Carceral Necropolitics and Narratives of Bodily Construction: The Detainment of HIV Positive Haitians in Guantanamo Bay

Rebecca Leger, CAS '25

Bachelor of Arts: History

Bachelor of Arts: Social Sciences

Precis

In my thesis, I examine the relationship between the construction of marginalized bodies as abnormal and dangerous, by way of popular narratives that demonize these bodies, and their resulting biopolitical and necropolitical management. I consider the case of the detainment of HIV positive Haitian refugees in Guantanamo Bay from 1991 to 1993, exploring the ways that the construction of Haitian bodies as threatening was used to justify their incarceration. The narratives I speak of come from academic and mainstream formulations of Haitian bodies, such as “Voodoo” associations of these bodies with cannibalism and zombies and the mainstream usage of the term “boat people” to describe Haitian migrants. In these instances, Haitian bodies are constructed to be premodern and therefore exotic and aberrant. I then take these mainstream narratives and examine the association of Haitian bodies as being inherently infected with HIV/AIDs. This project draws heavily on the work by Medical anthropologist Paul Farmer to map a throughline of harmful narratives that construct the Haitian body as infecting and therefore dangerous. With this construction, I detail the experiences of Haitian detainees at the hands of the US government through their incarceration in Guantanamo Bay. To do this work, I pull heavily from first person accounts of those detained at Camp Bulkeley, outlining poor living conditions and inhumane treatment by military and medical personnel at the camp. I argue that the act of keeping detainees in these subpar standards of living is not only a biopolitical act of keeping Haitians away from US populations in order to carry out the project of fostering and protecting life on the mainland. It is also a mode of necropolitical administration of HIV positive Haitian bodies through the reduction of detainees to a status of “bare life,” where they themselves are unable to take on the biopolitical act of self-care.

Introduction

In 1991, the Haitian president, Jean Bertrand Aristide was overthrown via a military coup just months after he became the first democratically elected president of the country. What followed was a humanitarian and refugee crisis that brought thousands of Haitian refugees into the US fleeing the instability in Haiti. Many took to the sea in makeshift boats to make their journey to the United States. The US government responded through an interdiction program, whereby boats were intercepted and sent back due to lack of proper documentation according to US officials. As the number of refugees mounted, the US then decided to begin rerouting these boats to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base to be processed, as part of an effort to deal with this influx of Haitian refugees seeking asylum in the US. Among these thousands of Haitians, hundreds who had been tested for HIV were subsequently further isolated into a separate section of the naval base, Camp Bulkeley, and denied entry into the US. After being held for months living in poor conditions and experiencing unfair and inhumane treatment by both medical and military staff at the camp, the HIV positive Haitian refugees at camp Bulkeley, resisted their detainment first through direct physical resistance and subsequently by way of a hunger strike. The public reacted in outcry, especially among activists in the U.S calling for Haitian refugees to be permitted to enter the United States, pressuring the US government to release them.

HIV/AIDs Context

This event occurred against the backdrop of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which in the early 1990s was still at its height in the U.S and globally. By 1990, over 100,000 deaths had occurred in the United States from the disease, with the majority of these deaths among members of the LGBT community (“Current Trends,” 1991). With the public panic surrounding the infections and deaths from the disease, certain populations bore the stigma of being associated with HIV, notably members of the LGBT community, intravenous drug users, and among ethnic groups, Haitians. Queer people bore the brunt of this stigma, as they were already a heavily marginalized community, being further persecuted as the outset of the epidemic fueled anti-gay sentiments among the public. The gay community, however, fought back against this stigma through political organization and community building, through the formation of organizations such as ACT UP and their campaign of direct action, including “Silence =Death.”For Haitians, HIV/AIDs epidemic brought an uptick in xenophobic and anti-Haitian sentiment, as Haitians began to be associated with the disease. This stigmatization fueled the discrimination of Haitians from US institutions, such as the CDC, for example, who in 1983 singled out Haitians as the only ethnic group to be named a risk factor for HIV/AIDS (AP, 1985). Then in 1987, the US issued a ban on HIV positive migrants from entering the US (Chavez, 2012). It is within this context that HIV positive Haitians found themselves detained in Guantanamo Bay, restricted in their own autonomy.

In consolidating the timeline and facts of what happened in Guantanamo Bay to the Haitians detained there, I pull from scholars of law and medical history, notably, A. Naomi Paik and Medical Anthropologist Paul Farmer. Paik, who is an associate professor of criminology, law, and global Asian Studies at the University of Chicago, focuses much of her work on the intersections of politics, racism, the limits of citizenship, and state violence. Paik has written extensively about Guantanamo Bay from a humanitarian and legal perspective, relying both on legislation passed that affected Haitian immigrants and personal testimonies of individuals detained in the naval base. In her article, “Carceral Quarantine at Guantánamo: Legacies of US Imprisonment of Haitian Refugees, 1991–1994,” she discusses the events of the detainment along with the legal precedent that fermented the ground from which this event arose. Paik states, “Since Haitian ‘boat people’ began arriving on its shores in the 1960s, the US state has excluded these refugees, deploying the tactics of imprisonment, suspension of constitutional rights, repatriation, and interdiction” (Paik, 2013). I also pull from Paik’s article , “Testifying to Rightlessness: Haitian Refugees Speaking from Guantánamo” which further details living conditions on the camp relying heavily from personal testimony and depositions of Haitian detainees. I also pull further testimony from a combination of court transcripts, media articles, and academic writings. One academic scholar I lean on heavily, especially when dealing with the medical specifics of HIV/AIDS, is medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer. In his book, Pathologies of Power, Farmer includes interviews he conducted with one of the detainees in great detail (Farmer, 2003). What these testimonies and personal narratives reveal is a reality of inhumane living conditions and deplorable treatment by medical and military staff that detainees had to endure in Guantanamo and at the hands of the United States government.

Bio and Necropolitics

I place the history of the Guantanamo Bay detainment of HIV positive Haitians within a corporeal analysis, situating the history of incarceration and demonization of Haitians in the body. I use the Haitian body as a site to explore the ways in which Haitians continue to be victims of US intervention and discourse and how those same bodies are then reclaimed by Haitian detainees and used as tools of resistance. For this reason, I center this history in the socio-political workings of biopolitics and its counterpart necropolitics. The term “biopolitics” was elaborated by philosopher Michel Foucault and was first explored in his essay “The Birth of Social Medicine,” found in the collection of his work, Power, which comes from the series Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984. Foucault states, “Society's control over individuals was accomplished not only through consciousness or ideology but also in the body and with the body.” (Foucault, 2000, p. 137). In his work, The History of Sexuality, Foucault goes on to elucidate how this operates through mechanisms of government administration that manage and discipline populations, such that subjects consent to take on the project of fostering life (Foucault, 1978). I use Foucault as a foundational text on the topic of biopolitics and expand this idea to describe conditions of exception that aid in this biopolitical governance. While Foucault sets the stage for my argument, it stops short of what I attempt to identify through the events on Guantanamo Bay. Necropolitics, which I describe through Achille Membe’s article, “Necropolitics,”comes closer to explaining how the treatment of HIV positive Haitians at Camp Bulkle unfolded the way it did. In this work, Mbembe configures the term Necropolitics as an examination of the role of death and the state’s ability to wield the right to kill as being a manifestation of sovereignty. In this way, he uses this term to take a step further than Foucault’s formulation of biopolitics. Mbembe asks “But under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised? Who is the subject of this right? What does the implementation of such a right tell us about the person who is thus put to death and about the relation of enmity that sets that person against his or her murderer?” (Mbembe, 2003). While Haitians were not being killed en masse in Guantanamo Bay, the conditions in which they were kept amounted to what Mbembe describes as living death (Mbembe, 2003). In keeping Haitian detainees in subhuman living conditions and “divested of political status and reduced to bare life,” the US was able to wield its sovereignty and status as a global power while eluding responsibility for the harming and violations of these bodies (Mbembe, 2003). For the US, the ability to deem Haitian bodies as being worthy or deserving of this inhumane treatment is an extension of its sovereignty.

Construction of the Haitian Body

How was the US able to justify its necropolitical management of Haitian detainees? This is a central question I ask in my thesis, and to answer I focus in on the site of the Haitian body, mapping a throughline of destructive narratives deeming it as being pre-modern, abnormal, and disease-ridden. To do this work, I begin with scholar Erin Durban who discusses the demonization of Haitian bodies and culture in their work, The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti. Durban describes the kind of rhetoric that, through a mischaracterization of the Afro-syncretic religion Vodou, was used to shape the view of Haiti and its culture as being “pre-modern” and “uncivilized.” These types of narratives created an image of Haiti as being rife with cannibalism, child sacrifice, zombies, and other freakish occurrences. According to Durban, “These representations strengthened the association of Black Haiti with superstition and -without the more civilized influence of the United States- unbridled consumption” (Durban, 2023, p. 42). I want to use Durban’s work as a driving force for the bodily direction in which I want to take this project. The demonization of Haitian culture directly ties to the demonization of Haitian bodies. If the US can deem Haitian migrant bodies as abnormal and riddled with disease, then it can justify the incarceration and violation of these bodies.

I also want to bring attention to the ways the Haitian body fits into discourse surrounding migration, and the ways in which the body is settled and unsettled through movement, how the body loses a sense of place, a sense of home, only to be kept in suspense, never quite settled onto a homeland. I use the histories of the origins and use of the term “boat people,” which was often used to describe Haitian refugees (although Haitians were not the only population to be described in this way) to demonstrate their dehumanization and the erasures of their own identities. In Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Sharpe writes about the migrant body in relation to the ship as a space that carries violent history. Guantanamo Bay, afterall, could represent a ship but on land: a ship that incarcerates and contains bodies away from the US mainland. Sharpe discusses at length an image of a young Haitian girl with the word “ship” taped to her forehead in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti Earthquake (Sharpe, 2016, p. 46). This girl Sharpe describes does not seem to have a name. She is identified with the word “ship,” which, similar to the term “boat people” strips her of her personhood. These identifications also do the same work of the “voodoo/vaudou” discourses Durban speaks on in their work. It prescribes Haitian bodies as being “premodern” and “dirty,” more proof of their supposed primitivity. These discourses work together to construct a threatening and abnormal Haitian body which needs to be regulated and contained. These constructions are also unbound by time, being reproduced again and again under different circumstances, only worsening with the association of Haitian bodies with HIV/AIDS.

I use Paul Farmer’s book AIDS and Accusation : Haiti and the Geography of Blame to trace the origin of the affiliation of Haitian bodies to HIV/AIDs. In my research, I examine another construction of Haitian bodies as being disease-ridden, especially as being infected and infecting bodies. In his book, Farmer outlines the beginning stages of the HIV epidemic both in the US and in Haiti, highlighting the different phases from the initial discovery of the disease to its spread into a global health crisis. Farmer also reveals discussions from within the scientific community about the origins of the disease, and, not surprisingly, Haiti became a central focus as a possible origin point. What made these discussions interesting was that the same kinds of “voodoo/vaudoux” tropes return once more, with some in the medical community positing that HIV had been a result of vodou practices occurring on the island (Farmer, 2006, p. 23). I use Farmer to make connections between this configuration of Haitian bodies as being “infecting” to the bio and necropolitical justifications of the US to both keep Haitians away from US borders and in a dehumanizing state of bare life. Both the identifying words, “infected” and “Haitian,” become the impetus for the U.S’s decision to detain hundreds of Haitian migrants onto a naval base. The simple act of existing both in a Haitian and infected body seemingly warranted a stripping of one’s humanity. With my thesis I ask the question: Why are Haitian Bodies seen as a threat to the US body politics? There are multiple entry points through which to begin to answer this question, much of which is intertwined with the long history of US interventionism into Haitian politics, which is where I begin in the first chapter of my thesis. My second chapter traces the different narratives that construct the Haitian body as being threatening, followed by my third chapter which delves into the details of what Haitian detainees underwent in Camp Bulkeley. Finally, I end my final chapter with the stories of resistance by Haitian detainees in a refusal to accept their living conditions. Ultimately, I want this body of work to serve as testimony of the dangers of weaponizing narratives about marginalized groups in times of crisis.

