http://www.miamiherald.com/416/story/100418.html

Florida firm hired for migrant encampment
Miami Herald Staff and Wire Report
The United States, which has been planning for possible waves of fleeing Cubans when Fidel Castro dies, has hired a Florida company to establish basic infrastructure for atemporary migrant encampment at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Islands Mechanical Contractors Inc. of Jacksonville, has won a $16.5 million contract to build a ''migrant operations complex'' at the base, a U.S. enclave in eastern Cuba, the U.S. Defense Department said.

The infrastructure would include bathroom and shower houses as well as a laundry facility, to be finished by May 2008, according to a Defense Department contract announcement.

The announcement late Monday did not specify the capacity of the complex and a Defense Department spokesman said additional details were not immediately available. Bob Turnage, the president of Islands Mechanical, declined to discuss the project.

But base officials have said they are planning for a crude, open-air encampment of tents that could accommodate up to 10,000 people seeking shelter from a humanitarian disaster.

The site is on the Leeward side of the base, miles and a ferry boat ride away from the portion of the base where the Pentagon houses about 385 ''enemy combatants'' as suspected terrorists with links or sympathy for the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Guantánamo was used to hold thousands of Haitian and Cuban migrants in the 1990s.