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[En Español: Video de Obama en la cárcel es de una visita a Sudáfrica, no a Guantánamo]
An Aug. 24 Facebook post (direct link, archive link) shows a video of former President Barack Obama looking out of a jail cell window.
“This is a video of Barack Obama in the jail cell at Gitmo when he was arrested on September 29, 2019,” the post reads in Spanish.
The post was shared more than 150 times in four weeks. A similar, English version of the claim was also shared on Facebook.
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The video is from 2013, when Obama and his family visited Nelson Mandela’s prison cell in Robben Island, South Africa. Obama, of course, has not been arrested or held at the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba.
The video in the post was from June 30, 2013, when Obama and his family visited RobbenIsland, where anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 18 years. Former first lady Michelle Obama wrote about her experience on that trip.
“It was amazing to see Mandela’s cell, a tiny room – about 6 feet wide – where he spent 18 of the 27 years he was in prison,” Michelle Obama wrote. “He slept on a thin mat on the floor, and when he stretched out to sleep at night, his toes touched one wall, while his head grazed the other.”
Barack Obama was never arrested and held at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. However, he made a historic visit to Havana, Cuba, in March 2016, when he met Cuban President Raul Castro. Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Cuba since Calvin Coolidge in 1928.
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As president, Obama had intended to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay but blamed Congress for his inability to do so, according to The New Yorker.
About 780 prisoners have been held at Guantanamo Bay since 2002, according to The New York Times. As of Aug. 7, there were 30 detainees.
USA TODAY reached out to the user who shared the post for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
Reuters and Lead Stories also debunked the claim.
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