Juan Gonzales of Democracy Now:
[T]he closest land mass to Haiti other than the Dominican Republic, with which it shares an island, is Cuba, and in fact the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base is very close to Haiti. There are 9,000 US Marines there. They have their own desalinization plant, because they had conflicts with Cuba in the past over water supplies. They have huge reservoirs of water. It would have been really a quick action on the part of the United States to send a few thousand of those Marines immediately to Haiti in the first days with the water and the earth-moving equipment and all that stuff that’s right there in Guantánamo. And imagine the image of Guantánamo to the world as, instead of being a place that just tortures prisoners, that the Marines on Guantánamo had moved quickly in the first few days to assist the people in Haiti. Didn’t happen. And it took—even now, it’s about a couple of thousand of US soldiers are there, and they’re not necessarily playing the most—the best role that they can in this situation. So it just baffles me that they didn’t immediately bring the people in Guantánamo into action.
via Bottled Water Supplies in Port-au-Prince Airport Being Distributed…to US Embassy.
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