The Caribbean Studies journal Sargasso, which is based at the University of Puerto Rico’s Río Piedras Campus, recently published a new volume titled ‘Guantánamo: What’s Next?’ Edited by Don E. Walicek and Jessica Adams, it deals with a diverse array of ideas about Guantánamo and the future. The cover art is a watercolor by Regino E. Boti (1878-1958), a Cuban writer from Guantánamo City, Cuba. 

Here we share information on the new issue, provided by Don E. Walicek. [Our warmest congratulations on this new issue! We understand that it has been a major feat and labor of love to catch up with the production after the destruction of the office and equipment by Hurricane María.]

The volume includes poetry by Irene Vázquez and Amílcar Sanatan. It also included fascinating two interviews: in the first José Sánchez Guerra and Don E. Walicek speak  with the former Cuban base worker Lennox Lambert Farquard, a Cuban of Jamaican ancestry who worked on the base for 19 years (roughly 1939-1958) and now lives in Guantánamo City; in the second, Alexandra S. Moore with Mansoor Adayfi, a Yemeni citizen held in the U.S. military base for almost 15 years without charges pressed against him. Adayfi now lives in Serbia, where he writes and working to rebuild his life.

This volume of Sargasso features six essays:

• Don E. Walicek and Jessica Adams (UPR-RP) “Guantánamo and the Future”
• Esther Whitfield (Brown University) “Art, Ecology, and Repair: Imagining the Future of the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base”
• Jorge Rodríguez Beruff (Carlos Albizu University) “U.S. Military Bases and Strategic Political Culture in Cuba”
• Ruth McHugh-Dillon (University of Melbourne) “This Place Is Australia Itself ”: Manus, Guantánamo, and Embodied Literary Resistance in Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains
• Diana Murtaugh Coleman (Northern Arizona University) “On the ‘Phobia of Hope’ and Everything After”
• Jessica Adams (UPR-RP) “Guantánamo and the Limits of Circum-Caribbean Emancipation”

It also includes an English translation of excerpts from the José Sánchez Guerra’s Spanish-language research on British Caribbean Migration to the Guantánamo region between 1902-1950.  The five reviews featured in the volume, each of which profiles an online resource dedicated to the topic of Guantánamo, were done by students who study American Studies at the University of Graz.

The final component of the volume is a memorial that Don E. Walicek created to commemorate the lives of the nine prisoners who have died in the base’s prison since 2002.

This most recent issue can be downloaded here: https://www.academia.edu/40427289/Guantánamo_Whats_Next_an_issue_of_Sargasso_edited_by_Don_E._Walicek_and_Jessica_Adams_

To purchase a hard copy or to receive a pdf of the volume, please write to sargassojournal@gmail.com.