GUANTANAMO BAY
Base readies for refugees
The Bush administration is preparing the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba, to house up to 10,000 refugees in case of a Caribbean migrant
crisis -- and starting with the bathrooms.
BY CAROL ROSENBERG
crosenberg@MiamiHerald.com
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- In contingency planning here, the Navy
is spending $17 million to prepare for a tent city to shelter up to
10,000 boat people saved from the seas, starting with crude summer-camp
style showers and toilet houses.
Ever since Fidel Castro took ill and ceded power to his brother Raúl,
across a minefield and 525 miles away in Havana, U.S. officials have
been planning a bare bones infrastructure for four, 2,500-person tent
villages in the event politics and misfortune touch off a Caribbean
migrant crisis.
Sailors would open up a now-vacant white stucco health clinic, establish
small cooking areas to let refugees fix their own food and leave enough
open space for a park and swimming at an inlet called Mahamilla Bay.
OVERGROWN FIELD
Right now, the site is an overgrown field on a sleepy corner of this
45-square-mile U.S. Navy base.
Planners envision a range of events -- everything from a natural
disaster such as hurricane to political instability -- that could lead
to a humanitarian crisis and the interdiction of thousands of boat
people trying to reach the coast of Florida.
Either way, said Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Johnston, who runs the base's public
works projects: ``Everyone's gotta take a shower. Everyone's gotta get
some chow, and everyone's gotta go to the bathroom.''
So they're starting with the basics and have hired a Jacksonville firm,
Island Mechanical Contractors, to build 48 cinder-block bathhouses --
each with 12 toilets, six showers and places to wash laundry, feeding a
rudimentary sewage treatment runoff.
Were the White House to declare a migrant crisis, the military would
then throw up hundreds of 16-person tents in four mini-villages arrayed
around the shower and toilet houses.
''Think Boy Scout Jamboree. . . . There's no Marriott Hotel being built
here,'' said Navy Capt. William Vaughn, an engineer assigned to the
Joint Task Force that would run the camps -- a 30-minute ferry ride and
miles away from the prison camps that house some 385 war-on-terror captives.
REPLACEMENT SITE
The plan principally replaces a site that was swallowed up in 2002 when
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared Guantánamo ''the least worst
place'' to house and interrogate
al Qaeda and Taliban suspects.
Workers mowed under latrines and shower houses on a bluff overlooking
the Caribbean called Radio Range, a provisional spot for any future
humanitarian crisis -- and built today's detention center in its place.
So, instead, planners chose the smaller five-square-mile, leeward side
of this base, across Guantánamo Bay from the main portion -- where 6,000
or so soldiers, sailors, contractors and their families live and work
around a school and McDonald's, church, bowling alley and scrubby golf
course -- and where the 5-year-old prison camps that have put a
spotlight on this base known as ''Gitmo'' are situated.
Leeward today is mostly vacant, with only a seaside airstrip, guest
quarters used mostly by journalists, attorneys and overnighting air
crews, and a small contingent of U.S. Marines guarding the leeward fence
line.
U.S. military officials say there is no ultimate price tag for what such
a tent-city relief mission might cost.
The United States and Cuba have coordinated repatriations of most
nationals intercepted at sea since the 1994-95 so-called Rafter Crisis
overwhelmed this base with 40,000-plus boat people, both Cuban and Haitian.
Only a few among those found on rafts have been designated as credibly
fearing persecution, if returned to Castro's Cuba, and have been
sheltered on this base until diplomats find a third country to grant
them asylum.
RESETTLEMENT
Cubans given sanctuary at Guantánamo have been resettled from Europe to
Latin America, and the State Department recently signed an agreement
with Australia to take as many as 200 refugees.
Meantime, commanders here describe a businesslike relationship across
the 17.4-mile fence line that separates the U.S. zone from sovereign Cuba.
The current base commander, Navy Capt. Mark Leary, meets a Cuban
counterpart, Cuban Navy Capt. Pedro Román Cisneros, a Soviet-trained
submariner, once a month in a formal session to notify each side of
coming activities -- and avoid tensions between the U.S. Marines and
Cuban soldiers of the Frontier Brigade who face off across watchtowers.
In fact, Leary said in a recent interview, he notified his counterpart
about the coming tent-camp infrastructure at the February fence line
meeting by handing Cisneros a copy of a Miami Herald report from Washington.
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