The Anti-Imperialist Geopolitical Suburb? Caimanera as Guantánamo’s Revolutionary Frontier

Abstract

The spatialities of anti-imperialist praxis are increasingly fraught with innumerable challenges that require complex epistemological considerations. As borderless US-based militarisation regimes proliferate globally at an unprecedented pace, embedding their political-territorial control more securely through state and logics of neo-imperial extractive capitalism, they have prevailed through the strategic discourse of “progress, security and freedom”. This paper explores the geopolitical workings of Caimanera, the town closest to the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base (GTMO), as a counter-hegemonic project to US imperialism. Referred to as the First Anti-Imperialist Trench in Cuba—a territory lying within the shadow of one of the world’s most notorious prisons and oldest military bases—Caimanera’s history is fraught with tension since the base was first established by the US in 1903. Since the triumph of the 1959 revolution, the base continues to be held against the will of the Cuban people and is strongly denounced as an illegal occupation. Based on archival material, landscape analysis, and visits to Caimanera in 2015, 2017 and 2019, this paper explores how the anti-imperialist geopolitical suburb has historically evolved through the territoriality of its governance and actions. This anti-imperiaist geopolitical suburb is explored as a conceptual form and mode of praxis drawing insights from Fidel Castro’s theorisation of the “Battle of Ideas”, whereby the production of oppositional space in response to imperial threats and aggression is tackled through complexities of the city-building process and the cultural ideological resistance of its closely interwoven educational landscape. The anti-imperialist geopolitical suburb as a space of subaltern geopolitics creatively attends to the complex task of sovereignty and boldly promulgates a movement towards peace and solidarity in the larger transnational region.