On February 23, 1903, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt signed an agreement with Cuba leasing the bay for 2,000 gold coins per year. The agreement was forced on the puppet Cuban government (with an American-citizen for President) through the Platt Amendment, which gave U.S. authorities the right to interfere in Cuban affairs.
On July 2 1906, (just before the 2nd U.S. military intervention, a new lease is signed in Havana for Guantánamo Bay and Bahía Honda, for which the U.S. will pay a meager $2,000 per year.
After Cubans annulled the Platt Amendment in 1934, a new lease was negotiated between the Roosevelt administration and a U.S.-friendly government that included Fulgencio Batista as one of three signatories. Batista emerged as the strong man on the island over the next twenty-five years.
When the Revolution triumphed in 1959, the U.S. banned its soldiers stationed at the bay from entering Cuban territory. Legally speaking, Guantánamo should have been returned to Cuba at this time.
"It's no secret," writes Rafael Hernández Rodriquez in Subject to Solution: Problems in Cuban-U.S. Relations, "that the main mission of the naval bases in this area of the Gulf is to control, police and spy on Cuba."
In an interview with Soviet journalists in October 1985, U.S. President Ronald Reagan said that the purpose of the base was political: to impose the U.S. presence, even if the Cubans didn't want it.
Every year the U.S. sends a check for the lease amount, but the Cuban government has never cashed them. Main
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