Located at Cuba’s eastern tip, Guantánamo is a land of geographical contrasts that contains important natural resources and perhaps the island’s best-preserved wilderness.

Guantánamo covers 6,167.97 sq kms (2,381.5 sq miles), or 5.6% of the country’s land area. It is a small province by Cuban standards, not only in terms of area, but also in terms of population and economic impact.

POPULATION

In December 2011, Guantánamo had only 511,781 inhabitants, or 4.6% of Cuba’s population. Traditionally, the province has reported the country’s highest birth rate as well as the highest rate of emigration to other provinces. At present, nearly 1% of Guantánamo’s people leave the province every year.

Between 1990 and 2011, more than 91,000 guantanameros departed equivalent to 17.8% of the province’s entire population.

The provincial capital, also known as Guantánamo, reported 207,739 inhabitants at the end of 2011. The 2nd-largest city is Baracoa, with about 40,000 residents. Together, the two cities are home to 48.4% of Guantánamo’s population. The rest live in towns with less than 10,000 people, including Imías (8,300), Caimanera (7,200), Jamaica (7,200), Manuel Tames (6,600), El Salvador (6,500) and San Antonio del Sur (4,500).

GEOGRAPHY

Cuba’s thickest and best-preserved forests cover most of the mountains of Guantánamo, which receives Cuba’s highest average annual rainfall and ironically is also the driest province in Cuba.

Mountains make up 75% of Guantánamo’s land area. Curiously, there is no unified name for the province’s main mountain range. Rather, they have colorful, local names such as Cuchillas del Toa, Sierra del Purial, Sierra de Mariana and Meseta del Guaso.

Blocking the free flow of the Atlantic Ocean’s humid trade winds, the mountains are a formidable barrier for rains and divide the province into two very different landscapes. Along the northern windward slopes, average annual rainfall exceeds 3,400 mm (134 inches). A dense rainforest, often growing over thick weathering crusts, shelters numerous plants and animals found nowhere else in the world.

South of the watershed, on the leeward side of the winds and rains, a narrow belt along the coast from Guantánamo Bay to the Point of Maisí receives less than 600 mm (24 inches) of rainfall yearly, and xerophytic thorn bushes predominate. Another outstanding geographic trait of this part of the island is the series of spectacular marine terraces at Punta de Maisí. Unique in the world and often featured in geography textbooks, dozens of such steppes carved on limestone were created by the combined effects of marine abrasion and tectonic upheaval over millions of years.

To some extent, the largely mestizo inhabitants are physically distinguishable from other Cubans. The local Spanish and even some staples of the local diet contrast with the rest of the island. Guantánamo is home of many descendants of native Cubans.

Several hundred guantanameros (maybe thousands) claim to be the offspring of the original Taino population — an offshoot of the Arawak groups that populated the Antilles and northern South America.

A movement to recover pride and identity among those people is a relatively recent phenomenon, as well as the revival of some traditions, words and a more significant place in Cuban history. These people live in the mountains, where a village Caridad de los Indios is in fact named for the original inhabitants of the area.

These distinctions make Guantánamo unique to the point that driving through the province is almost like being in another country.

ECONOMY

Guantánamo’s economy is mainly agricultural, with 40% of its land area devoted to farms. But arable land, found only in the Guantánamo Basin and in the Caujerí Valley, is scarce and poor; barely 13% of total land area is devoted to croplands. Nearly 20% of the province’s farmlands reportedly suffer from saline intrusions.

Droughts are particularly severe in Guantanamo, whose croplands are largely located to the south. Saline intrusions and dryness have rendered useless some low farmland along the southern shoreline and have been abandoned. Forests cover 51% of the territory.

The downsizing of Cuba’s sugar industry in 2002 hit Guantánamo hard. The province lost five of its six sugar mills as a result of low yields and high production costs; it’s not clear how many of the five stalled mills are still operable. Three mills were originally dismantled, but over the past few years only one has been grinding and the likelihood of restoring any mothballed facilities remains in doubt.

