Web Letters: Reach Out to Cuba to Heal Guantánamo's Wounds

The United States should simply return Guantánamo to the Cubans and end its illegal 110-year occupation of Cuban territory. The Cubans would certainly make of Guantánamo something better than what it is now, i.e., what Amnesty International declared in 2005 a Soviet-style "gulag" and part of an "archipelago of prisons, many of them secret prisons in which people are being disappeared. They are being held in incommunicado detention without access to the judicial system." Cuba does not need the US--a nation that tortures and the nation with the largest number and highest per capita rate of incarceration in the world--involved in any aspect of its system. It is fifty years past the time when the United States needs to attend to its own decrepit house and let Cuba--free of embargo, free of occupation and free of threat--rebuild its own.

David Brookbank

Spokane, WA

This proposal would turn a crime scene and source of shame for the US into a humanitarian center and source of pride; it would prove a boon to the health sciences and enhance America's badly tarnished image.

Barack Obama has been a profound disappointment to many of us in the progressive community, and improving our relationship with Cuba and his own with his erstwhile base would be a wise thing for the president to do.

Prof. Brian Cobb, M.D.

Dhaka, Bangladesh