From Country Club to American fortress

For more than two centuries the land where Long Circular Road meets Saddle Road belonged to Trinidad's planter class, and then to its club class. It now belongs to the United States. On the 11 acres where the Trinidad Country Club kept its ballroom, tennis courts and swimming pool, Washington is building a compound its own diplomats value at more than half a billion U.S. dollars.13125

The figure has climbed as the project has advanced. When the State Department signed for the site in April 2023, the embassy said the United States would invest more than US$400 million to plan, design and build it. In March this year it put the figure at more than US$500 million. In June the chargé d'affaires, Mike Fitzpatrick, told AMCHAM T&T's annual meeting: “The U.S. Government is investing over half a billion U.S. dollars on a large new embassy campus.”157

Federal contract records show what that money is buying. The design-build contract went to Caddell Construction Co. in September 2024 at a potential value of US$333.9 million. It now stands at US$353.6 million, and its end date has moved from 30 January to 24 March 2029. Most of that rise is tax, not building: three days after the award, the State Department added US$16.1 million to the contract's line for value added tax. The scope lists nine elements: site development; a New Office Building; three separate access-control facilities, for the main compound, consular visitors and service traffic; a Marine Security Guard Residence; a support annex and warehouse; a utility building; and “an optional pool and cabana”.103911

Contract 19AQMM24C0140 · the nine elements

What the contract says is being built

Select an element. Pins mark where it appears, or most probably appears, in the architect's published rendering. Locations are this publication's reading of the rendering; the State Department has not published a labelled site plan.810

NOBMCACSCACSPX/WHEPool

Rendering: Mark Cavagnero Associates for the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations8

NOB

New Office Building

The principal building for diplomatic, consular and administrative work.1011

Shown in rendering

1. Site and compound developmentCMPD
2. New Office BuildingNOB
3. Main Compound Access ControlMCAC
4. Consular Compound Access ControlCCAC
5. Service Compound Access ControlSCAC
6. Marine Security Guard ResidenceMSGR
7. Support annex and warehouseSPX/WHE
8. Utility buildingUTL
9. Pool and cabanaPool

From Les Champs Élysées to the Country Club

The National Trust traces the site to a Spanish-era holding known as St. Xavier. In 1782 Philippe Rose Roume de Saint-Laurent, architect of the scheme to populate Trinidad, bought 22.4 acres there for his mother, Rosa, who had lost her plantation in Grenada. She arrived with 75 enslaved Africans. Under the cedula she was granted thirty-two acres for every enslaved person she held, and with later purchases she assembled about 927 acres of lower Maraval. She called the estate Les Champs Élysées.13

Rosa ran a sugar estate there with her son Francois. When debts mounted, land was sold to his younger half-brothers in 1793. She died a few years later and, the Trust records, was buried in the garden near the great house, “ostensibly on the same spot that Trinidad Country Club was built”. The house was rebuilt three times. The last version, around 1870, used stone quarried on the estate and served as a retreat for visiting royalty and “the crème de la crème of local society”.13

In 1932 Huggins and Company, owners of the Queen's Park Hotel, bought the house and the 12 acres around it for their guests. They added a large dance hall, tennis courts and a pool. J.B. Fernandes acquired the hotel and the club in 1953, and the Country Club remained an exclusive retreat into the 21st century.13

Its exclusivity became political. From the 1950s, the Trust records, the club “came under heavy attack” from Dr Eric Williams and others who sought to expose inequities in the country as they campaigned for independence. The criticism persisted long after 1962.13

The sale to Washington began quietly. In 2021, the Express reported, National Trust representatives toured the site with U.S. Embassy officials because the club is on the Heritage Asset Inventory, the official list of the country's historic sites. In April 2022 tennis players were told to vacate. A month later the Fernandes family was in court over what the Express described as the $316 million sale of the club to the embassy. On 5 April 2023 Joseph Fernandes, for the former owner Champs Elysees Ltd, and State Department official Christin Martinelli signed the property over.141516