The downsizing slashed Guantánamo’s nominal daily grinding capacity to only 17% of the 11,800-ton-a-day installed capacity the province boasted in 2002, when it accounted for 1.5% of national sugar production.

Actual capacity, however, averages 1,400 tons of sugarcane daily, which yields daily production of only 150 tons of raw sugar a result of dire industrial problems and low agricultural yields. To have an idea of how bad the problems are, it’s enough to say that since 2006, the harvests in Guantánamo report an average 45% in lost time due to grinding interruptions.

The dismantled mills Costa Rica (formerly Ermita), Honduras (Isabel), Paraguay (Los Caños) and El Salvador (Soledad), which was preserved to produce only molasses together, yielded some 90,000 metric tons of sugar annually in their heyday.

In 2009, Guantánamo produced just under 28,100 tons of sugar worth around $10.9 million at then prevailing world prices a far cry from the average 140,000 tons per year produced in the late 1980s and valued in excess of $77 million at the preferential prices paid by the Soviets.

The two surviving mills are Argeo Martínez (Esperanza) and Manuel Tames (San Antonio), although the first one has remained idle for years.

While sugar production is now negligible, Guantánamo still produces 25% of Cuba’s coffee crop, ranking second after Santiago de Cuba. The coffee plantations are located in the mountains, where deep soils, cool temperatures and high humidity provide excellent growing conditions for the bean.

Nevertheless, plantations have been pretty much neglected, driving down both yields and quality. Annual production of coffee today is less than 5,000 tons.

On the other hand, Guantánamo is beginning to benefit from production of high-value organic coffee. Sources say that in 2002, the province exported around 70 tons of such coffee to Europe, with the beans certified by the German agency BCS Öko-Garantie GmbH.

In order to win that kind of certification, coffee producers must use biological rather than chemical means to fertilize crops and protect them from plagues and insects.

Their reward: considerably higher prices on the world market. Some 3,000 hectares of land have been devoted to organic coffee production in Guantánamo, with the goal of eventually boosting output to 800 tons a year.

Guantánamo is also Cuba’s leading cacao producer, averaging some 1,417 tons annually between 2007 and 2011, down nearly two-fifths from the 2,300 tons it averaged per year between 1986 and 1990.

And that in itself is considerably lower than the 6,800 tons produced per year in the early 20th century, before plantations were abandoned as a result of Cuba’s sugar expansion and perhaps helped by a much wetter climate.

Guantánamo is the only Cuban producer of coconut oil; output ranges from 200 to 400 tons per year. All coconut groves are located along the northern shoreline. Aided by the dry climate, a facility at Caimanera produces an average of 93,400 tons of table salt a year equivalent to 45% of Cuba’s annual consumption down from 150,000 tons a decade ago. A furniture factory in the capital supplies Cuba’s tourist sector.

With only 147 rooms in poor-quality hotels, tourism capabilities are limited to the city of Baracoa. Guantánamo reported only 3,298 foreign visitors in 2011, barely 0.1% of all tourists arriving in Cuba and down 86% from the 23,819 visitors who came in 2009.

Tourists visiting Guantánamo stay in the province an average of 2.7 days and spend $200 each, translating into total 2011 tourism income of around $670,000.

However, Guantánamo’s outstanding tropical landscapes and virgin shores offer an important potential for future development. Visitors to the nearby Dominican Republic (more than 4.2 million people last year) could be lured to hop over for short trips to enjoy the province’s local foods and customs, which are quite distinct from the rest of Cuba.

INFRASTRUCTURE

Guantánamo’s network of highways and railroads is very limited. Some mountain settlements are actually inaccessible by modern means of transportation.

Guantánamo’s sugar production, as well as part of the production of neighboring Santiago de Cuba province, used to be exported through Boquerón, where facilities for bulk shipping were capable of handling about 5,000 tons daily and store up to 20,000 tons. Those facilities are no longer in use.

Two domestic airports, located in Guantánamo and Baracoa, support some domestic traffic. Before the economic collapse of the 1990s, light planes linked some isolated settlements such as Maisí on Cuba’s eastern tip, but local air service has since been suspended.