Guantanamo Bay Naval Base Guillory. Guantanamo Bay Naval Base Guantanamo Bay Naval Base (), officially known as Naval Station Guantanamo Bay or NSGB (also called GTMO because of the abbreviation of "Guantanamo" or Gitmo because of the common pronunciation of this word by the U.S. military), is a United States military base and detention camp located on 120 square kilometers (45 sq mi) of land and water at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which the U.S. leased for use as a coaling station and naval base in 1903. The lease was $2,000 in gold per year until 1934, when the payment was set to match the
Cuban refugees at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base Cuban refugees at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base Over the years a varying number of Cuban refugees at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base have found refuge there. In the 1990s several thousand refugees were held at the base for years. Most of the refugees were housed in a tent city on the re-purposed airstrip that would later be used to house the complex used for the Guantanamo military commissions. The refugees who represented discipline or security problems were held on the site that would later become Camp XRay, the initial site of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Small numbers of