Qualla: Guantanamo Bay

Guantanamo Bay: Introduction

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit USGS Native Bee Inventory and Monitoring Laboratory from Beltsville, USA, Public domain. Fidel Castro kept the rent checks in a desk drawer. Every year after the Cuban Revolution, the United States sent a payment of $4,085 for its lease on Guantanamo Bay - a figure that began as $2,000 in gold coins in 1903, was converted to $3,386.25 in dollars in 1934, and adjusted upward to $4,085 in 1974 as gold prices rose. Castro cashed one, early on, which he later attributed to "confusion." The rest he stuffed into a drawer, made out to the "Treasurer General of the Republic," a title his revolution had abolished. It was a small, stubborn protest against a lease Cuba never wanted and could not break. The bay itself - the largest natural harbor on Cuba's south coast, ringed by steep hills that seal it off from the island's interior - has watched this argument for more than a century with the indifference that geography shows to politics. Empires come and go. The harbor remains.

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Image: USGS Native Bee Inventory and Monitoring Laboratory from Beltsville, USA | Public domain

Guantanamo Bay: Puerto Grande, Cumberland Bay, Guantanamo

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit jeshua.nace, CC BY-SA 2.0. The bay has been renamed by nearly everyone who found it. The Taino people, the island's original inhabitants, called it Guantanamo - a name that survived conquest, colonization, and revolution. Christopher Columbus landed in 1494 and called it Puerto Grande. His crew found Taino...

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Image: jeshua.nace | CC BY-SA 2.0

Guantanamo Bay: The Lease That Cannot Die

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lithiumpilz, CC BY-SA 4.0. The United States first seized the bay during the Spanish-American War in 1898. Five years later, Tomas Estrada Palma, Cuba's first president, signed a perpetual lease under the terms of the Platt Amendment - legislation that the U.S. Congress had required Cuba to incorporate int...

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Image: Lithiumpilz | CC BY-SA 4.0

Guantanamo Bay: Refugees and Razor Wire

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oliver Rühl at de.wikipedia, Public domain. Before Guantanamo Bay became synonymous with the War on Terror, it served as a processing center for people fleeing violence across the Caribbean. In the 1990s, the United States intercepted tens of thousands of Haitian and Cuban refugees at sea and brought them to the base. Over...

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Image: Oliver Rühl at de.wikipedia | Public domain

Guantanamo Bay: The Bay Between Nations

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CESAR MONROY from Bellflower, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0. From the air, Guantanamo Bay looks like what it is: a deep horseshoe of water biting into Cuba's southeastern coast, enclosed by hills so steep they form a natural fortress. The climate is hot and semi-arid, one of the driest corners of an otherwise lush island. The naval base, n...

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Image: CESAR MONROY from Bellflower, USA | CC BY-SA 2.0