Chapter 1: Origins of the Mystification of the Haitian Body

To get a grasp of the winding paths that led to the incarceration of Haitian refugees in Guantanamo Bay, the historical contexts of Haitian and American relations must first be understood. Haiti has a long history of being treated as an unofficial extension of the global US empire in the Caribbean, with periods of occupation dispersed throughout that history along a continual pattern of intervention on the part of the US into Haitian political affairs. The US has kept Haiti in its gaze ensuring that the Haitian state never quite veers too far from U.S interests. The deposing of Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide in 1991, which kicked off the Haitian Refugee crisis and the subsequent Guantanamo bay detainment of refugees, exemplifies this. The Ousting of Haiti’s first democratically elected president occurred in a context of continual political turmoil and military rule enforced by iron-fisted despots, many of whom were notoriously backed by US governmental forces and interests. These periods of U.S. intervention are, in the same breath, coupled with and formed by discourses surrounding Haitian culture and its people, which the US used to justify, as scholar Jana Evans Braziel describes, “the US Marines penetrating the interior territories of ‘third world’ countries” (Braziel, 2008, p. 93). I employ what anthropologist Erin L. Durban describes as “the transnational Euro-US discourse of Haiti as the dark dangerous land of ‘voodoo/vaudoux’” along with circling discourses surrounding Haitian nation-building, to describe the ways that the Haitian state, as a body in and of itself, is both demonized and mystified (Durban, 2023, p. 18). This mystification is then transcribed onto Haitian bodies as flesh to construct these bodies as a hazard, justifying both the intervention and occupation of Haitian lands, and the ensuing incarceration of Haitian migrants away from the confines of the US state.

US Occupation of Haiti (1915-1934)

Although the story of US-Haitian political relations truly begins with the victory of the enslaved population over the brutal French plantation system and the subsequent establishment of the Haitian Republic in 1804 (as exemplified by the US’s decision to ostracize the newly formed republic along with the rest of the world), direct relations between the two nations truly began with the U.S’s occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 (Schmidt, 1995, p. 26). This occurred as part of a race between the US and European powers to expand its naval outposts and strengthen its hegemony in the Caribbean, which was threatened especially by the Emergence of Germany’s naval strength in the region. The US occupied Haiti along with the Dominican Republic, the US Virgin Islands, and parts of Cuba in order to offset the possibilities of a strengthening of German political influence in the Caribbean (Schmidt, 1995, pp. 3-4). Along with this political context was also the weaponization of the same kind of rhetoric that the US used to justify in its colonization of Native Lands. Historian Hans Schmidt characterizes this historical moment in his book The United States Occupation of Haiti:1915-1934. He writes:

“Racist preconceptions, reinforced by the current debasement of Haiti's political institutions, placed the Haitians far below levels Americans considered necessary for democracy, self-government, and constitutionalism. The generous and even noble narcissist compulsion to bestow American civilization was stymied by self-defeating ethnocentric prejudices, cultivated during several centuries of domination over Indians and black slaves, which stigmatized the subject peoples as genetically and culturally inferior. Moreover, the Occupation in Haiti always gave first priority to United States political, military, and economic interests. The belief that Haitians were inherently inferior, coupled with the dictates of State Department diplomacy in the Caribbean, led to grotesque perversion of the declared missionary ideal of spreading liberal democracy” (Schmidt, 1995, p. 10)

The US was able to deploy this kind of rhetoric to depict Haitians as helpless and in need of a “civilized” society to bring about liberal and democratic forms of government, despite that the fact that the act of a military occupation necessitates the foundational stripping of democratic self determination from occupied peoples. This is exactly what the US did in Haiti through the suppression of local democratic institutions and political liberties, as Schmidt describes. Scholar Davi B. Cooper goes so far as to describe the US occupation of Haiti as a “thinly-disguised military dictatorship” (Cooper, 1963). It is not surprising, then, that even while the US depicted itself to be taking on a paternalistic view of helping haiti to adopt democratic systems of government, albeit in order to justify its occupation of the island, the occupation itself was more about furthering the US’s own political interests over the island and in the Caribbean region as a whole. Even the paternalistic image that the US spun of itself reinforces problematic views of Haiti’s idealized helplessness and a recycling of Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man's Burden” (Kipling, 1899). Taking Kipling's characterization of US imperialism in close connection to racial embodiment of imperialist expansion, along with the spinning of rhetoric of Haiti’s helplessness and inferiority, we see the ways in which a body politic is mobilized to place Haiti, viewed in black flesh, as a “burden” onto the U.S.’s white state body, which it then must “civilize”, or in other words be brought into modernity.

In the same breadth, Haiti itself represents the destruction of everything the US stands for: a white supremacist system of power that reigns supreme the lesser bodies of black and brown peoples. In her article, “The State is a Man: Theresa Spence, Loretta Saunders and the Gender of Settler Sovereignty,” Audra Simpson describes the ways in which indigenous sovereignty is consistently curtailed by the Canadian state in order to destroy everything that Indigenous women embody. She writes, “The state that I seek to name has a character, it has a male character, it is more than likely white, or aspiring to an unmarked center of whiteness, and definitely heteropatriarchal. I say heteropatriarchal because it serves the interests of what is understood now as "straightness" or heterosexuality and patriarchy, the rule by men. As well, it seeks to destroy what is not. The state does so with a death drive to eliminate, contain, hide and in other ways "disappear" what fundamentally challenges its legitimacy: Indigenous political orders” (Simpson, 2016). This can be applied to Haiti and the ways that the U.S. seeks to destroy the Haitian state body through occupation and continual state intervention. Since the Haitian revolution, the world has punished Haiti from its daring to not only challenge the imperial status quo, but succeed in winning that challenge. For these reasons, the US state has spent much of its existence putting its energy in ensuring that the Haitian body remains constantly ravaged first through the Occupation and subsequently through further political intervention which occurs later in Haiti’s history.

This is of course not to deemphasize the ways that the Occupation quite literally ravaged Haitian individual bodies, especially with the US military’s re-implementation of a forced labor system on the island, corvée, which was used primarily against the peasant class until it was officially abolished in 1918 due to increasing hostility (Schmidt, 1995, p. 26). The corvée was a system of forced labor in which the Haitian underclass populace were coerced to meet certain quotas or else face the threat of violence (Durban, 2023, p. 39). James Weldon Johson, who was an African American activist and member of the NAACP, describes this system of labor by writing:

By day or by night, from the bosom of their families, from their little farms or while trudging peacefully on the country roads, Haitians were seized and forcibly taken to toil for months in far sections of the country Those who protested or resisted were beaten into submission. A night, after long hours of unremitting labor under armed taskmasters, who swiftly discouraged any slackening of effort with boot or rifle butt, the victims were herded into compounds. Those attempting to escape were shot. The terror-stricken families meanwhile were often in total ignorance of the date of their husbands, fathers, brothers (Johnson, 1920, pp. 13-14).

The forced usage of black bodies in the process of nation building has quite a long history in the US and the Atlantic world as a whole. The body is used as a vehicle for subjugation and the reaping of profit. For a nation that had dug itself out of enslavement by force, the imposition of forced labor by US forces represented the ultimate desecration of Haitian history, land, and body. In the meantime, the US framed this system as a “gift” to the Haitian population, repeating its paternalistic rhetoric of helping Haitians build infrastructure on their island (Durban, 2023, p. 41). This paternalistic role is further undermined by the stripping of men from family structures to harness their bodies for labor. The Haitian body became a tool of US imperial expansion.

However this is not to say that those very same bodies were not also active in the resistance against that very imperialism. In fact, guerrilla rebel forces called the Cacos fought the US occupation into the 1920s when they eventually were quelled by US marines. The Cacos, led by a former convict Charlemagne Péralte, often ran their operations out of the very spaces of forced labor and repression, as is described by Matthew Casey in his article, “Domestic Workers and Foreign Occupation: Haitian Servants, US Marines, and Conflicts over Labor and Empire in Haiti, 1915–1934.” In this work, Casey describes the role of domestic workers who provided labor in US Marine households in the resistance work of the Cacos. Casey writes, “The experience of imprisonment and forced household labor at the time that an alternative vision for Haiti was being espoused by rebels created Cacos and sympathizers right inside marines’ homes” (Casey, 2019). These household workers, through their labor and collective subjugation were able to form networks of support for the Cacos rebellion. These workers also planned and participated heavily in demonstrations against the occupation (Casey, 2019). In this way, spaces of repression were formed into spaces of resistance through the brave actions by Caco members and sympathizers who sought to rid themselves of US imperial rule. This same kind of ravaging and then reclamation of the Haitian body is what we see later in Guantanamo Bay.

Post Occupation US Interventionism (1957-1991)

Even after the subsequent fall of the U.S’s occupation of Haiti in 1934, the United State’s policy of interventionism in the island continued. This brings us to the events leading up to the migrant crisis that brought Haitians en masse to the United states in the early to mid nineties. In the later part of the 20th century there seemed to have been a trend of waves of Haitian political refugee crises being triggered by political turmoil on the island directly or indirectly caused by US involvement. This is a throughline in Haiti’s history that follows the country into its current political standing. One cannot understand the events of the detainment of HIV Positive Haitians in Guantanamo Bay without first understanding the ousting of Haiti’s president Jean Benard Aristide, and one cannot understand the event of that outsting without first understanding the moments of US intervention into political regimes of Haitian heads of state decades before. By understanding these historical patterns, we can begin to understand how the narratives spun of the inferiority of Haitian bodies comes out of perception of Haiti as a land doomed to chaos and destitution. This chaos and destitution, however, becomes a self fulfilling prophecy worsened by continuing cycles of US intervention fueled, as mentioned before, by the belief that Haitians are unable to rule themselves.

From 1957 to 1971, Doctor Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, ruled Haiti with an iron fist. Influenced by the socio-cultural movement of Noisisme, Duvalier attempted to upend the power dynamics that existed in Haitian society by centering blackness and vodou in Haitian culture and politics. However, these plans quickly took a despotic and brutally repressive shape. Although loved by the darker skinned Haitian masses, he was feared by the light-skinned Haitian elites whom he wanted to purge from government and society at large. He used an armed private military force to do his bidding and spread an environment of fear throughout the country, discouraging Haitians from speaking out against his rule. In 1964, he declared himself president for life and remained Haiti’s president until his death in 1971(Britannica, 2024). This particularly dark time in Haitian history culminated in the deaths of thousands of Haitians and triggered a sequence of authoritarian leaders for the next 2 decades. This began with the leadership of Francois’s son, Jean Clause “baby Doc” Duvalier who led the country from 1971 until he was deposed in 1986. The political eras of both Duvaliers was rife with turmoil and violence against anyone who spoke against them or threatened their rule. Famously, when Francois suffered a heart attack in 1959, his chef aide Clément Barbot stepped in in his absence. Once Francois recovered, he subsequently imprisoned Barbot and later had Barbot murdered (Britannica, 2024). In this way, violence was a common tactic used in both of these dictatorial periods of Haiti’s history.

