GUANTANAMO BAY US NAVAL BASE: Virgilio Franqui was a sun-blistered Cuban migrant plucked off a makeshift raft in the Florida Straits when he first set eyes on the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay in 1993.

He spent 11 months there in a vast tent camp full of refugees. Now a US Navy medical corpsman and US citizen, Petty Officer Franqui is back at Guantanamo handling paperwork at the base hospital, which cares for US service personnel and their families. He is believed to be the only Cuban refugee ever to have returned as a US serviceman.

“It was either Iceland or Gitmo,” Franqui said of the only job postings available when he asked for the assignment. The ‘Ice’ part did not appeal to his tropical sensitivities.

Guantanamo has become synonymous in recent years with the prison camp that holds about 490 foreign captives in the US war against terrorism. But for tens of thousands like Franqui, the dusty little base in southeast Cuba has served as a way station for Cubans who want to leave Cuba, and also for Haitians fleeing their impoverished land.

Franqui’s posting will keep him on the island until 2007. But because Cuba and the United States have no formal diplomatic relations, he cannot leave the US base to visit any other part of his homeland.

He is friendly with a few Cubans living on the base and said he was happy to see Cuba again. “Of course you know it’s Cuba, so I was happy to come back,” he said. “I was dying to go in the ocean again, the Cuban ocean.”

The United States has leased the base from Cuba since 1903, under a perpetual agreement that rankles President Fidel Castro, a long-time US ideological foe who would prefer to evict his tenants.

US-bound Cuban migrants stopped at sea by the US Coast Guard are generally returned to Cuba. But those who persuade immigration officers that they would face persecution from the communist government are taken to Guantanamo to await rulings on political asylum in the United States and elsewhere.

There are about 40 at any given time. They live in old hotel-style quarters and some take jobs to earn a little money as they bide their time. One works at the base McDonald’s.

—Reuters