4. Guantanamo Bay is a mostly Constitution-free zone

In this July 24, 2018 photo, a youth works out on an exercise bar at a park by Revolution Plaza in Guantanamo, Cuba, near the US Guantanamo Bay naval base. Ramon Espinosa/AP Photo

The 1898 Guantanamo Bay lease agreement created a paradox over who has legal authority on the base by stipulating that Cuba retains "ultimate sovereignty" over the territory while the US has "complete jurisdiction."

Local Guantánamo journalist Lino Lemes wrote about the practical implications of this legal contradiction in the 1940s and 1950s. He observed that the working conditions of Cubans employed at Guantanamo Bay complied with neither Cuban nor American labor laws.

In 1954, US officers on the base jailed a Cuban employee for two weeks without trial for allegedly stealing a couple hundred dollars in cigarettes from the naval exchange where he worked.

Leaders of the base workers' union said that his detention violated due process.

"We could not conceive that in a naval establishment of the most powerful nation in the world, champion of democracy, things like this could happen," they wrote.

More recently, in the 1990s, the Coast Guard intercepted thousands of Haitians fleeing post-coup political unrest in boats and brought them to Guantanamo Bay. Most were denied asylum and sent home.

But 205 HIV-positive refugees were detained at Guantanamo Bay for months. Though they had been granted asylum, immigration officials would not admit them into the United States because of their health status.

Human rights lawyers and law students took on their case, charging that the base was a "legal black hole."

A federal judge agreed, writing in 1993 that the base had become "an HIV prison camp." He ordered all the Haitian asylum-seekers released and the Guantanamo Bay detention center closed.

The Haitians were admitted to the United States, but the unused facilities remained.

And the base's nebulous legal status — and therefore the question of whether the Constitution applies there — remained unresolved.