Another common theme was the U.S. involvement in supporting Duvalierist rule in the country. Scholar A. Noimi Paik discusses this in her article “Carceral Quarantine at Guantanamo: Legacies of US Imprisonment of Haitian Refugees 1991-1994.” Paik states, “Terror was a condition of everyday life actively supported by the United States, as evidenced when it sent a Marine mission to train the Haitian army two years after François Duvalier’s inauguration” (Paik, 2013). Along with military operations, the US also supported the Duvarliers’s rules financially. Paik discusses the ways in which the US state turned its eye from the undemocratic modes of leadership by the Duvaliers in exchange for an economic program centering on investments from private US companies into Haiti, allowing for the exploitation of Haitian labor for American profit. Paik writes, “Furthermore, the US state funneled tens of millions of dollars to both Duvaliers through avenues like the US Agency for International Development (USAID), military support, and CIA funding…under Jean-Claude’s rule and with US collaboration, Haiti fell further into poverty and state terror, thereby producing increasing numbers of refugees (Paio, 2013). The US’s intervention into Haitian political affairs allowed the Duvalier regimes to continue to cause harm and oppress the Haitian public. The United State’s direct hand in the further destabilizing of Haiti, through the support of these despotic political leaders, solidifies again the U.S. viewing Haiti as a pawn for its own interests, and the Haitian people as a means to secure these interests. This cycle of US intervention and a gradual Haitian destabilization reared its head once more with the deposing of Haitian president Aristide.

When Jean Bertrand Aristide was elected president in 1991, it was the first free democratic election the nation had seen in its history. This however was short lived because shortly after Aristide’s ascension into power, he was deposed in a bloody military coup by opposition leaders which led to the deaths of thousands of Haitians. While the US did not have a direct hand in the coup itself, besides the coincidence of having trained and sponsored some of the leaders of the coup some decades before, this event of disruption came as the more recent link to a larger chain of destabilization as a result of US intervention (Greenburg & Wagner, 2021). This was the primary event that triggered the rush of Haitian refugees fleeing the country headed for the United States, which subsequently led to the detainment of these refugees in Guantanamo Bay. Aristide returned to his position as president in 1994 with backing of the US, but the fallout from the 1991 coup was extensive and upended thousands of lives. Aristide’s deposing is proof of the dangers of US interventionism. This narrative of the US taking a paternalistic role of offering aid to Haiti ultimately never came to bear. The story of the political relationship between the US and Haiti is not one of amicable support but of gradual exploitation and the sowing of chaos. What can ultimately be derived is that the narratives that so often circulate surrounding Haiti’s political affairs, of Haiti being doomed to disarray, that Haitians are unable to run their own country, etc, are fundamentally untrue. The cycle of US intervention and subsequent Haitian instability is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which the US’s own biases against Haiti are proved right as a result of their direct hand in the country’s decline. The US claims that Haitians are unable to run themselves, therefore they intervene to “help” or “fix” the country, thereby perpetuating cycles of chaos. And this is what has allowed the Haitian people and by extension their bodies to be demonized as being the very manifestation of that chaos and destabilization, despite the fact that the U.S. itself has had a direct hand in that process of chaos making. It is therefore with an added irony when the US then also makes it a point to prevent Haitian immigration to its borders, which it has done through a series of Anti-Haitian immigration policies throughout the 1970s and 80s.

Anti-Haitian Immigration policy (1970-1995)

Haitian immigration to the U.S. has for decades been met with rejection on the part of the U.S. government. Although Haitians have been migrating to the U.S, often by boat, since the 1960s, it wasn’t until the 1970s that Haitian immigration truly ramped up. In 1978, the Carter administration implemented a policy called “The Haitian Program,” in response to an increase of Haitian refugees attempting to enter the country in order to seek asylum during the Duvalier presidencies. This legislation was implemented with the purpose of deterring Haitians from seeking asylum in the US. According to the Washington Post article, “Violence and Racism against Haitian Migrants was Never Limited to Agents on Horseback”, this program “placed the newly arrived Haitians in local jails, denied them permission to work and applied a blanket denial of their asylum claims” (Lindskoog, 2021). Here we see already the seeds of a throughline of incarceration in the treatment of Haitian migrants, which expanded with the rise of immigration detention centers in the 1980s and into the 21st century. Haitians represent just one other group of black bodies who present a “problem” to the American state, which has been dealt with through the literal stripping of rights of these people.

When President Reagan took office in 1981, he expanded the Haitian Program by including an interdiction to the policy. Reagan made an agreement with the Haitian government to give the US authorization to enter migrant boats and question passengers (Legomsky, 2006). This policy was passed with the purpose of intersecting migrant ships arriving to the US from Haiti and subsequently sending back any refugee who did not have proper documentation. Although this was not completely limited to Haitian migrants, it was this group of migrants that more often fell victim to this policy. In 1990, a report was published by Human Rights First (formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights), which found that between 1981 and 1990, the US intercepted a total of 364 vessels from Haiti and returned more than 21,000 Haitians. Only six passengers were given a full asylum hearing (Legomsky, 2006). Despite the fact that the US government at the time claimed that it would not turn away Haitian refugees, these figures would indicate that this was not the case in reality, and that there were clear flaws in the asylum seeking process, especially when the political atmosphere at that time was quite dire. A partial reason for this was the US’s refusal to ascribe Haitian migrants as political refugees, instead claiming that these migrants were economic refugees. Refugee advocates pushed back against this narrative, however claiming that the political instability at the time, especially following the deposing of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier in 1986, was proof enough that many of these migrants were fleeing violence and persecution, and therefore should not have been turned away by the US (Legonsky, 2006). The interdiction policy is what ultimately led to the incarceration of Haitians in Guantanamo, as the US pivoted their policy to have Haitian migrants be processed in Guantanamo rather than on vessels to accommodate the surge in migrants seeking asylum in the US.

Along with the policy of interdiction, an in-country processing program was implemented in 1992, which encouraged Haitians to apply for refugee status at the US consulate in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, instead of taking the journey by boat. In the article “In-country refugee processing of Haitians: the case against,” scholar Bill Frelick writes, “The mere existence of an in-country processing program was used to justify the new policy of summarily returning all interdicted Haitians with no screening. Although it was touted as an alternative to boat departure, the reality at the time was that only a handful of people were able to avail themselves of that alternative” (Felick, 2003). Frelick argues that this in-country processing is directly tied to the interdiction policy, and is further proof of the failure of the US’s asylum process to save those fleeing persecution. In January 1993, shortly, before he was set to be sworn in as president, former president Bill Clinton made the decision to continue Bush’s in-country processing program, stating, “Those who do leave Haiti directly by boat will be stopped and directly returned by the United States Coast Guard…You can apply from within Haiti, through the United States embassy in Port-au-Prince” (Frelick, 2003).

It is clear that these anti-immigration policies that target Haitians are done with the purpose of keeping as many Haitians as possible away from the US mainland. Even under the guise of creating a safer asylum application process, as was done under the Clinton administration, there is still an undercurrent of a reality that the US government did not, and one could argue, still does not, want Haitians immigrants in this country. I argue that these policies and decisions on the part of the US government are the result of the weaponization of discourse surrounding Haiti and the bodies of Haitians that mystify these bodies and construct them as being hazardous to US populations on the mainland. These images and narratives were instrumentalized in order to justify this pattern of exclusion towards Haitian immigrants.

Conclusion: Mystification of Haitian Bodies

When I discuss a mystification of Haitian bodies, I use the term in a similar way to the sociological definition of the term, as being a naturalization of social phenomena (Mills, 1985). This has to do with the ways that sociological phenomena are seen as natural and as part of natural laws. The vilifying of Haitian bodies as a result of stereotyping and the circulation of negative dialogue surrounding Haiti is a representation of this kind of naturalization. Haitian bodies are ascribed narratives of chaos and premodernity as were used to justify both the occupation of Haitian lands and, I argue, the implementation of Anti-Haitian immigration policy. The political narratives about Haitians embodying chaos is reaffirmed through US interventionist policies that directly further the destabilization of Haiti and notably, leaves Haiti vulnerable in the event of public health crises. But it is from these spaces of discourse that a negative view of Haitian bodies truly originates. This discourse is what allowed the US government to justify turning away Haitian refugees under the interdiction program. Through this mystification, mainstream thought clings onto the idea that the misfortune that Haitians have faced is indicative of an inherent malformation or abnormality to be found within Haitian bodies. This is to say that the destabilization is simply in the nature of Haitians, and that therefore, Haitians cannot be allowed to seek asylum in the US- the US being seen as a land of stability and proof of theSuccess of the first world. Haitian bodies are constructed to be inherently threatening to that stability. Further in my research, I demonstrate how these narratives are building blocks to the intensification of the construction of Haitian bodies as being threatening and dangerous as a result of the HIV/AIDs epidemic. It must be noted that this construction truly originates with the founding of Haiti and its victory against the institution of slavery. From the very establishment of Haiti as an independent state, Haitians have been deemed as threatening and dangerous, existing as an affidavit to the fallibility of white supremacist power structures that continue to shape American and, broadly, western societal framings to this day. This construction of threatening bodies, I argue, is employed by the US to justify its biopolitical response to HIV+ migrants in the early 1990s through the incarceration and necropolitical administration of these migrants in Guantanamo Bay. What I have outlined in this chapter is simply a baseline or starting point to further explain how and why the story of the treatment of Haitian refugees in the US leads to Guantanamo.

Chapter 2: Narratives of Demonization

There are two primary narratives that are directly tied to the U.S’s incarceration of HIV+ Haitian refugees in Guantanamo Bay. One such narrative questions the Haitian body’s normativity by rendering it deviant. Through the work of scholars such as Erin Durban and Christina Sharpe I map the source of narratives surrounding the Haitian body that seem to set them apart from what would be seen as a normative body, primarily through discourse misrepresenting the Afro-Syncretic religion of Vodou and negative identifications used to describe Haitian refugees. These occur through a fetishism of the Haitian body by way of sensationalized tales of cannibalism and human sacrifice supposedly running rampant in the country. These tales then find themselves onto migrant boats, where Haitian refugees are characterized as “boat people,” who, through the usage of this term, are reinforced as having abnormal bodies. The second narrative is in a way, an added facet that builds off of the former, that Haitian bodies are biologically susceptible to the HIV virus, thus categorizing them as infected and infecting bodies. These two narratives engendered a construction of Haitian bodies as being threatening and dangerous, which was then used to justify a pattern of inhumane treatment of Haitian refugees on the part of the US government.

The “Voodoo/Vaudoux” Discourses: The “Queered” Haitian Body

The Haitian body becomes vilified primarily as an effect of the demonization of Haitian culture, or more specifically what is viewed to be Haitian culture in mainstream American discourse. Nothing exemplifies this more than the ways that the syncretic religion, Vodou, gets exoticized and vilified to be associated with demons, zombies, and cannibalism. In their book The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti, scholar Erin L. Durban examines the “voodoo/vaudoux discourses” to demonstrate the U.S’s use of discourse surrounding Haitian culture to justify white-saviorist intervention including that of US protestant missionaries who set out “save” Haitian populations from themselves. Erin uses the term “voodoo/vaudoux” to specifically discuss discourse, not necessarily focusing on the vodou religion itself. Erin Durban writes:

“Nightmarish tales of demonic possession, physical torture, ingestion of human and non-human animal body parts, kidnaping, murder, mind control, fates and fortunes redirected by black magic, and evildoing pervade Euro-US representation of the black republic vis-à-vis voodoo/vaudoux. Racialized (hyper) sexuality is key to the imperialist imagination of this supposed devil-worshiping cult… the circulation of the translational Euro-US imperialist discourse of voodoo/vaudoux worked to justify Haiti’s recolonization by the United States the twentieth century by perverting the Black republic- rendering it abnormal, freakish, and queer” (Durban, 2023, p. 24).

