The 10^th anniversary of the Guantanamo detention center is being celebrated at the New York Times with an article suggesting that we could improve the human rights situation in respect of Guantanamo by giving it — wait for it — to the remnant Stalinist dictatorship of Fidel Castro. The author of this brainstorm, Jonathan Hansen, is a professor at Harvard. He sketches what he sees as a negative history of American relations with Cuba going back to the struggle for independence from Spain. He wants President Obama “to acknowledge this history and initiate the process of returning Guantánamo to Cuba.”

Well, wait just a minute. If the professor is going to talk about acknowledging history, let him start by acknowledging the role of the New York Times in this epic. We happen to be sensitive in respect of this point, for we fly the flag of the newspaper that flew — from its offices at 180 Broadway — the flag of Cuba Libre back when that movement was in full struggle against Spain. It was in The New York Sun’s newsroom that the exiled hero Jose Marti himself set up his own office, and the cause of Cuba Libre became the cause of The New York Sun. Where does the New York Times come off lecturing the rest of us in respect of freedom in Cuba?

Back in the day, the New York Times was full of derision for Jose Marti and the cause for which he stood — and fell. We have noted before that on June 1, 1895, after Marti died heroically in battle, the Times issued a dispatch from its special correspondent at Havana. The headline was “Impression of Marti’s Death.” It mocked him as the “so-called President of the Cuban Republic,” saying he’d prepared the revolution “in spite of the little aid which he could find in Cuba every time he had attempted to create a revolutionary movement.” It called him a “commonplace poet and writer, a prolix orator of diffuse style . . .” The separatists, it sneered,”lacking a chief having any prestige at all, gave him their money.”

The Times conceded that it would be “unjust to deny” that Marti “had remarkable tenacity, activity, and perseverance. Perhaps he was also a man of conviction, as his friends assure.” But it said that “he must be severely judged.” The paper complained: “To put into turbulence a country which asked for nothing but peace and work, to expose it to a ferocious race, thinking always of revenge against the whites, to light the fires of civil war, pillage under the pretext of ‘Cuba libre,’ and put obstacles in the way of reforms which had been demanded for years, are not acts that claim indulgence.” The Times went on to gripe about Marti: “To sustain the revolution he had recourse to all sorts of means: lies, false news, calumny.”

Given the New York Times’ own record, where does it come off lecturing the rest of the country about how “an unmistakable message that integrity, self-scrutiny and candor are not evidence of weakness, but indispensable attributes of leadership in an ever-changing world”? The truth is that the Times’ record on Cuba has been a disgrace at every turn, from its coverage of Jose Marti through the correspondence of Herbert Matthews, whose coverage of Castro’s rise led to the National Review’s famous jibe about the dictator, “I got my job through the New York Times.” The long record of Cuba will show that even though it has had far more than any nation’s fair share of injustice, the worst injustice of them all was that perpetrated by the Stalinist dictatorship of Fidel Castro. Why in the world would anyone want to give anything back to a regime that is still under the grip of his communist party?