Ambassador Candace Bond called it “an important and exciting project which will benefit the people of Trinidad and Tobago in many ways”. In a video posted by the embassy she said: “While it will take a few years before we relocate to the new site, we are really looking forward to this new chapter and our new home.”1162

America's address in Port of Spain

The United States has measured its interest in Trinidad in property before. On 2 September 1940, in the destroyers-for-bases exchange, Britain granted it base sites that included “the west coast of Trinidad in the Gulf of Paria”. Chaguaramas became the American base Williams spent the independence years fighting to recover.18

The embassy itself opened on 31 August 1962, the day Washington recognised independence, with William H. Christensen as chargé d'affaires. Robert G. Miner presented his credentials as the first ambassador on 1 December. The mission has worked from Marli Street, at the Queen's Park Savannah, ever since.1716

The move to Maraval closes a circle. A property Williams attacked as a symbol of colonial privilege becomes the seat of the most powerful foreign government in the country. The National Trust says the club's history “continues to provide an intimate look into the colonial and postcolonial past of the country”. What of the Great House, its stonework and its records will survive on an American diplomatic site has not been made public.13

“Not fit for service”

Washington's own inspectors made the case for the move years before the sale. In July 2009 the State Department's Office of Inspector General found the embassy's buildings “largely shabby and inefficient, wasting staff time and presenting a poor public face for the United States”, with the mission spread across “four scattered and generally run-down facilities in downtown Port of Spain”. “Funds for a new embassy are not likely, even in the mid-term,” they wrote.40

The same inspection recorded who was working there: 44 American direct-hire staff, 119 local employees and “roughly 20 long-term, but temporary duty military special operations personnel”. The military liaison office was “by far the fastest growing element within the Embassy”, and the number of Defense Department visitors in the country at any one time could “range from a few dozen to 200”. The Drug Enforcement Administration worked outside the chancery compound. Its deputy leader, the inspectors noted, “had to remove the arms from his chair to fit into his allotted 35 square feet”.40

By March 2022 the embassy's four-year Integrated Country Strategy was blunter. “Previous Office of the Inspector General reports noted that the facilities at Embassy Port of Spain are not fit for service,” it says. “Each building requires safety and security waivers from the Department to remain in use.” The DEA, public affairs and part of the political and economic section still worked in rented offices away from the chancery, and the strategy set a limit on Washington's ambitions: “Interagency partners interested in establishing a permanent presence at Post must consider whether there is adequate office space for staff.” The main risk it named was “a prolonged and extended delay in NEC construction”, the new embassy compound.41

The same strategy sets out what the extra room is for. It calls corruption in Trinidad and Tobago “a backdoor to malevolent influences, both state and non-state actors, such as the People's Republic of China (PRC), the Maduro regime, and organized crime”, and says the government “is often at odds with U.S. foreign policy, notably policy differences regarding Venezuela”. One of its mission objectives reads: “TT more closely aligns itself with U.S. regional priorities.” By June 2023 the State Department's buildings bureau had placed Port of Spain in the fiscal 2024 tranche of its Capital Security Construction Program, with a design-build tender expected in July 2024.4142

What the design shows

The compound was designed by Mark Cavagnero Associates of San Francisco, which has held a State Department order for the project since September 2020 now worth US$14.5 million. Its programme is 165,000 square feet on the 11-acre site. The architect describes three arrival points, each giving a view of the landscape inside the walls, sun and rain canopies over the public entrances and access to public transport. DLR Group is architect of record. Thornton Tomasetti handled structural, blast, physical-security and façade engineering; Martin Aquatic Design & Engineering, aquatic design.89

The site today, and as designed

January 2026: foundations

Today2029

Photograph

The landscape keeps one inheritance from the estate. “We are delighted that the two large, historic Samaan trees on the property are to be preserved in the final landscape plan,” chargé d'affaires Jenifer Neidhart de Ortiz said when work began in June 2025. “I know how dear these trees are to our Trinbagonian neighbors.”3

The architect has published one aerial rendering. The sequence that follows takes that rendering to ground level through photorealistic interpretations prepared for this publication. They show what the published massing, canopies and landscape imply at the scale of a visitor; materials, signage and planting are illustrative.8

A visual tour · 1 of 7

Walking the compound before it exists

The approach from Long Circular Road

The perimeter fence and wall follow the road edge. The landscaped ground between the road and the office building is the standoff distance the security law is written around.