Haiti has been framed into a land of uncivilization, a land of chaos and moral corruption. These “voodoo/vaudoux” discourses create an idea of Haitian culture and haitian people as being premodern and even bestial. Durban begins their first chapter “Perverting Haiti,” by honing in on the image of the zonbi which in Haiti’s history and culture holds a much different idea than the image of the zombi that is touted and recycled all through American horror media. According to Durban, a zonbi is a being that through the workings of sorcery and magic, appears as dead and is buried, and then is removed from its grave and sold into servitude in some far away land (Durban, 2023, p. 28). In Saint Domingue, which would later become Haiti, the figure of the zonbi was closely tied to the transatlantic slave trade and the plantation. Enslaved people on the island were quite literally worked to death. They were placed on sugar fields and mad to perform backbreaking labor ceaselessly day in and day out and endure incredible violence. Durban describes enslavement as “a kind of living death” (Durban, 2023, p. 30) It is the stripping of ownership of one’s body, of one's freedom, of one’s entire self. This reality of enslavement was what was being conveyed by the image of the zonbi in Haitian mythology. The US media, however, twisted this perception of this mythological being and created what is now known as the “zombie.” This is the decaying, brain-eating, horror character which is brought to life on the screen through big name film productions such as “The Walking Dead,” and “World War Z,” among a host of others. This is the image that remains in the minds of Amerians when they think about Haiti and Haitian culture. This is what is associated with Haitian bodies.

Along with the Zombie is also a perception of Haiti surrounding cannibalism and human sacrifice. There is a bestial image of Haiti that hones in on consumption, consumption of the self and consumption of flesh. Durban writes,

“Self consumption plays out in the tales of cannibalism in voodoo/vaudoux. There are erotic undertones to cannibalism- mouths ingesting human blood and flesh are not unlike the various forms of “ingestion” during sex acts. But what kinds of sex might cannibalism reference? Certainly not the prescribed missionary position of active male bodies dominating passive female ones, whose phallocentric circuits of sexuality route away from the mouth, vagina, and anus as sources of pleasure. Cannibalism is rather a reference to queer sex, that is sex for enjoyment rather than reproduction.” (Durban, 2023, p. 37)

Cannibalism is framed as supposed evidence of biological peculiarity that sets Haitian bodies as different and wrong, fueling the exoticization of Haitian culture. These claims of cannibalism are prevalent even to this day (Ingam, 2024). The connection of cannibalism to sex that Durban discusses creates another level to the demonization of Haitian bodies. It is not just that Haitian bodies are wrong, but that Haitian bodies engage in sex wrong. Through the framing of these discourses, Haitian bodies are made “queeer” and sexualized as being abnormally sexual.

The political and cultural history of Haiti as it pertains to the United States works in tandem to solidify negative narratives surrounding Haitian people and bodies. Haitian bodies are made to be subjects of curiosity and bewilderment through the popularization of “voodoo/vaudoux” discourse surrounding Haitian culture. They are seen as “unnatural” due to its connections with vodou. The narratives of cannibalism thriving on the island demonstrate this overarching view of an abnormality of Haitian bodies and sexuality. “Normal” bodies are not associated with the consumption of body parts for sustenance and pleasure. In this way, a kind of obscurity is placed onto these bodies that seems to take away from the inherent humanity of the person attached to the bodies. Haitians are not given the privilege of being seen as people. They are seen as bodies and just bodies. This stripping of humanity can be seen way back in the period of the US’s occupation of the island and the implementation of a forced labor policy, as mentioned before. The political narratives about Haitians embodying primitivity and are reaffirmed through this demonization of vodou. It is also reinforced in popular culture and in the media, through movies, books, etc, through the popularizations of images of zombies, cannibalism and other supernatural phenomenons. The media as an institution plays quite a pivotal role in the pushing of these narratives. These histories and institutions aid in the formulation of Haitian bodies as abnormal.

“Boat People”: Narratives of Asylum seeking

The experiences of what it means to be a migrant or refugee, truly cannot be so easily put into words by the intellectual wherewithal of academics. The pain of this loss of home and belonging can perhaps be captured by poets, as in the words of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who in his poem “Who Am I, Without Exile?” writes:

Water

binds me

to your name ...

Nothing takes me from the butterflies of my dreams

to my reality: not dust and not fire. What

will I do without roses from Samarkand? What

will I do in a theater that burnishes the singers with its lunar

stones? Our weight has become light like our houses

in the faraway winds. We have become two friends of the strange

creatures in the clouds ... and we are now loosened

from the gravity of identity’s land. What will we do … what

will we do without exile, and a long night

that stares at the water? (Darwish, 2008)

Mahmoud Darwish spoke of exile as it pertained to the history of his homeland in Palestine, his homeland stripped from his family, giving him no choice but to flee. But this could apply to any group that has had to make the decision leaving behind home, land, culture, history, because one simply has no other choice. There is a real pain that comes with being torn from home, from all that one knew. Families left to make decisions about braving real dangers in order to find safety, or at least a small hope of stability. To degrade that is to demean the experiences of those who are left with no choices but to take to the seas in search for better lives. This is the damage that is done with the term “boat people” which was used often to refer to Haitian migrants. This term both brings attention to and condescends the very real strife of migration across waters. It strips migrants from their humanity, hyper-fixating on this one act of desperation, of having no other choice but to travel by treacherous sea in a boat. Instead of viewing this as an act of bravery, it is used as further stigmatization of migrant bodies, as proof of their inferiority. Scholar Christina Sharpe brings attention to the term in her book, In The Wake: On Blackness and Being, in which she describes the intense violence to be found in the history of the transatlantic slave trade, and how this violence lingers on to this day. She writes, “The phrase boat people, applied to those Haitians leaving the country under force, reflects, enacts, and attempts to erase its particular and brutal violences, and this ship and this girl enact a prior and ongoing in- stance of eponymity” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 47). Sharpe writes this in analysis of a photograph taken of a Haitian girl in 1992, with the term “Haitian Boat People” written in the caption of the photo. This little girl’s entire identification in the photograph is reduced to this term, “boat people.” That is all she is seen as and that is all she embodies: the hold of a ship, a people displaced and in desperate search for home. Another image Sharpe discusses at length is of a young Haitian girl with the word “ship” taped to her forehead in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti Earthquake. Sharpe writes, “Is Ship a reminder and/or remainder of the Middle Passage, of the difference between life and death? Of those other Haitians in crisis sometimes called boat people? Or is Ship a reminder and/or remainder of the on- going migrant and refugee crises unfolding in the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian and Atlantic Oceans? Given how visual and literary culture evoke and invoke the Middle Passage with such deliberate and reflexive dysgraphic unseeing, I cannot help but extrapolate” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 46). Again, this term “boat people” returns, but is settled in a particular history that connects to the afterlives of the Middle Passage and the transatlantic slave trade. The ship keeps the migrant body in suspense, never quite settled onto a homeland. Guantanamo Bay represents the ship but on land: a ship that incarcerates and contains bodies away from the US mainland. But this ship also erases. This girl is not given a name, she is identified by this one term, which is simply a location or mode of travel. She is reduced to a place that really is not a place, but a means to get somewhere else. In this way, she is not afforded the right to be seen first as a person, with a name, with a story, with hopes and fears. This is the erasure of human essence that comes with the usage of “boat people” as an identification of refugees.

The actual term itself was originally used to describe migrants from Vietnam who were fleeing a violent and repressive communist regime in their country, following the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese, similar to Haitians, were escaping violence and unrest in their respective countries, having that unrest partially caused by the effects of US political interventionism. It is no surprise, then, that both of these countries have become victims of negative narratives calling into question their worth of being given safety through the term “boat people.” In an interview with the New Yorker, Kathleen Belew, an associate professor of history at Northwestern University, traced the precedents of Trump’s harmful anti-immigrant rhetoric, particularly attacking Haitian immigrants, while on the 2024 presidential campaign trail. In this interview, Belew made a comparison to Vietnamese immigrants seeking refuge in the US following the end of the Vietnam war, stating, “Those immigrants were sometimes colloquially referred to as “boat people,” and there were major misinformation campaigns around whether they were eating rats. People reported that they were eating rats caught in peanut-baited traps” (Chotiner, 2024). These kinds of narratives, that get attached to the term “boat people,” shape a perspective of Vietnamese immigrants as being dirty and participating in crude behavior, as eating a rat. These are the kinds of narratives that were recycled 20 years after the Vietnamese sought refuge in the US, to categorize Haitian migrants as being undesirable and unwanted.

The boat conjures an image of antiquity, of premodern modes of transportation: pre-automobile and aviary ways of travel. It is this image of pre-modernity that allows for Haitian immigrants to be seen as inferior, which is why the term “boat people” is wielded with anti-Haitian sentiment. It reinstates images and narratives of the “primitive” black body that needs to be conquered and “saved” as was used as justification for the occupation of Haiti in 1915. The use of the term seems to bring to attention the lack of resources available to these refugee groups, but in a way that seems to depict them as ignorant. It is as if to say “Haitians brave oceans with flimsy boats, look at them, haven’t they heard of an airplane?” It is a kind of debasement of the experience of migration and seeking refuge, and it often carries connotations that omits the humanity of the refugee. Afterall, there is a specific image of the kinds of bodies that are “boat people” and these bodies are ones that are devalued, the one’s who’s pain are overlooked and weaponized, held like loaded guns to push harmful narratives. The boat also conjures an image of external threat, of an invading force, which echoes the kind of language that have been recently ascribed onto waves of immigrants. American politicians often describe immigrants searching for safety and stability, as “invading” U.S borders. (Banks, 2025). The term “boat people” reaffirms this kind of fear mongering by characterizing groups of immigrants as dangerous. This is no different with Haitian refugees: they were inherently seen as dangerous without any consideration being held for their well being. Haitian refugees’ bodies are not afforded empathy, their pain not taken with the gravity it deserves.

A final consideration of the weight that is carried by this term, once again goes back to discourses of the body. For Haitian refugees, the term carries another narrative reestablishing the non-normativity of the Haitian body through “voodoo/vaudoux” discourses. In her book Voodoo: A History of a Racial Slur scholar Danielle N. Boaz describes a series of incidents on migrant boats from Haiti that were at the time rumoured to be characterizes as vodou rituals and human sacrifices. Boaz writes, “Between June 1980 and October 1981, there were at least three cases of purported vodou-related violence among Haitians on vessels en route to the United States. There was a close relationship between the attention that the media gave to these supposed “voodoo” cases and major shifts in refugee policies. When lawmakers introduced new policies encouraging the interception and return of Haitian migrants on the open seas, or when concerns arose about the conditions of Haitian migrants in detention centers, journalists featured more stories about violence against the migrants on their journey to the United States and were more likely to characterize this violence as ‘voodoo’” (Boaz, 2023, p. 123). This adds another layer to what it means to be a “boat person.” Haitian refugees are recaptured into harmful rhetoric that seems to question their humanity on a biological level. This also brings to light the ways that institutions take part in the establishment and spreading of this rhetoric. In Robert Lawless’s book Haiti’s Bad Press: Origins, Development, and Consequences, an outline of American journalistic depictions of Haiti is illustrated. Lawless writes, “The press certainly has given an inordinate amount of publicity to Haitians in terms of their being a ‘boat people’ and Carrying AIDS- and has consistently misinterpreted the quantity, characteristics, causes, and consequences” (Lawless, 1992, p. 1). This kind of rhetoric shapes an image of Haitians as being a threat, as being dangerous, and when it came to the HIV epidemic, this sentiment of a supposed danger caused by Haitian bodies only grew.

