Audio editing by Evan Roberts
For the Biden administration, the arrival of thousands of Haitian immigrants on the southern border has been a telling moment. Instead of rushing relief to and expediting the admission of asylum seekers, the White House focused on the domestic political fallout: trying to appease the nativist right through a massive deportation wave, while defusing criticism from the left by weakly addressing the most visceral actions by border agents caught on camera. Inevitably, no one is happy.
An even more dire response was hinted at last week by NBC News. The story by Jacob Soboroff and Ken Dilanian revealed a posted ad by the Department of Homeland Security for a “new contract to operate a migrant detention facility at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, with a requirement that some of the guards speak Spanish and Haitian Creole.” The revelation horrified many Americans, who associate Guantánamo with the worst abuses of the Forever Wars. To Haitians, it brought back an even older memory: of the original Gitmo detention camps, built in the early 1990s to house an earlier group of Haitian refugees.
To dig deeper, I called Jocelyn McCalla, one of the foremost defenders of Haitian migrants’ rights, who devoted years of his life to freeing the original Guantánamo detainees. We talked about the situation on the border, how Guantánamo got to be Guantánamo, and what should be done for the migrants now. MaCalla casts doubt on the insistence of White House spokesman Jennifer Psaki that the ad was “routine.” I also reveal a few details from my upcoming book, Gangsters of Capitalism, for which I traveled to Guantánamo Bay.(The book is available for pre-order now, hint hint.)
Hope you enjoy. Paid subscribers can share their thoughts in the comments at katz.substack.com. Na pale pita.
Transcript (may contain errors)
Jonathan M. Katz:
[music 00:00:04]. Hello, and welcome to The Long Version. I am Jonathan M. Katz. This is a podcast associated with my newsletter, The Long Version, which you can find at katz.substack.com.
Jonathan M. Katz:
I'm sure a lot of you have seen the images that came recently from the US-Mexico border of Haitian migrants crossing the Rio Grande over a dam only to be threatened, trampled, and forced back across it by US border agents in cowboy hats and tactical armor on horseback. Adding insult to injury, about a week ago NBC News reported that the Biden administration had put out an advertisement looking for a contractor to set up a migrant detention facility at Guantánamo Bay.
Jonathan M. Katz:
Now, this prompted an enormous hue and cry, especially when it was revealed by NBC that they had made sure to put in the ad that the new detention center guards at Guantánamo should speak Haitian Creole. For those of us who've been paying attention to Haiti for a long time, and those of us who've been paying attention to Guantánamo for a long time, we know that this actually goes back a ways in the history of Guantánamo. That before Guantánamo became associated with the war on terror, with Muslim detainees who were taken off the battlefields in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then all over the world in the war on terror, the detention center was actually first built in the 1990s, way before 911, to house Haitians and Cubans who were captured at sea trying to reach the United States.
Jonathan M. Katz:
Now, as some of you know, I have a book coming out in January called Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, The Marines, and The Making and Breaking of America's Empire. It's on sale for preorder right now. You can go to Amazon, or better yet your local independent bookstore and preorder it. Please do.
Jonathan M. Katz:
While I was researching and reporting that book, I went to Guantánamo because it's the place where Smedley Butler, who is essentially the main character of my book, it's a nonfiction book but I think we can call him a character, he certainly was a character. Guantánamo is the place where he started his career, and it's also the place where in 1898 the United States overseas empire really began. But it is, of course, the place that today in 2021, and really for the last 20 years has represented the grosses excesses of American empire.
Jonathan M. Katz:
Again, that's a story that really began in the 1990s. I wanted to bring on somebody who knows about that firsthand. Jocelyn McCalla is the Executive Director of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights. He is himself Haitian-American and he has been fighting fiercely for the rights of Haitian immigrants. Haitians trying to escape poverty and repression in Haiti to come to the United States since the 1980s, since they were trying to escape the clutches of the dictator, Jean Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier.