The approach from Long Circular Road

The perimeter fence and wall follow the road edge. The landscaped ground between the road and the office building is the standoff distance the security law is written around.

Next

Interpretation of the architect's published design. Not an official image; materials, signage and detail are illustrative. Captions describe features in the published design.8310

One detail in the official rendering stands out against the contract. It shows a pool beside a low pavilion behind the office building. The tender lists the pool and cabana as an option, and an aquatic engineer is on the design team. Whether the State Department has exercised that option is not public.81011

Built around Beirut and Nairobi

The shape of the compound was set by attacks thousands of miles from Port of Spain. In April 1983 a truck bomb outside the embassy in Beirut killed 63 employees, among them 17 American diplomatic and military personnel. The State Department responded with a US$1 billion programme of more than 60 construction projects. On 7 August 1998 bombs at the embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam killed 224 people, 12 of them Americans, and wounded more than 4,500.2122

Congress wrote the lessons into law. The 1986 Omnibus Diplomatic Security and Antiterrorism Act made the Secretary of State responsible for “security-related construction”. The 1999 Secure Embassy Construction and Counterterrorism Act required each new facility to be sited “not less than 100 feet from the perimeter of the property”. Since a 2022 amendment, a building may instead meet the measured blast-performance standard of a building set back that far. The Benghazi review of 2012, convened under the 1986 Act, renewed the pressure.201923

The same statute contains a co-location rule. In posts with certain threat ratings, every U.S. government employee at post, with exceptions such as personnel under an area military commander and the Peace Corps, must work on the embassy site. The State Department does not publish the threat ratings that decide where the rule applies. Where it does, an embassy compound becomes the single address for every American agency in the country.19

The Maraval scope follows that model: three separate gates, a dedicated service compound, its own utility building and a residence for a Marine detachment. The Marine Security Guard Residence is a line item in the contract, which provides for the Marines who guard the compound to live on it.1011

Power, built to last

The compound is rising through a period of heightened American military activity in the southern Caribbean. In October 2025 the UN Security Council heard that an increased U.S. military presence had been reported since mid-August, which Washington described as an operation “to stop drugs from flooding into the United States”. On 26 October an American warship docked in Port of Spain, and protesters gathered outside the embassy.2425

Five months later the frame changed. On 5 March 2026 the State Department said Washington and Venezuela's interim authorities would restore diplomatic and consular relations, and on 30 March the United States reopened its embassy in Caracas.2627

Fitzpatrick tied the Maraval project to that new map. “Trinidad and Tobago is shaping up as a centerpiece of a southern Caribbean energy corridor—connecting nations, creating opportunities, and driving regional integration,” he told AMCHAM. The embassy, he said, “is a symbol of our commitment—not just to diplomacy, but to partnership, prosperity, and the decades ahead”. The site was bought in 2023 and the builder chosen in 2024, before the warships came. The compound answers a longer calculation. Trinidad lies within sight of the Venezuelan coast, beside the gas fields and sea lanes Washington wants to shape, and the United States intends to be there, in strength, for decades.7110

Across the road stands the other great power in the region. On 31 October 2018 China opened its new embassy at 76 Long Circular Road, “located opposite the Trinidad Country Club”: two and a half acres with staff flats, tennis courts and a pool, built by Chinese developers after a ground-breaking in August 2014, and Beijing's largest embassy in the English-speaking Caribbean. The two most powerful governments with missions in Port of Spain will face each other across one Maraval junction.2829

In that sense the American compound is also a bulwark against the rise of China, and an ambitious one. Washington is building its largest statement of permanence in the country within a stone's throw of Beijing's largest in the region. The rivalry is now open policy. In October the administration announced more than US$340 million in aid and financing for CARICOM amid what Caribbean Life's Bert Wilkinson described as mounting concern in Washington about China's growing influence, weeks after Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau visited Trinidad with plans for American investment in steel.30