Contagion and the Black Infecting Body

In the early 1980s, both in the press and among the medical community, Haitians were singled out having a higher risk factor for HIV/AIDS than other national populations, Haiti being the only nation to be singled out in this way, as part of the 4Hs: Homosexuals, Hemophiliacs, Haitians, and intravenous drug users (Heroin). The CDC in 1983, in fact, had suggested that Haitians be placed as a separate at-risk group for HIV, which is what led to the mainstream use of the term “4H” when referring to the disease (Koenig et al., 2010). Then in 1990, the FDA prohibited Haitians along with Sub-Saharan Africans from being able to give blood. These actions sent a clear message to the global community: that Haitian blood was dirty and infected. Enraged by this decision, tens of thousands of Haitians and their allies flooded the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City on April 20th 1990, calling the FDA ruling racist. A New York Times article published on the following day after the protest described the event, stating, “The protesters - college students, factory workers and families with picnic baskets and umbrellas to protect them from the sun - massed in the morning at Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn and then crossed into Manhattan. The bridge was closed to traffic, hopelessly clogging lower Manhattan for most of the day. Waving flags and chanting, the marchers, whose numbers surprised the Police Department, were intent on their mission but also festive and orderly” (Lorch, 1990). This event brought to the forefront, the power of collective unity, especially bringing to attention the size and collaborative voice of the Haitian community in the US. During the event, protesters were heard stating, “We're proud of our blood” (Lorch, 1990).

But why were Haitians viewed as being inherent caries of HIV? To answer this question, one must first explore the many myths and speculations regarding the origins of the disease, many of which in the 1970s and 80s involved Haiti as being the origin point of this disease. Part of the reason for this was the lack of information at the time about the state of HIV in Haiti and the lack of a real grasp of understanding HIV transmission among Haitians. Medical Anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer compiled details and figures surrounding the state of the HIV epidemic in Haiti in the 1970s and 80s in his book AIDS and Accusation : Haiti and the Geography of Blame. In this work, Farmer brings together data from ethnographic, epidemiological, and historical sources to map the progression and condition of HIV/AIDS in Haiti. He uses this data to explore the social and cultural factors that contributed to the spread of the disease in Haiti.

According to Farmer, the first case found in Haiti of Kaposi's sarcoma, which is a type of cancer associated with HIV infections, was detected in June 1979 by dermatologist Bernard Liautaud in his patient, a 28-year old woman from a city in the west of Haiti. The demographic and clinical presentations of the sarcoma with this patient was peculiar, however, as it did not fit the standard descriptions of this sarcoma. Farmer states, “before the AIDS pandemic, Kaposi's had been described as a rare and slow-growing malignancy seen largely in elderly men of Eastern European and Mediterranean descent”( Farmer, 2006, p. 114). At the same time, concurrent outbreaks of Kaposi’s were found in New York City and San Francisco, which demonstrated, along with an increase in opportunistic infections (infections that occur in people with weakened immune systems), that “the tumor might be related in some way to an epidemic triggered by an infectious agent” (Farmer, 2006, p. 115). This series of events bore striking resemblance to the recently termed “AIDS” in North American medical literature. In Haiti, this revelation led Doctors to mobilize and create the Haitian Study Group on Kaposi's Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections (GHESKIO). This study group would go on to treat hundreds with HIV/AIDS in Haiti. As the epidemic on the island continued, data of the demographics of patients were compiled. It seemed that the majority of AIDS cases in Haiti at this time were mostly men, and that the epicenter of the epidemic was the city of Carrefour, a suburb of Port-au-Price, which was also notorious for being a center of prostitution (Farmer, 2006, p. 117).

As cases of HIV climbed in Haiti and in the United States, speculations surrounding the origins of the disease grew among the scientific community. It is no surprise that many in the American medical community pointed the finger at Haiti, and by extension Vodou, for explanation as to where the disease originated from. In the first chapter of his book, Farmer explains this speculation, writing:

“In December 1982, for example, a physician with the U.S. National Cancer Institute was widely quoted as announcing that ‘we suspect that this may be an epidemic Haitian virus that was brought back to the homosexual population in the United States.’ 1 This theory, although unbolstered by research, was echoed by other physicians and scientists investigating (or merely commenting on) AIDS. In North America and Europe, other commentators linked AIDS in Haiti to ‘voodoo practices.’ Something that went on around ritual fires, went the supposition, triggered AIDS in cult adherents, a category presumed to include the quasi-totality of Haitians. In the October 1983 edition of Annals of Internal Medicine , for example, physicians affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology related the details of a brief visit to Haiti and wrote, ‘It seems reasonable to consider voodoo practices a cause of the syndrome’” (Farmer, 2006, p. 23).

Farmer goes on to ask, “Why, precisely, would it be “reasonable to consider voodoo practices as a cause of the syndrome”? Did existing knowledge of AIDS in Haiti make such a hypothesis reasonable? Had voodoo been previously associated with the transmission of other illnesses?” He clarifies these theories as “a systematic misreading of existing epidemiologic and ethnographic data” (Farmer, 2006, p. 23). These types of speculations seemed to once again be fed by narratives of “voodoo/vaudoux” Durban spoke of in their work. The assumption that the HIV virus originated in vodou ceremonies reproduces the construction of Haitian bodies as being anomalous; it reinforces the perspective of Haiti as a premodern land rife with supernatural conceptualizations that come out of a distortion of Vodou as a religion. These then get prescribed onto Haitians in order to associate their bodies with disease. The medical community deemed Haiti as a likely suspect in the origin and initial spread of the disease due to misunderstandings of the vodou religion and Haitian culture more broadly. The very fact that this assumption was taken at face value to the point of being seen as “reasonable,” demonstrates just how ingrained these “voodoo/vaudoux” discourses that exoticize Haitian culture remained embedded in American mainstream and even academic discourse.

Ultimately, however, these speculations were debunked. In his work, Farmer cites studies from Africa, particularly by scientific researchers Dr. Warren Johnson and Dr. Jean Pape, that “are consistent with the hypothesis that HIV most likely originated in that continent, came to the United States and Europe, and subsequently was introduced into Haiti by either tourists or returning Haitians.” Along with this, later in the book, Farmer echoes this sentiment, but about the Caribbean as a whole, stating, “And yet what is known of “the start” of AIDS in the Caribbean suggests that the epidemics there were introduced through international prostitution, same-sex sexual contacts, and bisexuality. Blood transfusion also played a role. These island epidemics are not in all likelihood “direct descendants” of the African pandemic. They are American” (Farmer, 2006, p. 218).

However, these conversations did not just end in the 90s with Farmer’s publishing of this work. In fact, in 2007, a study was released by an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, Dr. Michael Worobey, who found that the HIV virus originated in Africa and did in fact arrive in the US by way of Haiti. However, Dr. Jean Pape, who is now the director of GHESKIO and a professor of medicine at Cornell University, criticized these findings stating that Worobey was simply restating “prejudices advanced 2 decades ago” (Cohen, 2007). Ultimately, scientists and researchers concur on the fact that the disease originated in Central Africa, and not Haiti. Nevertheless, despite the fact that these myths and speculations from the 1980s and 90s were ultimately debunked, it still does not take away from the very real damage caused by the hammering in of a misguided impression that Haitian bodies bore the constant threat of infecting simply due to their nationality.

It was these kinds of narratives that constructed the black, Haitian body as equated to HIV/AIDS. And if Haitian bodies were automatically assumed to be infected, then their incarceration was being justified preliminarily. This is what ultimately occurred in Guantanamo Bay. This rhetoric invites the larger conversation questioning why black bodies are often associated with infectious disease. In her work, Paik lays out a history of Haitians being regarded as infecting and being carriers of disease both on account of their race and ethnicity. She discusses the association of Haitians with Syphilis by Europeans in the sixteenth century, along with the US associating Haitians in the 1970s with Tuberculosis, Hepatitis, and Typhoid. Paik states, “Well before they found themselves indefinitely imprisoned, the HIV-positive Haitian refugees of Guantánamo were already ensnared in this web that entangled xenophobia, racism, nationalism, and fears of HIV/AIDS. As racially black and ethnically Haitian, not only were they associated with infectious diseases, but their very bodies were figured as contagion, as sources of pollution whose mere presence would contaminate the United States” (Paik, 2013). Black Haitian blood and bodies were deemed to be contaminated and dangerous, and for that supposed crime, Haitian bodies were punished.

Conclusion

Christina Sharpe uses the image of the ship to conjure the history of slavery and its afterlives. She uses the recurring motif of being “in the wake” both in a literal sense of a funeral and in the wake of trauma and pain in order to reckon with a history so closely tied to the deaths of black bodies. Sharpe questions how one can “tend to the Black dead and dying: to tend to the Black person, to Black people, always living in the push toward our death?” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 10). Sharpe asks us to face the glaring histories of oppression that stand before us and deal with the ghosts that still linger. White supremacy was not just the driving force of the transatlantic slave trade, it is also the driving force that continues to demand brutality against black communities across the Atlantic. The narratives that construct Haitian bodies to be abnormal, primitive, hyper-sexual, and disease-ridden are those same ghosts recycled again and again to justify brutality done to black Haitian bodies. The Guantanamo Bay detainment of Haitian refugees is a manifestation of those ghosts, of a painful history of the relationship between the United States and Haiti rearing its head.

Chapter 3: Carceral Bio and Necropolitics: Guantanamo Bay

For Michel Foucault, Biopolitics outlines the methods by which the state exerts control over populations via the body. It is used to illustrate the many mechanisms of regulation by government entities over the well being of the lives of their populations. In the first volume of his work History of Sexuality, Foucault formulates his analysis of biopolitics by establishing the government’s main role as “to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order…” (Foucault, 1978, p. 138). He goes on to expand upon this, stating, “One might say that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (Foucault, 1978, p. 138). While Foucault acknowledges the role that death plays in biopolitical management of populations, he ultimately designates the function of government in the administering and nurturing of life. There are many ways that populations themselves take on this state project of administering life, this is especially true when it comes to health and medicine. Through vaccines and disease prevention mechanisms and other efforts, for example, individuals take on the work of caring for themselves and caring for the masses as a whole. In the context of the detainment of HIV positive Haitians in Guantanamo Bay, the US government exerted its biopolitical administration of detainees in keeping them away from populations on the mainland, thereby protecting these American populations from a supposed foreign threat. This action,while punitive for Haitian detainees, does the work of fostering and protesting life among US mainland populations.

However, Foucault’s dissection of Biopolitics does not fully account for the actual treatment of Haitians in Guantanamo Bay. It is not just that these detainees were being kept away and managed biopolitically, but that they were kept in conditions of bodily harm and subpar standards of living, where the fostering of life becomes impossible. Academic analysis of the idea of necropolitics better accounts for this negative administering of bodies. The term first comes out of Achille Mbembe’s academic article “Necropolitics,” which details the government’s power in controlling populations, but by focusing on death instead of the promotion of life. Mbembe writes, “To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.” He draws on Foucault’s writings on the topic of biopower and asks “What place is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?” (Mbembe, 2003). Mbembe uses this term to form a critique of governmental power and the ways that it is wielded against bodies and even describes sovereignty as being “expressed predominantly as the right to kill” (Mbembe, 2003). In this way, death is shown to be intrinsically tied to a demonstration of a nation or state’s power. The state gives itself the right to eliminate perceived threats to its sovereignty, and this self-given right becomes a manifestation of its biopolitical reach. However, Mbembe does not simply define necropolitics as being associated with death; not all subjects of necropolitical management are brought to their demise. For example, Mbembe examines conditions of chattel slavery, maintaining that enslaved people were “kept alive but in a state of injury, in a phantom- like world of horrors and intense cruelty and profanity” (Mbembe, 2003). He continues, expounding that the life of an enslaved person was “a form of death-in-life” (Mbembe, 2003). The enslaved person is subjected to a reality in which though they may be physically alive, their conditions of life do not allow them to take on the biopolitical work of self care. Similarly, while Haitian detainees were not being executed en masse in Guantanamo Bay, they were still being necropolitically managed by being reduced to a state of “bare life,” unable to take on the biopolitical task of biopolitics of caring for the self and the cultivation of life. (Mbembe, 2003). It is not that the U.S. government was seeking to bring detainees to their deaths, but that they saw themselves as having the authority to keep them in inhumane conditions and available for bodily harm.

