"There are many desecrations of human rights taking place in our world. Many involve conflicts of great complexity, religious or factional: it is immensely difficult to create just solutions to them. Guantánamo is the outstanding exception. The just solution is simple . . . the US must leave Guantánamo unconditionally."?From the foreword by Noam Chomsky, Nadine Gordimer, Rigoberta Menchu, and others

"Imagine if after we defeated the British in our revolution, we then let them keep a few thousand troops and a bunch of battleships in New York Harbor. Weird!"?Michael Moore

"To keep a military base against the will of our people is a violation of the most elemental principles of international law."?Fidel Castro

How is it that Guantánamo Bay, seized after the Spanish-American War over one hundred years ago, is still held by the United States as a naval base? President Obama has proposed to close the prison for those captured in the "war against terrorism," but Fidel Castro argues in this extended essay, "The Empire and the Independent Island," written in 2007, that the illegal occupation must end and the territory be returned to Cuba.

This book also features a comprehensive chronology of the base's history and extensive appendices, including some key historical documents through which Washington has justified its continued occupation and recently declassified documents from the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. It also includes a foreword by Noam Chomsky, Nadine Gordimer, Salim Lamrani, Rigoberta Menchu, and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel.