Once more the Guantanamo Bay naval base is in the news, thanks to President Barack Obama’s plan to transfer prisoners from its prison into the United States. While the plan is delayed, Speaker Paul Ryan is considering legal action against the administration.

“Congress has spoken and the president does not have the authority to import Gitmo terrorist into the United States,” said AshLee Strong, a spokesperson for Speaker Ryan. “Because the law is clear we do not anticipate the need for any legal action, but Speaker Ryan is prepared to forcefully defend Congress’s authority if the president does attempt any illegal action.”

As interesting as all that is, what’s usually absent from news and discussion about Guantanamo Bay is the Cuban perspective. The naval base comes up as a topic in debates sometimes, but answers often don’t go beyond closing the prison (Democrats) or utilizing it even more (Republicans).

I can’t say I’m an expert, but I think I know enough to comment on it. My colleagues and I traveled to Cuba in January to understand the changes the island nation is undergoing and the obstacles it faces. They’re slowly transitioning to a market system, restrictions are being eased, and they are becoming more open to the world.

Most Cubans can tell you the significance of December 17, 2014. It’s the day Barack Obama announced the beginning of normalizing relations with Cuba, our island neighbor, and called for a change in approach. Cubans overwhelmingly favor this, in spite of the major differences in the governments’ respective perspectives.

Of course though, Guantanamo Bay is one of the many points the two nations sharply diverge on. Camilo Garcia Lopez Trigo, a former diplomat, explained  that while the government wouldn’t sacrifice progress in relations to get Guantanamo back, the return of the naval base has been a nearly constant (and complicating) issue.

“They have Guantanamo still and they are not talking about it,” he explained to us over lunch. “Guantanamo is not that important militarily speaking… It is a political issue.”

The American public, by a large margin, doesn’t want to close the base. The government’s position is that Guantanamo is strategically necessary, pivotal in the War on Terror, and they pay the Cuban government to use the land anyway (even if the Cuban government doesn’t cash the check).

Cubans, by contrast, see it as a military occupation where human rights violations flourish. The revolutionary government wasn’t the one who initially agreed to lease the land in 1903, after all, and the current government does not like this agreement. Furthermore, the lease is viewed as a temporary agreement with two agreeing parties that can be nullified by the rightful owner.

More importantly, it’s a violation of the sovereignty they struggled to achieve. The nation, after all, was a colony to Spain and beholden to American corporate and political interests for most of its life. The ongoing Cuban Revolution, while far left in nature, has independence from this as its core trait.

“…What lies at the heart of this dispute is the US authorities’ resistance to seeing Cuba become a free and sovereign nation,” Fidel Castro wrote in Guantánamo. “The Guantánamo base is the concentrated expression of those unsatisfied geopolitical ambitions and the arrogance of the powerful when faced with something that did not turn out the way they wanted.”

Indeed, it’s a complicated issue. And while President Obama has made impressive strides here, many of the big changes here must come from or with the help of Congress– just as Paul Ryan said. Hopefully they’ll someday see, understand, and consider the Cuban perspective (at least on this issue). There’s much to gain from improved relations with Cuba on both sides: new markets, new perspectives, and the best practices of both worlds.