Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, officially known as Naval Station Guantanamo Bay or NSGB, is a United States military base located on 45 square miles (117 km2) of land and water on the shore of Guantánamo Bay at the southeastern end of Cuba. It has been leased to the United States with no end date since 1903 as a coaling station and naval base, making it the oldest overseas U.S. naval base. The lease was $2,000 in gold per year until 1934, when the payment was set to match the value of gold in dollars; in 1974, the yearly lease was set to $4,085.
The Mariel boatlift was a mass emigration of Cubans who traveled from Cuba's Mariel Harbor to the United States between April 15 and October 31, 1980. The term "Marielito" is used to refer to these refugees in both Spanish and English. While the exodus was triggered by a sharp downturn in the Cuban economy, it followed on the heels of generations of Cubans who had immigrated to the United States in the preceding decades.
The wet feet, dry feet policy or wet foot, dry foot policy was the name given to a former interpretation of the 1995 revision of the application of the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 that essentially says that anyone who emigrated from Cuba and entered the United States would be allowed to pursue residency a year later. Prior to 1995, the U.S. government allowed all Cubans who reached U.S. territorial waters to remain in the U.S. After talks with the Cuban government, the Clinton administration came to an agreement with Cuba that it would stop admitting people intercepted in U.S. waters.
The Cuban exodus is the mass emigration of Cubans from the island of Cuba after the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Throughout the exodus, millions of Cubans from diverse social positions within Cuban society emigrated within various emigration waves, due to political repression and disillusionment with life in Cuba.
Camp Bulkeley is an encampment within the United States Naval Station Guantanamo Bay. Camp Bulkeley was constructed between 1943–45. Originally, the camp was constructed to house Marines that were permanently stationed at the United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay. Later, the camp was named for Vice Admiral John D. Bulkeley, who was in charge of the base during 1964, when Cuba had accused the United States of stealing water.
Balseros is a 2002 Catalan documentary co-directed by Carles Bosch and Josep Maria Domènech about Cubans leaving during the Período Especial.
Guantánamo Bay is a bay in Guantánamo Province at the southeastern end of Cuba. It is the largest harbor on the south side of the island and it is surrounded by steep hills which create an enclave that is cut off from its immediate hinterland.
Balseros were boat people who emigrated without formal documentation in self constructed or precarious vessels from Cuba to neighboring states including The Bahamas, Jamaica, the Cayman Islands and, most commonly, the United States since the 1994 Balsero crisis and during the wet feet, dry feet policy.
Operation Sea Signal was a United States Department of Defense operation in the Caribbean in response to an influx of Cuban and Haitian migrants attempting to gain asylum in the United States. As a result, the migrants became refugees at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. The operation took place from May 1992 to February 1996 under Joint Task Force 160. The task force processed over 50,000 refugees as part of the operation. The U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Navy rescued refugees from the sea and other migrants attempted to cross the landmine field that then separated the U.S. and Cuban military areas. Soldiers, Airmen, and Marines provided refugee camp security at Guantanamo Bay, and ship security on board the Coast Guard cutters. This mass exodus led to the U.S. immigration implementation of the Wet Feet Dry Feet Policy. The mass Cuban exodus of 1994 was similar to the Mariel boat lift in 1980.
The Maleconazo was a protest on 5 August 1994, in which thousands of Cubans took to the streets around the Malecón in Havana to demand freedom and express frustration with the government. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Cuba fell into a crippling economic crisis that had many citizens looking to flee the island. On the day of the protest, the Cuban police blocked people from boarding tugboats leaving Havana, prompting thousands of citizens to storm the streets in the largest anti-government demonstration Cuba had seen since the Cuban Revolution. In the following weeks, President Fidel Castro quelled the frustration by opening the doors of the country and allowing Cubans to leave, which had a significant impact on Cuba's relationship with the United States moving forward.
Amauris Samartino Flores is a Cuban physician who escaped from his native country in 1999 in a makeshift raft. He was given asylum in Bolivia, but after becoming politically active in that country, protesting the governments of both Fidel Castro and Evo Morales, was deported. He now lives in Norway.
Lizbet Martínez is a Cuban violinist and English teacher at M.A. Milam K-8 Center.
The Haitian refugee crisis, which began in 1991, saw the US Coast Guard collect Haitian refugees and take them to a refugee camp at Guantanamo Bay. They were fleeing by boat after Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the democratically elected president of Haiti, was overthrown and the military government was persecuting his followers. The first camp reached a maximum of 12,500 people. It was then reduced to 270 refugees who either had HIV or were related to someone who did. The reduction was the result of the US policy adopting a strict policy of repatriation for both those found at sea and most of those living in Guantanamo. The HIV+ refugees were quarantined in a section of the military base known as Camp Bulkeley and faced human rights violations. They were brought to the United States after US District Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. ruled the camp was an "HIV prison camp."
Cuban immigration to the United States, for the most part, occurred in two periods: the first series of immigration of wealthy Cuban Americans to the United States resulted from Cubans establishing cigar factories in Tampa and from attempts to overthrow Spanish colonial rule by the movement led by José Martí, the second to escape from Communist rule under Fidel Castro following the Cuban Revolution. Massive Cuban migration to Miami during the second series led to major demographic and cultural changes in Miami. There was also economic emigration, particularly during the Great Depression in the 1930s. As of 2019, there were 1,359,990 Cubans in the United States.
The Fort Chaffee crisis occurred during the Mariel boatlift in 1980 when over 19,000 Cuban refugees were detained at Fort Chaffee. They could not be released into the public because they were not United States citizens. After a promise of quick release many processing setbacks occurred and many refugees remained still detained at the center. Frustrated with the conditions at the facility and the slow processing many refugees rioted, 62 refugees were injured and 46 others were arrested. Refugees at the center would go on to refer to the riot as El Domingo. After the riots Governor Bill Clinton put heavy fortifications at the center. Clinton would lose the later Arkansas election after his opponent would use the incident against him.
"Refugees as weapons" is a term used to describe a hostile government organizing, or threatening to organize, a sudden influx of refugees into another country or political entity with the intent of causing political disturbances in that entity. The responsible country usually seeks to extract concessions from the targeted country and achieve some political, military, and/or economic objective.
The emigration of Cubans, from the 1959 Cuban Revolution to October of 1962, has been dubbed the Golden exile and the first emigration wave in the greater Cuban exile. The exodus was referred to as the "Golden exile" because of the mainly upper and middle class character of the emigrants. After the success of the revolution various Cubans who had allied themselves or worked with the overthrown Batista regime fled the country. Later as the Fidel Castro government began nationalizing industries many Cuban professionals would flee the island. This period of the Cuban exile is also referred to as the Historical exile, mainly by those who emigrated during this period.
Haitian boat people are refugees from Haiti who flee the country by boat, usually to South Florida and sometimes the Bahamas.
Cuban boat people mainly refers to refugees who flee Cuba by boat and ship to the United States.
Gusano is a pejorative term used to refer to Cubans who fled Cuba following the rise of Fidel Castro after the Cuban Revolution. The term has connotations referring to the Cuban revolution's Marxist political philosophy in which the use of the term "worm" can imply a parasitic relationship to the working class. Traditionally capitalist economic roles, such as that of a landlord or plantation owner, especially within the Cuban political context of American corporate plantation ownership are considered "parasitic" under this Marxist model, like some worms.
