At the time of the 1995 uprising, over 300 unaccompanied minors were trapped at Camp Nine. Some children had lost parents on the trip. Others made the journey unsupervised, shepherding younger siblings onto boats and across oceans. Nearly all Haitians were returned to Haiti, labeled “economic migrants” rather than political refugees, while the vast majority of Cubans received admission into the US. Though Haitians fled a military coup and years of well-documented human rights violations, they were not escaping communism, the most clear-cut path to US refugee status. “When I heard that the US was going to let 15,000 Cubans into the country and leave 450 Haitians in Guantánamo, I felt like someone had stuck me with a knife,” a 17-year-old boy said following the uprising. “This is a very cruel situation.”
Nearly all of the migrants detained at Guantánamo had been intercepted at sea by the US Coast Guard, a strategy designed to move asylum hearings far from the interventions of attorneys and concerned citizens. These encounters could be deadly. In July 1994, a Haitian woman named R.E. boarded a crowded raft with her three children. The Coast Guard apprehended the 66 rafters just miles off the Florida coast. Exhausted from days at sea, R.E. fell asleep on the Coast Guard ship. When she woke up, she discovered her two-year-old had fallen overboard — the Coast Guard searched the dark waters with flashlights to no avail.
At Guantánamo, few officials spoke to R.E. about the loss of her child: “It was like a dog died and it just didn’t matter to them,” she testified. Her son’s funeral program now sits in a university archive, bearing the child’s name, the location of Guantánamo Naval Base, and a scripture in Creole.
As Haitian migrants arrived at Guantánamo, military personnel housed them in shoddy tent cities, ill-suited for months of detention. When storms swept across the island, the metal poles of the tents collapsed and the camps flooded with water. Through the wire gates of Camp Nine, Haitian children could see military officials building wood cabins for Cuban migrants — yet another indication that the two groups would not be treated equally under US law.
One of the most consistent elements of children’s narratives from the camp was their unsparing descriptions of violence. Resistance and protest were met with punishment. Children reported being sent to a makeshift children’s jail for days if they got into fights, and being physically hit and pinned down by military personnel. Aid workers described the children in the jail as “put in pajamas and drugged.” Sexual violence was all too common. Suicide attempts occurred with a frequency that stunned relief workers. In legal affidavits, migrant children described the fraying mental state of themselves and their siblings: “She would cry uncontrollably.” “She does not behave like the sister I know.” “I try to be strong, but at times, I’m ready to break.”
The US argued that keeping unaccompanied youth at Guantánamo was necessary as they searched for family members; critics argued the military was making little effort to locate American relatives, instead trying to repatriate children to Haiti at whatever cost. After Precilio Jeannot’s 18th birthday, officials swiftly returned him to Port-au-Prince with $15, a pack of saltine crackers, and an orange drink. In other cases, relief workers at Guantánamo speculated that officials were changing birthdays on children’s case files, aging them up to expel them from custody more quickly.