Jonathan M. Katz:
Jocelyn was thus one of the first people to be advocating for people trapped at Guantánamo in that original detention camp back in the 1990s. He remembers very well the thousands of Haitians who were trapped there, including many who were trapped for supposed medical reasons; they had HIV. Americans were as afraid of Aids as they were of Haitians and they connected the two in theirs minds in very unfortunate ways.
Jonathan M. Katz:
I talked to Jocelyn last week, I wanted to sort of understand the connections between the period that he was very involved with Haitian migrant rights at Guantánamo in 1990, how that connects to today and this latest threat of dumping Haitians in Guantánamo. It was a fascinating conversation; among other things, I learned that back in the 1990s, McCalla and his group realized that a slot machine had more rights than Haitians, at least as far as Guantánamo Bay was concerned. So, without any further ado, here is my conversation with Jocelyn McCalla.
Jonathan M. Katz:
What was your reaction to seeing the photos from Del Rio, from the Southern Border?
Jocelyn McCalla:
Well, I mean, my reaction is that "same-old-same-old". To a certain extent, the Haitian refugee saga is littered with similar pictures from the time they landed in Florida in 1972 up to now, they usually land in south Florida by boat and the Coast Guard and the Border Patrol obviously very actively tried to catch the Haitians before they disappeared in South Florida. So they were all over the beach. Seeing the Haitians still running from the Border Patrol back then is essentially a reminder of what happened just this past week.
Jocelyn McCalla:
Then you had Haitians being detained at Krome North in the hundreds and sometimes the thousands. At Krome North, some of them were in chains; at Krome North, they were also processed and disinfected. I think that you should go on the internet, you'd probably find a picture of Haitian men, naked, being lathered in soap that was published at the time. That comes sometime in 1980 or so and you have at that time Haitians washing ashore in Florida, about 33 of them, and they washed ashore dead because they didn't know how to swim. That picture as well.
Jocelyn McCalla:
But with respect to horses, my experience with horses was in 1985 when I was organizing and had organized a protest of US policy towards Haiti and US policy towards Haitian refugees, and we were protesting on 42nd Street near what used to be the Haitian Consulate. The New York City police was using horses to corral us in, to make sure to get us off the street, and essentially moved us onto the sidewalk; and they were doing this very brutally. At the time, my ex-wife was there, [Borgnine 00:07:16], and she was pregnant with [Layla 00:07:19].
Jonathan M. Katz:
Wow.
Jocelyn McCalla:
She fell down and I had to basically rush her into a store where she could be protected. But one of my guys, who was an organizer, was trampled by one of the police horses.
Jonathan M. Katz:
It's like an old intimidation tactic.
Jocelyn McCalla:
Absolutely. The horse is huge compared to a human being, and a horse that is being used aggressively led into a crowd is nothing to sneeze at, so to speak.
Jonathan M. Katz:
My big encounter with police horses, I think, was during Occupy Wall Street, also in Times Square in 2011. And just a phalanx of police horses just charged into part of the crowd. It's terrifying. And trying to imagine what it's like for somebody who just waded across the Rio Grande and is trying to bring their lunch.
Jocelyn McCalla:
Well, the picture of that person is completely terrible. I mean, you had an entire family that are going back across the Rio Grande to get some food and they were all coming back, and this border patrol guard decided that he was going to split the family and prevent the man, the adult there, from joining the others. So it's a really sick attempt to basically send a very strong message that you're not wanted and we're going to do everything in our power to ensure that you're going to regret coming ashore.
Jonathan M. Katz:
That was the video where the border guard said that, that's why, "You come from a s**t country." Yeah.
Jocelyn McCalla:
Yeah. Right. And that you're using your women to get by.
Jonathan M. Katz:
Yeah. I don't even know what he meant by that. What's that?
Jocelyn McCalla:
You know, well.
Jonathan M. Katz:
I mean, the whole family was trying to claim asylum-
Jocelyn McCalla:
Exactly. Right.
