Ted Widmer: Calls on the US to surrender island of Navassa (Navassa?)
[Ted Widmer, the director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, is the author of the forthcoming “Ark of the Liberties: America and the World.”]
IF you sail due south from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, you will eventually come to a tiny tear-shaped island with no beaches, no water and no human beings. Navassa, its enormous limestone cliffs rising straight out of the sea, is the oldest continuous overseas possession of the United States, older than Guantánamo, the Virgin Islands, Hawaii, and Alaska. Older than all of them, Navassa contains American history in microcosm.
Although it came into American possession only 150 years ago, Navassa was first sighted, according to legend, during the second voyage of Columbus in 1493. Thirty miles west of Hispaniola, it was close enough to be noticed but far enough away that its existence was always a bit in doubt. From the beginning it appeared indistinct on maps, a tiny smudge not much bigger than a ladybug on a windshield, in the windward passage between Haiti and Jamaica....
The United States Congress quickly placed the island under American jurisdiction based on the Guano Islands Act of 1856. The act, one of history’s more accurately named pieces of legislation, gave permission to the United States, from the United States, to claim any island in the world rich in bird droppings. Consequently, Navassa became an American “appurtenance” — not quite a territory but still indisputably American.
Except the declaration was disputed by the island’s nearest neighbor, Haiti, which has claimed Navassa since its independence in 1804. Haiti bases its rights on Columbus and on early treaties between France and Spain. But few paid attention, in part because Haiti itself was not recognized by the United States at the time since it was governed by people of African descent....
All that Navassa holds for us is the right — or more specifically, the power — of its possession. Perhaps we should celebrate the sesquicentennial by just giving it back — to Haiti, or an international trust or the state of nature itself. It would be a sublime gesture on behalf of freedom in its simplest state.
Would it not confound our critics to witness an American act of pure altruism? Would it not confound them even more if our oldest possession, the birthplace of American imperialism, became the birthplace of a better way of thinking about the way nations interact?...
Read entire article at Ted Widmer in an Op Ed in the NYT
IF you sail due south from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, you will eventually come to a tiny tear-shaped island with no beaches, no water and no human beings. Navassa, its enormous limestone cliffs rising straight out of the sea, is the oldest continuous overseas possession of the United States, older than Guantánamo, the Virgin Islands, Hawaii, and Alaska. Older than all of them, Navassa contains American history in microcosm.
Although it came into American possession only 150 years ago, Navassa was first sighted, according to legend, during the second voyage of Columbus in 1493. Thirty miles west of Hispaniola, it was close enough to be noticed but far enough away that its existence was always a bit in doubt. From the beginning it appeared indistinct on maps, a tiny smudge not much bigger than a ladybug on a windshield, in the windward passage between Haiti and Jamaica....
The United States Congress quickly placed the island under American jurisdiction based on the Guano Islands Act of 1856. The act, one of history’s more accurately named pieces of legislation, gave permission to the United States, from the United States, to claim any island in the world rich in bird droppings. Consequently, Navassa became an American “appurtenance” — not quite a territory but still indisputably American.
Except the declaration was disputed by the island’s nearest neighbor, Haiti, which has claimed Navassa since its independence in 1804. Haiti bases its rights on Columbus and on early treaties between France and Spain. But few paid attention, in part because Haiti itself was not recognized by the United States at the time since it was governed by people of African descent....
All that Navassa holds for us is the right — or more specifically, the power — of its possession. Perhaps we should celebrate the sesquicentennial by just giving it back — to Haiti, or an international trust or the state of nature itself. It would be a sublime gesture on behalf of freedom in its simplest state.
Would it not confound our critics to witness an American act of pure altruism? Would it not confound them even more if our oldest possession, the birthplace of American imperialism, became the birthplace of a better way of thinking about the way nations interact?...