A refrigerator plane arrives weekly with fresh fruit and vegetables to restock the stores and sailors’ dining rooms. A barge from Florida pulls into port twice a month with everything from frozen pizza dough to new and used vehicles.
A container ship loaded with liquefied natural gas to power the base comes every two or three weeks.
Even as the Trump administration has stopped oil shipments to Cuba, causing blackouts and paralyzing many aspects of life on the island, the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay exists in a bubble, untouched by the hardships on the other side of a Cuban minefield.
From a hilltop on the base, the town of Caimanera on the other side of the bay was enveloped in darkness on a recent night. But Gitmo, as the American outpost is known, was thriving.
At a brightly lit sports bar, Kelly Clarkson belted out “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” through a state-of-the-art sound system. A nearby bowling alley and arcade were illuminated by strobe light.
The base sparkled, from the fence line that demarcates the two sides to the floodlights at a ball field with lush-looking synthetic turf and the huge outdoor movie screens.
For months, the Trump administration has demanded that Cuba make political as well as economic changes. Then this month President Trump raised the possibility of the United States “taking” the country. But the answer to what he might be planning cannot be found here.
There is no sign of a military buildup or extra forces, aside from a small contingent of Marines deployed a year ago to provide security at homeland security facilities that can hold a few hundred migrants.
To be sure, the base is more isolated than it has been in decades. The Trump administration last year stopped monthly meetings between the base commander, a U.S. Navy captain, and a senior Cuban military officer. The dialogue was established in the 1990s to keep the peace between the two military forces that are separated by 17 miles of fences.
Successive commanders had called the relationship “benign” in part because the meetings helped avoid misunderstandings. An example: Each June the U.S. officer would remind his Cuban counterpart that come the Fourth of July, those will be fireworks exploding on the base. Nobody is shooting at them.
The current base commander, Capt. Michael Stephen, has repeatedly declined to give interviews on the rupture in relations, lending to an air of uncertainty. So civilians living on the base wonder whether there is a plan to evacuate them if tensions increase between Washington and Havana. Or whether the economic strife on the Cuban side might stir citizens to brave the bay or minefield to try to reach the base as a haven, a repeat of a humanitarian crisis from the 1990s. The Pentagon’s U.S. Southern Command has hundreds of tents and other supplies on base just in case, and a plan to mobilize forces.
Life on the Cuban side beyond the base has long been a struggle. It is the least developed portion of the island. Even before the oil blockade, people there were suffering from the damage to basic services from Hurricane Melissa in October. The storm mostly spared the 45-square-mile base but tore up the Cuban infrastructure and severely disrupted essential services in the eastern provinces.
The Catholic Church’s global charity, Caritas, has delivered food and hygiene kits with the help of priests based in Miami through cargo flights to Santiago, about 40 miles west of the U.S. base. The church estimates it has sent supplies for about 4,000 families, relief to a population that is relatively similar to the 4,500 or so people who live at the Navy base.
The church delivers directly to the eastern portion of the island, Thomas G. Wenski, the archbishop of Miami, said recently. It is more reliable than trying to truck them from the gas-strapped capital, Havana, he added.
On his cellphone were images of men and women moving the aid in wheelbarrows along dusty rural roads.
On the base, a supply crisis seems quaint in comparison. When the refrigeration failed twice in a row on barge deliveries from Florida, the Jamaican contractors working as baristas at the coffee and ice cream shop apologetically offered drip coffee with creamer packets — no lattes.
“Project Hail Mary” opened one Friday at one outdoor venue, the Lyceum, where the base screens first-run movies nightly, no charge. A soda, hot dog and chips combo sells for $4.50.
Base areas do experience periodic power outages for the Navy-run public works department to fine-tune the system. But they are announced in advance on the base’s Facebook page.
The base has been independent of the island’s electrical grid since the 1960s, when the Navy answered Fidel Castro’s demands to go home by cutting links and building its own power and desalination plants. U.S. troops first invaded the island and established a foothold at Guantánamo during the Spanish-American War in 1898. The base exists there now through a 1934 lease, which U.S. law considers unbreakable unless both sides agree.
Some Cubans were allowed to continue working on the base as day laborers. But that ended in 2012 when the last two commuters retired at age 79 and 82.
In 2023, the Defense Department inaugurated a $368.8 million transformation of its power plant from diesel oil energy to liquefied natural gas under an efficiency plan that also recently proved to be fortuitous. The base still has a diesel oil alternative in case of emergencies. But it is mostly powered by L.N.G. that “is sourced from domestic natural gas produced within the United States,” the Navy engineering command said in a statement in response to a question about the fragility of the global oil supply because of war in the Middle East.
Communications are entirely independent of Cuba. The base abandoned its international Cuban phone code, 011-5399, about a decade ago in favor of Virgina’s 757 area code with the installation of a fiber optic cable from Florida that, for the first time, brought commercial cellphone service to the base.
Radio programming, with a few hours of exception, originates in Europe from the Defense Department’s Armed Forces Network. But savvy base motorists wanting to hear a bit of Spanish can tune their car radios to Cuban radio, even in this time of blackouts and shortages.
Carol Rosenberg reports on the wartime prison and court at Guantánamo Bay. She has been covering the topic since the first detainees were brought to the U.S. base in 2002.
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