Jonathan M. Katz:
... I don't understand. How do you not travel with your family if you're trying to bring your family to safety? Can you just talk a little bit about your background, how you got involved with migrants rights?
Jocelyn McCalla:
Back when I had an opportunity to go to Haiti after living here for about seven years-
Jonathan M. Katz:
What year is this about?
Jocelyn McCalla:
1975, 1976.
Jonathan M. Katz:
So this under Jean-Claude Duvalier.
Jocelyn McCalla:
Yes. Jean-Claude Duvalier was President for [inaudible 00:10:02]. You know, I had no other intention but to have a good time back then but I found myself in the situation where I was profoundly shocked by what I saw, which was the opposite of my memories of Haiti. I was also profoundly shocked by the fact that there was so much inequality in the country. I decided upon my return that I was going to try to figure it out. I kept hearing from Haitians that nothing is ever going to work in Haiti, the country cannot be fixed, because even though we say together we're strong and that unity makes us all strong, there's never going to be any unity.
Jocelyn McCalla:
So I decided that I was going to try to demonstrate and prove to Haitians that, yes, you can achieve unity and you can do the impossible. From that point on, I started to really get deep down into Haitian history, Haitian custom, Haitian politics and so on. I became very active in student affairs and tried to organize Haitian students on campus; put together the City University of New York. From that point on, I basically went on to become associated with and founded the Association of Haitian Workers in New York, being associated with [inaudible 00:11:40], which was, I mean, not [inaudible 00:11:45], and launched a couple of other student and-
Jonathan M. Katz:
The newspaper.
Jocelyn McCalla:
Yeah. The newspaper; the weekly newspaper.
Jocelyn McCalla:
Then, throughout this period, there were a number of refugees that were being dispersed. You had Haitian refugees being detained at what is called the Brooklyn Navy Yard; a little less than 100 Haitians were being detained there. Then you had Haitians being detained in Upstate New York, which was about two to three hours away from New York City in the town called Otisville in New York. Then New York City had another area, an old military base near the Canadian border, where several hundred Haitians were being held there too.
Jocelyn McCalla:
Part of what I did was to organize, and at that time it was possible to do so, organize visits to the Haitians in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We had worked out agreements with the authorities there to provide English as a second language, classes for these guys to orient them while they were in detention. And with respect to the Haitians in Otisville, I worked primarily with a good friend of mine, Michael Hooper, who was at the time leading the National Coalition for Haitian refugees.
Jocelyn McCalla:
Michael and I worked together trying to provide legal assistance to the Haitians in Otisville. That sealed my, well, first of all, my bond with them, but also made it possible for me to, in 1985, to join the National Coalition for Haitian refugees as a Deputy Director. By that time-
Jonathan M. Katz:
A lot of America is the land of short memories. Haitians, up to 1986 were fleeing the Duvalier dictatorship, and then there was another big wave following the 1991 coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide, right?
Jocelyn McCalla:
Correct. There were a couple of things in respect to the relationship of Haitians to the United States and the measures taken by the United States to prevent Haitians from reaching its shores, or to claim asylum. You have to take into account two things; one, the major influx of Haitians came in 1980 along with the [inaudible 00:14:33]. There were maybe about 15 to 18,000 Haitians who made it while the [inaudible 00:14:41] were being accompanied, so to speak, by the-
Jonathan M. Katz:
And those were people fleeing Cuba?
Jocelyn McCalla:
Yes. Those were the people fleeing Cuba; about 125,000 of them. So, [crosstalk 00:14:51]-
Jonathan M. Katz:
As depicted in the movie, Scarface.
Jocelyn McCalla:
I don't know if I've ever seen that movie.
Jonathan M. Katz:
Oh, it's a great movie, you should see it.
Jocelyn McCalla:
So the Haitians are being treated differently from the Cubans, and the Cubans had the benefit of the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, which essentially treated them as refugee
