During a visit to Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, photographer Debi Cornwall stumbled upon an unexpected sight: a gift shop brimming with souvenirs. Intrigued, she purchased a selection, bringing them back to photograph as a stark contrast to her previous work documenting the base’s recreational areas. This earlier project, featured on The New York Times’ Lens blog, involved navigating a complex 12-page list of prohibited subjects and submitting memory cards for military inspection, even developing film negatives under supervision.
The Gitmo Gift Shop offerings present a jarringly lighthearted take on Guantanamo’s weighty geopolitical history. Items like a Fidel Castro bobblehead, perched on a boombox with “Rockin’ in Fidel’s Backyard,” stand alongside seemingly innocuous trinkets. Candles and golf balls could easily be mistaken for seaside kiosk fare from any beach resort. Adding to the bizarre collection are a plush banana rat – a species thriving in Guantánamo due to the absence of predators – and a small t-shirt proclaiming, “It don’t GTMO better than this.”
Cornwall’s background as a civil rights attorney for over a decade informs her photographic perspective on Guantánamo. She explains her interest stems from concerns about the system at play, one she describes as paradoxically claiming “transparency” while operating with “secrecy” and “normalizing what happens on base.” The presence of a gitmo gift shop itself becomes part of this normalization, offering a consumer-friendly facade to a complex and controversial reality.
Her photographs of Guantánamo capture an incongruous facet of the base, surprising yet also strangely familiar within the context of American culture. While the public eye is accustomed to images of orange jumpsuits and barbed wire, the base also meticulously cultivates a semblance of American suburban life, complete with a shopping-mall style food court. Familiar franchises like Baskin-Robbins, McDonald’s, Subway, KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell are all present. And, pointedly, everyone except the detainees is permitted to exit through the gitmo gift shop, purchasing a tangible piece of this perplexing place.