This show of sovereignty is examined further in chapter four of Women and Genders Studies Professor Jasbir K. Puar’s book The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, where she moves beyond the right to kill to the right to maim, using the ongoing Israeli Occupation of Palestine as her focus. In this chapter, Puar, “takes the biopolitics of debilitation to its furthest expanse, looking at how the population available for injury is capacitated for settler colonial occupation through its explicit debilitation.” (Puar, 2017, pp. 128-129). In the context of this kind of occupation, marginalized/racialized populations are seen as readily available for injury and the ability of occupying forces to target these populations for the explicit purpose to maim these bodies becomes a show of military prowess of the occupier. Puar specifically discusses the carnage that arose in the wake of the 2014 Gaza War, and the usage of a “notable ‘shoot to cripple’ phenomenon” deployed by the Israeli Defence Forces. (Puar, 2017, 129). This connects back to Mbembe’s delineation of necropolitics, especially as the state holding immense power takes on the necropolitical management of populations it sees as a threat. This necropolitics then becomes an engine for the biopolitical “let live” project the government takes on in order to foster life in the populations it deems as acceptable. This necropolitical administration becomes a function of deeming populations as available for harm for the purpose of conserving the wellbeing of a dominant demographic. These populations are therefore identified as being attainable and deserving of necropolitical management. This is similar to what I find in Guantanamo- Haitian detainees were kept in necropolitical conditions as a foil for the maximization of life among US populations on the mainland.

It is through the fashionings of these ideas of bio and necro-politics that I want to discuss prisons and incarceration. Scholars of carceral studies, such as historian Hugh Ryan, describe prisons as being “detention warehouses” designed to “hide every social problem, we refuse to deal with” by keeping people locked away and abandoned (Ryan, 2022, pp. 17-19). Civil rights attorney and activist Michelle Alexander echoes this sentiment in her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, where she writes, “... mass incarceration is designed to warehouse a population deemed disposable— unnecessary to the functioning of the new global economy…” (Alexander, 2012, p. 17). Prisons therefore encompass both biopolitics and necropolitics: they are a mechanism of governmental management over populations as well as being a manifestation of the state's power to declare who lives and who dies/ is maimed. This is complicated further when one considers the prison camp, which philosopher Gieorgio Agamben describes as being born “out of a state of exception”(Agamben, 2017, p. 137). Agamben writes further, “The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule. In the camp, the state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the rule of law on the basis of a factual state of danger, is now given a permanent spatial arrangement, which as such nevertheless remains outside the normal order” (Agamben, 2017, p. 139). Not only is the prison camp a site of incarceration, whereby unfavorable populations are kept hidden and stashed away, it is also a place of judicial limbo, where jurisdictional lines are not properly drawn and legal frameworks are suspended. Mbembe also speaks of the state of exception in his work, identifying the plantation as a manifestation of the state of exception in which enslaved people are able to be harmed without consequence (Mbembe, 2003).

I want to tell the story of the Guantanamo Bay detention of HIV positive Haitian refugees by emphasizing what it truly was: an incarceration of people whose only crime was a diagnosis of a disease. I argue that the incarceration of these Haitian bodies is wielded as an interlocking biopolitical/necropolitical response on the part of the US government in order to contend with the supposed threat of Haitian bodies on the US body politic. The detainment of Haitians in a prison camp out of reach of US borders facilitates the US state’s biopolitical project. The construction of the Haitian body as infected and threatening to US populations creates conditions for necropolitical management by way of keeping detainees in a state of bare life: not dead, but also not put in a position for their lives and wellbeing to thrive. It is both biopolitics and necropolitics that shape the story of what happened to these detainees in Camp Bulkeley.

Camp Bulkeley

Guantanamo Bay is a US military naval base, ironically located in Cuba, but under complete US military Jurisdiction. It was opened in 1903 as a coaling and naval station following an agreement made between US president Theodore Roosevelt and Cuban president Estrada Palma following the passing of the “Platt Amendment” in 1902 as an addition to the Constitution of Cuba. This amendment detailed a series of conditions to be met before Cuba could gain its independence from the United States, as it had been annexed in 1998. The US then occupied Guantanamo Bay until 1934 when an additional agreement was signed in the treaty between the US and Cuba, which essentially granted the US an indefinite lease of Guantanamo Bay. Until the 1990s, the facility was mainly used as a naval base for the growing US Navy in the 20th century (Dastyari, 2015).

This primary function was changed, however, with the Haitian refugee crisis in the 1990s and the utilization of the interdiction policy. With the sudden influx of Haitian refugees seeking asylum in the United States, the decision was made to use Guantanamo Bay as a holding facility in order to process these refugees and their asylum claims. This was the first time that the facility was being used for human detention, and at its height, the facility held 12,000 Haitian detainees. During these asylum screenings, Haitians were also tested for HIV and those who tested positive were left facing a dilemma, as many of these Haitians had passed their asylum screenings. However due to a 1987 bill barring HIV positive migrants from entering the country, they were instead kept at a separate facility in Guantanamo, Camp Bulkeley, barred from entering the US but unable to be sent back to Haiti. The rest of the Haitians brought to Guantanamo were processed either they were allowed into the US or they were sent back to Haiti. This left over 200 HIV positive Haitian refugees imprisoned in Camp Bulkeley, awaiting further decisions by a US government both indifferent and conflicted on what steps to take to rectify the situation.

At Camp Bulkeley, US military personnel kept detainees in barracks-like structures, made of plywood or cinder blocks, covered by flimsy tin roofs. Many detainees hung sheets around their cots to maintain a sense of privacy (Rohter, 1993). The living conditions in the camp were quite appaling, as some detainees who later testified in the court case Haitian Centers Council v. Sale described inedible food, often containing worms, and inadequate housing (Paik, 2010). The Haitian Centers Council case ultimately led to the camp being shut down and allowed for detainees to be released as ordered by district judge Sterling Johnson in July 1993 (Haitian Centers Council v. Sale, 1993). Testimony also came from the 1993 New York Times article, “Haitians with HIV leave Cuba Base for Lives in U.S,” which included interviews from Haitians who had been detained in the camp, taken after they were granted entrance to the US following the closing of camp Bulkley. Many of these interviewees described horrific conditions in the camp, with one, Jean-Robert Germain, a 28-year old electrician, stating “I don't know if I am going to paradise…But at least I know that I am going to be leaving hell” (Rohter, 1993). Another interviewee, Jean Widmayer, discussed treatment of detainees by military personnel, stating, “They just treated us like animals…There was no understanding because of the language barriers and the difference in culture with the American military” (Rohter, 1993). This treatment of detainees by military staff was discernibly dehumanizing. Not only were detainees being kept in a prison camp without assurance of when they will be released, but their dignity was being slowly stripped by them by an American military culture determined to exert an immense amount of power over them. It also goes without saying that Haitians historically are no strangers to American military presence encroaching on their sovereignty and human dignity. It has been a constant in their history that the presence of US military personnel is often quickly followed by inhumane treatment and violations of bodily sovereignty. Federal judge Johnson, who presided over the Haitian Centers Council v. Sale case, echoed a similar kind of tension between detainees and military personnel, stating, “the Haitian detainees have been subjected to pre-dawn military sweeps as they sleep by as many as 400 soldiers dressed in full riot gear. They are confined like prisoners and are subject to detention in the brig without hearing for camp rule infractions” (Annas, 1993). In fact, according to the Washington Post article, “U.S. Camp for Haitians Described as Prison-Like” one detainee, 15-years old, was sent to detention for violating a rule prohibiting food in tents (Duke, 1992). This method of punishment for the breaking of arbitrary laws is eerily similar to current forms of discipline found within American carceral institutions. The line is clear that connects the detaining of Haitian refugees in Guantanamo with the system of incarceration that continues to grow from within American borders.

Along with these living conditions, detainees also faced a lack of proper medical care and inadequate capability to provide treatment for the conditions and symptoms that come with a disease like HIV/AIDS. Medical facilities at Guantanamo were known to be inadequate, especially when dealing with a fairly complex and fatal disease. In further testimony from the trial, defendants' counsel admitted that “the medical facilities at Guantanamo are not presently sufficient to provide treatment for such AIDS patients under the medical care standard applicable within the United States itself.” However, when pressed further about the US government’s willingness to provide further treatment for detainees, counsel responded, “The government does not intend at this point to do that” (Haitian Centers Council v. Sale, 1993). This blatant lack of regard on the part of the US government to care for populations it has kept detained echoes back to earlier critiques of the system of incarceration shared by Michelle Alexander, as I detailed earlier in this chapter. When the state constructs populations and bodies as being disposable, and therefore able to be warehoused and detained, the wellbeing of these bodies becomes at best, an afterthought and at worse, a drain on the system the state would rather disappear. In the same way that African Americans are racialized and punished via the carceral system, Haitian detainees were highly racialized and punished, as though they had been convicted of a crime, via the abhorrent living conditions and denigratory disregard for their wellness. This is proven explicitly by the comments of an INS Special Assistant to the Director of Congressional and Public Affairs Specifically, who, in regard to HIV positive Haitians kept in Guantanamo, stated to the press, “they're going to die anyway, aren't they?” (Haitian Centers Council v. Sale, 1993). This type of language echoes grimly back to Mbembe, who delineates on the existence of death words, in which “vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead” (Mbembe, 2003). These populations are so devalued that their lives are no longer held in consideration.

This cruel lack of regard for the well being of Haitian detainees coupled with failure to provide clear communication regarding their medical care contributed to a strain in the trust between Haitians and the medical staff at the camp. In regards to the medical system in Guantanamo, Camp Bulkeley itself was serviced by a battalion aid clinic, staffed by two physicians: one infectious disease specialist and the other specializing in family medicine (Farmer, 2003, p. 62). According to the New England Journal of Medicine article, “Detention of HIV-Positive Haitians at Guantanamo -- Human Rights and Medical Care”, “The Haitians believed that the military physicians were involved in their continued detention, and there were also great cultural differences between the physicians and the Haitian patients. As a result, the patients did not trust either their diagnosis or the medications prescribed for them” (Annas, 1993). This skepticism regarding diagnosis was justified, however, as inconsistencies were later found in the AIDS screenings, with findings discovering an error rate “80 times higher than in similar U.S. screenings” (Duke, 1992). Nelson Armel, who had been detained in camp Bulkeley, stated after his release “They tell me that I have the virus, but they offer no proof,...The first thing I am going to do [in Miami] is see a doctor and find out the truth” (Rohter, 1993). The reality that an error rate so stark was not enough to influence the US’s decision to keep these refugees detained directly corresponds with the construction of Haitian bodies as being carriers of contagion. It would have been much more rational to allow them entry into the US, where they could have been properly tested and given medical care at hospitals with the capacity to care for HIV/AIDS patients. However, Haitian bodies, constructed as being deviant, abnormal, and disease-ridden, were instead engendered to be incarcerable. Haitians in Camp Bulkeley who were bearing the fruits of this bodily construction and incarceration were aware of the ways that they were seen by the Americans who kept them confined. It is no surprise, then, that they felt unable to trust the medical staff on the compound.

