text: The 7,000 Spanish troops at the city of Guantánamo – only  away – did not march to the aid of Linares' besieged army, because prior to the cutting of his communications, General Pareja had been directed by his superiors to hold the city of Guantánamo at all costs. This was so ordered because the Spanish feared that the Guantánamo valley might be used as an invasion route by U.S. forces, as the English had once used it to advance on Santiago. After the Navy cut the cables and established a base at Guantánamo Bay, General Pareja remained in complete ignorance concerning the course of the war because the Cuban insurgents maintained such a tight ring about the city that not one messenger got through their lines. Fifteen were caught and executed as spies. None of General Linares' frantic requests for aid reached Pareja.
  The threat posed by U.S. Naval forces and a battalion of Marines at Guantánamo Bay, plus the stranglehold on land communications by 1,000 Cuban insurgents, effectively pinned down an army of 7,000 men which might have changed the outcome of the fighting at Santiago. Less than a week after the surrender of Santiago, the base at Guantánamo Bay was used to launch the invasion of Puerto Rico,  to the east. Three thousand five hundred troops under General Miles sailed from the Bay on 21 July. This was the last important event in the Spanish–American War phase of Guantánamo Bay; on August 12, the war ended with the signing of the peace protocol and an armistice.
  The new U.S. Naval Base was not formalized by lease agreement between the U.S. and Cuba until five years later, when in 1903 it was acquired as a "coaling and Naval station", but its worth was already proven.
  Lt. Col. Huntington's Marine First Battalion, which had reembarked aboard the  during the siege and surrender of Santiago, sailed for the United States, and after a stop at New York, arrived at Portsmouth Harbor, disembarking her marines on the evening of 24 August 1898.