A Country That Builds: Guantánamo Bay and the Future of American Power

The United States has held forty-five square miles of Caribbean coastline at Guantánamo Bay under continuous lease since 1903. For a quarter-century it has been little more than a budget line — roughly half a billion dollars a year for an empty naval station, fifteen remaining detainees, and the only McDonald’s in Cuba. A Country That Builds argues that the very features that made Guantánamo a liability — its extraterritorial status, the absence of state, county, and municipal jurisdiction, and a built-but-idle port, runway, and power grid — are exactly what could make it the most consequential American building project in a generation: a Free City under American sovereignty.Drawing on the histories of Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, Shenzhen, Subic Bay, Malta, and Taiwan, Voss shows that contested coastlines and abandoned outposts have repeatedly become engines of prosperity — and that America can do it again, ninety miles from Florida. For Miami’s international, investor, and Cuban-American audience the argument is not abstract: the diaspora is the natural workforce, leadership, and political coalition for a project that would reshape the hemisphere and stand as a beacon five miles from the darkened houses of Caimanera. Read more