This mistrust was further entrenched by the treatment of women in the camp. Haitian women often found themselves stripped of their bodily autonomy through medical procedures. For example, multiple claims arose of Haitian women being either forced or deceived into receiving the contraceptive injection, DepoProvera, many under the pretense that they were receiving treatment for their HIV symptoms. Some of these detainees experienced side effects to these injections, such as debilitating pain and heavy, continuous menstrual bleeding (Paik, 2010). One detainee, Yolande Jean, lamented in her deposition for the Haitian Centers Council v. Sale case, “They say that we are sick…but look at the treatments that are given to us as sick people. We have HIV and the type of medication that is given to us, we will die before we can be treated” (Paik, 2010). Along with the bodily dangers that these medical deceits posed to these women was the flagrant violation of Jeean and other female detainees’ bodily autonomy. Another instance of this kind of stripping of autonomy befell Marie Nicole St. Louis, who was also detained in the camp. In her deposition, she details having undergone surgical procedures following complications with her pregnancy with twins without being given a proper reason for these procedures. She states, “I don’t know what happened. I went to the clinic here, then they sent me to the hospital. When I got to the hospital, they told me that I was supposed to have surgery because I was carrying two children; one was good, the other one wasn’t. Then, later on, they told me they had removed both. . . . [T]hey never told me why” (Paik, 2010). Later on, Justice Department lawyers revealed that she had actually not been pregnant at all, and that the procedure was to remove one of her ovaries and a fallopian tube (Paik, 2010). Due to miscommunication or a lack of communication on the part of the Doctors carrying out her procedure, St. Louis spent months never fully grasping what happened to her body. Her status as being under the control of the US military as a detainee stripped away the ability to make an informed decision regarding her body. She was not properly informed of what would happen to her, she was not told of her choices or her rights.

Another consideration to make with these flagrant violations of the bodily autonomy of these women is the very palpable undertones of a eugenic policy attacking the reproductive capacity of Haitian women. This is so much more than a violation of Haitian women’s autonomy, although this is not to diminish that reality. US medical personnel took it upon themselves to decide whether or not these women would even have the option to bring about children into the world. Connecting back to Puar's delineation of the debilitation of bodies as serving a biopolitical purpose within hierarchies of power, it could be argued that the debilitation of HIV positive Haitian women’s reproductive capacity was done to prevent or acutely reduce the chances of Haitian futurity. Similarly to the ways that debilitation of Palestinian youth by Israeli forces limits possibilities of futurity, this debilitation of Haitian reproductive capabilities renders impotent possibilities of Haitian futurity (Puar, 2017, p. 152). Afterall, with the construction of Haitian bodies as dangerous, the possibility of Haitian futurity would be viewed as threatening to the “let live” paradigm of US biopolitical management.

These detailed, first hand testimonies bear witness to the sheer extent of bodily and mental harm endured by Haitian detainees in Guantanamo directly at the hands of the US government. I have outlined inhumane living conditions in which detainees were forced to spend their daily lives, unfair treatment by military personnel culminating in the use of disciplinary mechanisms for arbitrary and trivial rules, and the stifling of Haitian fertility by medical staff. Haitians were not afforded dignity of being seen as fully human, but were again viewed as a burden not for the US to carry but to be rid of. Echoing Agamben’s figuration of the camp, the US was able to keep HIV positive Haitian refugees in a legal space of exception where harm could be enacted upon them without true repercussions on the part of the American government. These Haitians were under the legal protection of neither Haiti nor the United States. In this way this detentionserved a necropolitical purpose of designating Haitians as a population able to be kept in conditions of bare life and debilitated corporeal, reproductive capability. And the unfortunate truth is that the world let them do this: the world allowed the US to enact real harm upon Haitian bodies. Haitian bodies were allowed to be harmed. And this continued until it was Haitians themselves from the camp who resisted and ensured that their voices would be heard and their stories told. This resistance will be explored further in the following chapter.

Conclusion

Camp Bulkelley was finally shut down following the decision made in the June 8, 1993 case Haitian Centers Council v. Sale in which judge Johnson ordered the camp shut down and Haitian detainees to be allowed into the US, citing their detainment as “totally unacceptable to this Court” (Haitian Centers Council v. Sale, 1993). Judge Johnson further explained that these detainees had not committed any crime nor posed a national security risk and therefore had no need of being further detained. In a statement, he commented, “Where detention no longer serves a legitimate purpose, the detainees must be released” (Haitian Centers Council v. Sale, 1993). However, later that month on June 21st, the Supreme Court decided the case Sale v. Haitian Centers Council, which upheld the U.S.’s controversial interdiction policy, stating that the president retains the power to “order the Coast Guard to repatriate undocumented aliens intercepted on the high seas.” (Sale, v. Haitian Centers Council, 1993). Because of this and despite the shutting down of Camp Bulkeley, the Guantanamo Bay detention center itself continued to be used as a holding place for refugees into the late 1990s. The detention of Haitian refugees set the groundwork for the decades-long history of the incarceration of different populations on the facility. With that history came the further construction of populations as “threatening” that fed into national security fears on the U.S. mainland. This history began with Haitians, but it by no means ended with them.

Chapter 4: Resistance and the Reclamation of a Confined Body

Haitians are a people who have a long history of resistance to oppressive forces and institutions, with the founding of their country being won through victory in a bloody revolution against a cruel system of enslavement. This same spirit of resistance struck again when faced with the United States military as an occupying force in the early 20th century, with the Haitian Caco rebellion in the 1920s. Haitians hold this history in high esteem, taking it as a source of immense national pride. In step with this history, it is no surprise that the detainees in Guantanamo Bay did not passively accept their unlawful incarceration at the prison camp. In fact, a series of demonstrations at Camp Bulkeley began in 1992 that erupted in an uprising in July. Fueled by their frustration at dire living conditions, detainees attacked military personnel with rocks, sticks, and other materials. In response, the military crushed their efforts brutally, beating and chaining up the detainees who had participated in the incident. Many of them were also taken to a separate isolation camp as punishment for their involvement (Farmer, 2003, pp. 61-62). Yolande Jean, who was introduced in the previous chapter, took part in these demonstrations and also was among those who were punished in this way. Through interviews he conducted with Jean, Paul Farmer details her experiences in his book Pathologies of Power: Heath, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. Jean recounts:

“We had been asking them to remove the barbed wire; the children were playing near it, they were falling and injuring themselves. The food they were serving us, including canned chicken, had maggots in it. And yet they insisted we eat it ‘Because you’ve got no choice. And it was for these reasons that we started holding demonstrations. In response, they began to beat us. On July 18th, they surrounded us, arrested some of us, and put us in prison in Camp Number 7… Camp 7 was a little space on a hill. They put up a tent, but when it rained you got wet. The sun came up, and we were baking in it. We slept on rocks; there were no beds. And each little space was separated by barbed wire. We couldn’t even turn around without being injured by the barbed wire” (Farmer, 2003, pp. 61-62).

These forceful acts of resistance demonstrated the persistence of these refugees in fighting against their unfair and unlawful treatment. In the same condition, it cannot be ignored the bodily harm that came with the repression of this act of resistance, with detainees having their bodily autonomy further restricted and being forced to live in worse living conditions, stuck in small spaces surrounded by barbed wire which restricted their movement. This again is another attestation of Haitians being deemed a population available for bodily harm, which becomes reinforced by the lack of rights and protections they are given as a consequence of being held in Guantanamo. Military personnel seemingly felt no moral objections to this brutal quelling of Haitian resistance, despite the fact that this was a population of refugees brought to frustration and desperation due to their inhumane treatment. But it is this threat of bodily harm that makes these acts of resistance from detainees so impactful. This became especially pertinent when, later that year following the events of the uprising, Haitian detainees in Camp Bulkeley decided to go on hunger strike.

A History of Hunger Strikes in Spaces of Incarceration

To fully comprehend the significance and implications of the Guantanamo Bay Detainees’ actions in planning and carrying out a hunger strike, there must first be a grasp of the extensive history of hunger strikes being used as a mode of resistance from within spaces of confinement or incarceration. In his book Refusal to Eat : A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes, American studies professor Nayan Shah details the ways that hunger strikes have been used globally and historically to resist conditions within carceral systems. Shah describes a hunger strike as ‘a protest like no other” in which “the imprisoned person defies an instinctual imperative to persist” by refusing to consume food (Shah, 2022, p. 1). In this way, the person choosing to undergo this act of protest is using their body as a vehicle by which a message is sent that challenges a destructive norm or status quo. Usually the term “strike” is associated with worker’s strikes, in which labor is ceased for a period of time with the intention of causing harm to the employer or industry. A hunger strike, however, “requires the cessation of the striker’s eating. Rather than causing material harm to an adversary, a hunger strike is an alarming exposure of the striker to suffering. Yet it foists the responsibility for the striker’s self-destruction onto the state’s authority and holds culpable the prison’s power” (Shah, 2022, p. 1). It is this assumption of culpability by the state that makes hunger strikes a repeated choice by prisoners. Shah explains this, stating, “authorities hope for a brief and limited protest. They become anxious as a hunger strike persists and spreads. Reluctantly, government officials must assume responsibility for the hunger striker’s life and reckon with how to deflect or mitigate that culpability” (Shah, 2022, p. 2). The process of starvation is slow and sets the body on display as a show of determination for the striker. The body deteriorates gradually while calling more and more attention onto itself, causing more outcry on behalf of the striker and therefore places more pressure on authorities to consider the striker’s demands. In this way the striker uses the “stakes of living and dying” to their advantage (Shah, 2022, p. 2).

In the early to mid twentieth century, hunger strikes erupted out of democratic crises, empires rose and crumbled and rights were fought for by marginalized populations. In 1909, for example, British and American Suffragettes who had been imprisoned for their political activism went on strike in order to resist their government’s denial of their rights. Similarly, in 1920, Irish Independence activist Terence Macswiney went on hunger strike to the death while being held in prison in England. A few years later, his sister, Mary, carried out her own hunger strike while she was imprisoned in Ireland. Both of these actions garnered different reactions from the public but nevertheless were immortalized as fighters for Irish independence. At the same time of Terrence's hunger strike, 60 IRA volunteers who had been imprisoned also went on strike, two of whom died due to their efforts. Later in the 20th century, South African anti-Apartheid activists also used hunger strikes to further their cause. In 1966, following the imprisonment of anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, other prisoners in the prison went on hunger strike to protest living conditions at the prison, fueled by Mandela’s participation in solidarity with their cause. This reinvigorated political action from within the prison and created a sense of allyship among the incarcerated (Shah, 2022, p. 2).

Within the US carceral system, and especially with the boom of incarceration rates in the United States starting in the 1970s, hunger strikes among prisoners and detainees have featured prominently. This by no means excluded immigration detention centers, which began to be used more frequently in the early 1980s. Even before the events on Guantanamo Bay, Haitians have been entangled in a complex system of INS (Immigration and Naturalization Services) detention, although it must be noted that Haitians were not the only ethnicity to fall victim to this system (“Our History,” 2022). These instances of Haitian immigration detention have often accompanied the use of hunger strikes as a mode of resistance. In 1982, for example, Haitian women held in a facility in Alderson, West Virginia went on hunger strike protesting their ongoing detainment and their living conditions (Lindskoog, 2018, p. 51). One of the most infamous sites of hunger strikes to resist against immigration detention, however, was the Krome Service Processing Center in Miami. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, economic stagnation in Cuba and the instability of the Duvalier in Haiti regime caused an uptick in Cuban and Haitian refugees fleeing to the United States. Many of these refugees ended up being held at Krome, which had been a decommissioned air force missile facility. This fact makes Krome especially interesting as it had been an establishment of the US military, just like Guantanamo Bay, thereby marking a clear throughline of militarism that runs through these stories of the detainment of Haitian migrants. At first it simply encompassed a jumble of makeshift tents and buildings on vacant land. In fact it had been urged to close by the Dade County Public Health Department due to violation of health and sanitary codes, however it was reactivated due to the uptick in refugee arrivals in November and December of 1980 (Shah, 2022, p. 266). Then, in May 1981 the Reagan administration imposed “indefinite detention on all excludable aliens,” which turned Korme into a long term detention center (Shah, 2022, p. 267).