Attachés, listening posts and radar

An American embassy is also an intelligence platform, and the U.S. government says so in its own definitions. The Defense Attaché Office in each mission exists, in the Pentagon's words, for the “overt gathering of military information”; the Defense Intelligence Agency has run the attaché system since 1965 to collect “intelligence information” for the Defense Department. Covert collection is on the record too. In 2013 Der Spiegel, working from the Edward Snowden archive, reported that a joint CIA–NSA unit, the Special Collection Service, ran a listening station from the roof of the embassy in Berlin, within sight of the Chancellery. A 2011 document the magazine later published put the unit at 80 sites worldwide, mostly inside embassies and consulates, its staff accredited as diplomats.33343132

Maraval is being built against the mirror-image threat. In 1985 the State Department stopped work on its new embassy in Moscow after inspectors found Soviet listening devices embedded in the concrete. In January 2026 the buildings bureau signed a US$3.69 million task order with Continuity Global Solutions for security services in Trinidad and Tobago; the company says the work is construction security monitoring “at the construction site for the new U.S. Embassy in Port of Spain”, under the programme of cleared American guards and construction surveillance technicians whose task is to watch uncleared workers and “prevent the implantation of clandestine surveillance devices or systems into the structure”. The construction contract itself was amended twice, in October 2024 and January 2025, to “incorporate DD254”, the federal form that sets security requirements for contracts involving access to classified information.214445463947

The Inspector General's latest inspection, published in August 2025, shows why the old buildings are a liability. It counted 41 authorised State Department positions and 12 Americans from the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services and Justice, alongside 121 local staff. Its unclassified report found that the embassy's information systems security officer did not consistently perform required duties on its classified and unclassified networks, that locally employed system administrators “had full, unmonitored access to every section's shared files”, and that wireless networks at the residences of the chief of mission and deputy chief of mission, the American Center and the warehouse “did not meet Bureau of Diplomatic Security standards or were not approved”. The security programme itself is covered in a separate, classified report.43

In the southern Caribbean the military reach is already visible. In August 2025 Washington asked Grenada to host a military radar at Maurice Bishop International Airport. In November U.S. Marines were in Tobago working on the runway and a radar at the A.N.R. Robinson International Airport. “They will help us to improve our surveillance and intelligence we gather,” the Prime Minister said, after first describing the work as roadworks. She said the radar would monitor only the country's territory and “will not be used for any action on Venezuela”. In December her government said it would open the country's airports to the U.S. military.353637

Washington's own risk assessment explains the engineering. The State Department's Overseas Security Advisory Council, in its September 2026 report, rates Port of Spain a critical-threat location for crime directed at U.S. government interests, medium for terrorism and low for political violence. It describes a southern border about 10 miles from the Venezuelan coast that Tren de Aragua, which Washington designates a terrorist organisation, “has been known to exploit” to move people and material.38

Those ratings, the radar and the attaché system belong to the same calculation as the building in Maraval. The State Department has not said which agencies will work from the new compound. What the public record shows is the model: a single secured address for the American government in a country, built for decades, a short flight from Venezuela and across the road from China.193828

What Trinidad and Tobago is owed

The embassy has promised “scores of jobs”, and the January foundation report spoke of hundreds of nationals employed. When work began it apologised in advance for noise and intermittent traffic disruption on one of the busiest junctions in the west of Port of Spain. A heritage-listed estate has passed into the keeping of a foreign government, and the public has seen one rendering of what will replace it.543

Several questions remain for the embassy and the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations: the full approved budget and what it includes; whether the pool option has been exercised; what was recorded or kept of the Great House; how many contracts and jobs are local; which agencies the compound will house; and how traffic on Long Circular Road and Saddle Road will be managed.

Rosa was buried in the garden of Les Champs Élysées more than two centuries ago. The Country Club rose over that ground, and was attacked by the man who led the country to independence. What now rises in its place is engineered to stand for longer than any government now in office in Port of Spain or Washington, and to tell the region, in concrete, where the United States intends to stay.