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
Guantanamo Bay detention camp the Guantánamo Bay prison as "the gulag of our times," breaking an internal AI policy on not comparing different human rights abuses. The report reflected ongoing claims of prisoner abuse at Guantánamo and other military prisons. The comparison between the Gulag and Guantanamo Bay has been criticized by a number of people, including John Podhoretz, who on the difference between Guantanamo and a Soviet gulag, said, "Maybe the people who work at Amnesty International really do think that the imprisonment of 600 certain or suspected terrorists is tantamount to the imprisonment of 25 million slaves." Former Soviet-era "gulag" prisoner, Pavel