country and telling stories about its history. But on plenty of occasions, he finds himself thinking about people less fortunate than him. His voice loses some of the cheer, and he talks somberly, almost poetically, about the painful impact of the blockade.
“It’s like actually who’s getting … hurt? It’s the people that are the ones getting hurt,” he says. “We get that in our flesh, man. My parents get it in their flesh. It’s like my grandmother gets it in her flesh. People get it in the flesh. It’s like injuring people, like hurting people in different ways. That’s my point of view.”
He doesn’t blame anyone who decides to leave, and he feels for the people caught up in the maelstrom of immigration enforcement that’s defined much of Trump’s second term. That includes a group of about 50 Cuban men who were recently deported from the US and held in the Guantánamo Bay prison previously used for suspected members of Al Qaeda.
It was a particularly cruel maneuver, Gelernt says: haul the men onto a plane reportedly bound for their home country, only to take them to the notorious prison the US controls on that same land.
“The idea that we needed [this] for space reasons is just simply a pretext,” says Gelernt. After all, the men were eventually taken to a detention facility in the US.
As evidenced by General Donovan’s comments, however, the latest US odyssey with Guantánamo Bay is far from over.
“What Guantánamo is and has been for a long time is a symbol of power over Cuba,” says Martínez-Fernández, the professor from the University of Central Florida. “And I see this more as exercising that symbol that, ‘We are in your own territory and we’re going to use it however we want.’”
Koh, who once again teaches at Yale, has been following the Guantánamo Bay stories. They naturally remind him of his legal fight from the 1990s. “What are we accomplishing by locking them up in prison camps, which can only foster frustration and ruin their lives with no further strategy?” he asks.
After he won his case and more than 230 Haitian refugees were released, Koh remained in contact with many of them. He attended the high school graduation of Marie Genard, who was 14 when she was detained at Guantánamo Bay.
As he watched her walk across the graduation stage, he thought about her journey: An immigrant comes to the United States, gets asylum, and makes their way by working hard. “That,” he says, “is an American story.”
