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Guantanamo Bay

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Guantanamo Bay sits on what was once called Oriente Province. Located on the southeast corner of the island country of Cuba. Oriente Province has since been divided into five distinct provinces, Las Tunas, Holguin, Granma, Santiago de Cuba, and Guantanamo. Guantanamo Bay is situated in the belt of the Caribbean trade winds; it receives sea breezes from the southeast during the afternoons, and shortly after sunset, the wind changes to a northerly direction and becomes a land breeze. The constant breezes help to keep the bay cooler than most semi-arid deserts. However, the mountains that surround the bay to the west, north, and east shelter it from cloud systems, thus producing less precipitation and maintaining the lands aridity. …show more content…

Still to this day the Marines and Cuba’s “Frontier Brigade” still man the fence line 24 hours a day. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962 to December 1962 family members of the service people were evacuated to the U.S. as President Kennedy announced the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. In 1964 Fidel Castro cut off the water supply to the base, in retaliation of some Cuban fishermen getting fined for fishing in Florida waters. So water had to be shipped in to the base. Fidel Castro accused the United States, of stealing water. So base commander John D. Bulkeley had a portion of the supply pipe excavated and an 18 inch portion of the pipe was cut and removed, to prove that water was not being stolen from Cuba. The hole was never filled in and the pipe is still exposed, at the northeastern corner of the base, where the Marines sleep when they are on the fence line duty. Since the water was shut off, Guantanamo Bay has been self-sufficient, and produces 3.4 million gallons of water daily at its desalination plant and more than 800,000 kilowatt hours of electricity daily, with the help of the four 262 feet tall wind turbines, located at the top of John Paul Jones Hill on the Windward side of the Base. U.S. troops had scattered 75,000 land mines across the “no man’s land” between the U.S. and Cuban border, creating the second-largest minefield in the

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