Cubans and Haitians were separated into two separate sections at Krome: Cubans were kept at Krome North and Haitians were kept at the army barracks in Krome South. Conditions at the prison were quite poor, with facilities often being very overcrowded and detainees being forced to use sordid, ramshackle sanitary amenities. There were cases of abuse by prison staff against detainees occurring at the facility (Lindskoog, 2018, p. 71). As a result, nearly all detainees participated in a hunger strike to demand their release. Activists carried out a series of protests to advocate for the refugees kept at Krome, standing in solidarity with their hunger strike, At one particular protest, protesters stormed the Krome gate and even managed to free over 100 prisoners from the facility before Krome Guards and US Border Patrol officers were able to regain control and stamp out the protest (Lindskoog, 2018, p. 71). This reveals the power and effectiveness of the hunger strike as a mode of resistance. Although this effort did not attain the ultimate goal of the detainees to be freed, it still created a coordinated effort in fighting for a common goal that resonated with the public. That is a major feat. This form of resistance also spread to other Haitian detention centers as well such as in the Lexington, Kentucky federal prison where Haitian prisoners carried out a hunger strike for freedom (Lindskoog, 2018, p. 72). Hunger strikes became a common method by which Haitians detained across the US mainland and abroad made their voices heard.

What makes hunger strikes so visceral is that it lays the body as a testimony to the harm done against it. It upsets the balance between the oppressed and the oppressor in the ability and right to commit harm against the body. Through the deliberate refusal of food, the prisoner is able to refuse the necropolitical management of their body by the state. When constrained into the configuration of “death worlds” Mbembe speaks of in his work, often the only choice an oppressed group has is to reclaim the harm being done to their bodies by leaning further into harm and sacrificing their own bodies. Instead of experiencing bodily harm at the hands of a state that has deemed this population as being available for necropolitical management, the striker refuses this necropolitical positioning. The prisoner uses their body to reclaim the power taken from them over their own body. Shah denotes this further in his book, writing, “...the hunger strike marshals the body’s elemental material processes: it is the prisoner’s personal and political defiance of the state, with the purpose of laying claim to rights the striker has been denied” (Shah, 2022, pp. 3-4). This delineates the ways that bodies can become the forefront of social and political struggle. For a prisoner, whose body is not only deemed as being undesirable and undeserving of safety, but also that their body no longer belongs to them, a hunger strike offers a compelling mode of refusal to accept this reality. In this way, the hunger strike becomes a powerful tool of dissent that can have widespread impact.

Camp Bulkeley Hunger Strike

In January of 1993, following newly inaugurated president Clinton decided to continue his predecessor’s policy of interdiction of Haitian refugees. Partially in response to this, along with the already unendurable living conditions at Camp Bulkelley, the HIV positive Haitian detainees, led by Yolande Jean, launched a hunger strike at the camp. In an interview, Jean stated, “Because of all of this, I just got to the point, sometimes in January, I said to myself, come what may, I might die, but we cannot continue in this fashion. We called the committee together and decided to have a hunger strike” (Farmer, 2003, p. 65). After 15 days of striking, participants began falling unconscious, but when military leadership warned them and demanded they end their strike, detainees refused. Military personnel reacted violently, beating detainees and leaving scars. Even so, the hunger strike lasted a total of six weeks. Jean was arrested and placed in solitary confinement. This greatly discouraged her, as seen through letters sent to her family in which she wrote, “I have lost hope; I am alone in my distress. I know you will understand my situation, but do not worry about me because I have made my own decision. I am alone in life and will remain so. Life is no longer worth living to me” (Farmer, 2003, p. 65). Understanding the detrimental psychological impacts that solitary confinement can have upon a prisoner, it is not surprising that Jean experienced such a downturn in her mental health as a result of being kept isolated in confinement compounded with the already mentally taxing assignment of shouldering a hunger strike. There is a reason, afterall, that solitary confinement is often considered a form of torture (“United States,” 2020).

However, Jean and the other detainees’ efforts did not go in vain. In March of 1993, Judge Johnson ordered all detainees with fewer than 200 total T-lymphocytes (the threshold for the diagnosis of AIDS) be released and transferred to the US. Jean herself was transferred almost directly from solitary confinement and arrived on the US mainland on April 8th of that year. Some among the remaining Haitian detainees at Camp Bulkeley initiated a second hunger strike at the beginning of that summer, seeing that these kinds of efforts create tangible results (Farmer, 2003, p. 66). These concerted actions of resistance by detainees demonstrate the grit and mental fortitude they held in denying themselves sustenance for long periods of time in struggle for a collective freedom. In archival material, there were even accounts of detainees losing consciousness, being intravenously rehydrated by medical personnel and then immediately rejoining the hunger strike soon after ([Protest footage of AIDS activists], 1993). These stories reaffirm the hunger strike as a mode of reclamation. The act of refusal is a powerful gesture, after all.The act of refusing what one knows their body needs for the sake of a greater purpose is quite impactful, especially when one recognizes that many of these hunger striking detainees were possibly quite ill. These actions were a show of collective support and the undertaking of a cooperative undertaking.

The response to news of the hunger strike on the US mainland were of outrage and solidarity. Activists, college students, ministers, and movement leaders across the United States undertook hunger strikes of their own in solidarity with the refugees. Demonstrations and protests were also planned and carried out to demand the release of Haitian detainees (Lindskoog, 2018, p. 99). ACT UP, the HIV/AIDS activism movement founded in the 1980s in New York City, took up advocacy efforts on behalf of Haitian refugees in Guantanamo. They planned lots of campaigns and acts of civil disobedience towards this goal, creating a unique intersection of queer activism and the fight for immigrant and refugee rights (Chavez, 2012). These acts of solidarity demonstrate the reverberative power of a hunger strike. Haitian detainees were able to use their bodies to communicate with the outside world, to bring others in conversation with them from across stretches of land, just like the Krome Center detainees were able to do just a decade before. In the end it was this public pressure along with the efforts of the Haitian detainees at Camp Bulkeley that allowed for their release and the shutting down of the camp. This small stretch of history remains as a testament to the power of collective struggle and resistance. Haitians in Guantanamo Bay, just like Haitians have done throughout historical moments of oppression, took it upon themselves to fight for their freedom and their right to be seen and treated as people. The very reality that this had to be fought for and not instinctively given is a sad one, but one that nonetheless did not stand in the way of a small group of people to reject the notion that their bodies could be harmed without consequence. The Guantanamo Bay hunger strikes were precisely the rejection of US authority to enact harm against a population it deemed available to be harmed. Haitian refugees demanded that the power to enact and experience harm no longer remain at the hand of the United States government.

Conclusion

Hunger strikes continued to be a method of resistance for prisoners who were later detained in Guantanamo Bay, especially after the inception of the post 9/11 war on terror. In 2013, for example, there was a hunger strike carried out by 106 detainees at Guantanamo Bay in order to protest their detainment at the facility, especially as many were being kept without trial. Although these were not refugees or immigrants, the hunger strike offered “a potent way to rebel” according to medical historian Ian Miller in his book A History of Force Feeding : Hunger Strikes, Prisons and Medical Ethics, 1909-1974. Miller goes on to say, “Having been stripped of their capacity for political communication and placed in an institution that severely restricted personal freedom, the simple act of not eating allowed detainees to reassert control over their bodies” (Miller, 2016, p. 1). Twenty years later, the same motivations that catalyzed the hunger strike among Haitian detainees were recycled for detainees caught up in a post 9/11 hyper-militarized and hyper-securitized world. Guantanamo Bay had remained as a site of resistance just as much as it has retained a history of recycled harm. It is a historical truth proved repeatedly that in spaces where autonomy is hyper-restrictive, those who’s autonomies are being restricted will attempt to regain some level of freedom. A hunger strike is just one of many methods that have been taken in these spaces, but it is one that has reverberated across different moments in time both within US jurisdiction and globally. Haitian detainees simply made their own etch upon this history.

Conclusion

When then presidential candidate Donald Trump stood on a debate stage in early September of 2024 and made claims that the Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio were “eating cats and dogs,” I was not particularly shocked (Reinstein & Demissie, 2024). Horrified, yes, but deep down I had heard these types of comments before, whether on social media or among middle school heckling, these remarks were not foreign to me. I understood from a very young age that this was how many Americans viewed Haiti, the country I had been raised in and had to flee at a very young age. But to see these words echo on a national platform did give me pause. Watching that debate and the online frenzy that followed bore a direct connection for me back to the research I had been conducting for my thesis, except these were not events I was reading in media articles or convoluted academic text or sifting through archival materials. These were events I was watching take place as they happened. This feeling strengthened for me when, after Trump was sworn into office, he directed the secretary of Homeland Security to expand immigration detention capacities in Guantanamo Bay to be able to hold up to 30,000 people, despite the fact that immigration activists and journalists have called these plans “abusive" (Opila, 2025).These two events served as a reminder that history by no way runs in a linear way. There are loops and repetitions all along the way, but that by no means made it less horrifying to see it begin to unfold again in similar ways.

In my thesis I centralize my argument as surrounding the construction of the Haitian body and the US response to this construction. The Haitian body is made to be abnormal, dirty, and dangerous and therefore available for necropolitical management. Through the narratives and institutions that construct these bodies in this way, the US was able to justify the detainment and incarceration of these migrants, not just in Guantanamo Bay but in the complex immigration detention system that spans across the country. Guantanamo Bay is proof of the dangers of the scapegoating of populations in times of crisis. We saw something very similar with the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent rise in anti-Asian racism across the country (Neil et al., 2023). When different ethnic or racial groups become associated with a particular disease or mass traumatic event, these populations are bound to be targeted. With Guantanamo Bay, the US government was able to weaponize a fashioning of Haitian bodies as being inherently threatening to persist in its incarceration and brutalization of these bodies while eluding criticism. That is, until they were no longer able to. Farmer states in Pathologies of Power, “The detention of HIV-positive Haitian refugees raises a host of questions regarding a complex symbolic web linking xenophobia, racism, and a surprisingly coherent ‘folk model’ of Haitians to which many North Americans subscribe. The persistent notion of Haitians as infected and, more important as infecting, clearly underpinned much of the American response” (Farmer, 2003, p. 66). I argue that this biopolitical response from the US government to keep Haitians away from US mainland populations was simultaneously a manifestation of necropolitical control. The US was able to keep detainees in a legal state of limbo where harm could be enacted upon them and they could be kept in a state of bare life, unable to consent to taking on the biopolitical project of self care and fostering life. Echoing back to Jasbir Puar’s The Right to Maim, the US government exerts its sovereignty through the harming of populations it deems deserving and available for harm. The dangers of harmful narratives that construct certain bodies as threatening or dangerous is that these bodies are simultaneously identified as being available for harm. We see this, even after Haitian detainees were released, with the expansion of the Guantanamo Bay facility with the War on Terror, where it became a facility to detain and extract intelligence from non-citizens involved in alleged terrorist activity (Dastyari, 2015).

I wanted to tell the story of these HIV positive Haitians not just focusing on the harm enacted against them through their detainment, but by sharing the stories of how they resisted, reclaimed their own stories and their own bodies. Through the efforts of hunger strikes that occurred in Camp Bulkeley in 1993, Haitian detainees were able to take back the bodily autonomy they were stripped of through their detainment and work towards a common purpose of sharing their stories with the outside world in order to secure their release. Stories like Yolande Jean’s experience in the camp, for example, places the narrative back into the hands of the ones who are most harmed by it, instead of the ones creating it. The modes of resistance taken by these refugees de-construct the negative fashionings of the Haitian body that were placed upon them against their will. They refused to be further perceived as populations deserving to be harmed. With this thesis, I wanted to bring to light their stories and put the experiences of Haitians from their words at the forefront. I hope I have done them justice.

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