The base offered steady jobs at wages far higher than those on local sugar plantations. President Lyndon Johnson ordered most Cuban workers fired to make the base more self-sufficient.
Jamaican and later Filipino guest laborers were brought in to take their place. Today, these guest workers live in trailers and old barracks on the base and do everything from construction and food services to laundry. Many are paid less than the U. Guantanamo Bay is a mostly Constitution-free zone.
He observed that the working conditions of Cubans employed at Guantanamo Bay complied with neither Cuban nor American labor laws. In , U. More recently, in the s, 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. Though they had been granted asylum, immigration officials would not admit them into the United States because of their health status.
The Haitians were admitted to the United States, but the unused facilities remained. Ferries provide transportation between the Windward and Leeward sides of the installation. Show More. Home Naval Station Guantanamo Bay. Main Contact Info. United States Navy.
Cost of Living. The general cost of living reflects conditions in the United States. View All Photos Other benefits include: Family housing comes with major appliances Access to on-base Department of Defense school and activity centers for teens and youth Employment opportunities for accompanying family members Very short commutes from housing to work sites, and free public transportation Cell phone and Internet service with speeds comparable to Continental U. In-Depth Overview. This is an overseas location and there are no driving directions for arriving personnel.
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Such links are provided consistent with the stated purpose of this website. To get there you drive past rows of wood panelled-houses with neat gardens and barbecues out back. You pass a school and a sports field. People jog along the roadway on their way to the beach. If that transition sounds jarring, it was. But it set the tone for my entire trip.
In my previous life as a Middle East correspondent, I visited a good number of military bases. There was Q-West base just outside of Mosul, Iraq, from which American soldiers fired thousands of rockets at Isis targets in the city. All of them, without exception, were deeply strange places. I was among a small group of reporters recently granted access to the base to attend a pre-trial hearing for a prisoner held at the detention centre on the island.
Government officials recognized the importance of naval bases in strategic positions in the Caribbean, primarily in order to facilitate growing trade to emerging markets. Schwab positions the decision to pursue a naval base at Guantanamo in this process of creating a stronger U. Navy; a base at Guantanamo would help ensure, in Roosevelt's mind, the creation of a modern and more well-rounded military with an enduring presence in the Caribbean The opportunity to create such a naval presence in the Caribbean came when the United States invaded Cuba — then a Spanish colony - in the summer of Across the twentieth century, Guantanamo's many uses have included being a coaling station, a ship repair point for the American naval fleet, a naval launching point into the treacherous Atlantic during the Second World War, a point from which to facilitate hurricane relief throughout the Caribbean, and as an incarceration center for suspected terrorists.
Along with these functions, Schwab argues that Guantanamo was a sight of mediation from its earliest days, and that that role took on new importance in the middle of the twentieth century because the base was one of the only places that the United States and Cuba were able to engage each other during the years after the revolution in which the Castro brothers rose to power.
It continues to be a place of mediation to the present day as one of the few places Cubans and Americans interact on a regular basis. Not surprisingly, the majority of the book is devoted to the first six decades of the twentieth century.
During the Cold War, Americans viewed Cuba with trepidation. The revolution of ensured the institution of a communist regime that was frightening to the United States.
Two of the eight chapters are reserved for the history of Guantanamo during the height of the Cold War, under the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. Schwab's treatment of the Cuban missile crisis in is surprisingly cursory, though he acknowledges it played only a minor role in those events. More than anything, Guantanamo functioned as an annoyance to Castro who demanded normalized relations between the U.
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