Mariela Castro affirms that in Cuba there was "no concentration camp against LGBT people"

Mariela Castro Espín, director of the National Center for Sexual Education (CENESEX) and responsible for washing the image of the patriarchal and homophobic Cuban regime, affirmed that the so-called “revolution” did not create “any concentration camp against LGBT people.”

The deputy also considered that the Military Production Assistance Units (UMAP) -where 25 thousand Cubans were interned for three years in more than seventy camps in the province of Camagüey- “they were military service centers.”

“The UMAP had been created because, given the situation we were experiencing of aggression, it had been decided that the military service, or at least a part of it, would not only prepare as soldiers to defend the country, but also contribute to agricultural production.” , to food production,” said Castro Espín.

Interviewed by the Mexican trans representative María Clemente García Moreno on your channel YouTube, the deputy of the National Assembly of People's Power (ANPP) He said that the UMAP “were not just LGBT people.”

“They were also soldiers who had been punished for some type of inappropriate activity that, instead of being prisoners, they were taken to serve” their sentence through forced labor, added the daughter of the retired general. Raul Castro.

In almost an hour of interview, the propagandist of the Cuban regime once again exonerated her uncle of responsibility for having repressed homosexuals. According to Castro Espín, "in the first three decades, the 60s, 70s, 80s, there was a very strong homophobic heritage", inherited from "that patriarchal capitalist society."

In Cuba there were "concrete situations" of homophobia, but "no concentration camp in Cuba against LGBT people," said the representative, admitting that prejudice and repression against homosexuals "could not be easily overcome."

“Even our decision-makers, our leaders, went to science looking for arguments,” said the expert, relativizing the persecution undertaken in Cuba by comparing it with discriminatory policies of other countries in those years in which there had not been so much progress in science and people rights.

For the representative, “a country at war has Compulsory Military Service. All the young people had to go, but many said they were homosexuals so as not to go to military service... And then, it was a time of terrorist attacks from the US...,” Castro Espín tried to justify.

It is not the first time that the dictator's niece Fidel Castro washes the face of the totalitarian regime that it implemented through violence in Cuba

"We went to school in the countryside. Were going to school in the countryside concentration camps?", declared the director of CENESEX in May 2020, interviewed by the Cuban youtuber Edmundo Garcia, now “fallen from grace”.

The official told García that the UMAP were agricultural work camps, at a time when food production was necessary, and compared them to the Youth Labor Army (EJT) and the rural schools, where hundreds of thousands studied. of young people from the Island.

Cubans forcibly interned in the work camps of the UMAP and international Human Rights organizations have documented the abuses against homosexuals, religious people and other people called “lumpenes” by the Castro regime, which kept these prisons operating between 1965 and 1968.

The teacher Rafael Hernandez, magazine director Themes, stated in an article that 25 thousand prisoners were held in the UMAP, distributed in more than 70 camps, in the province of Camagüey, between 1965 and 1968, after conducting an investigation into one of the most painful wounds of the Cuban nation.

In December 2015, LGBT activist Jimmy Roque published an article in the electronic newspaper Havana Times in which it asked General Raúl Castro Ruz to apologize and accept responsibility for the internment of homosexuals in the UMAP.

“It is time to apologize for this act of criminalization, exclusion and punishment to which thousands of homosexuals and Cubans were subjected with 'inappropriate conduct,'” the activist wrote, after watching the documentary The Revolution of Homosexuals in Cuba, with Mariela Castro in the leading role.

Fidel Castro told the Mexican newspaper in 2010 The Conference, who was responsible for the persecution of homosexuals that occurred in Cuba, which he attributed to the conditions of "surrection and isolation" of his revolution, in the years of harsh confrontation with the United States.

For the Cuban historian Abel Sierra Madero, the UMAP cannot be understood as an isolated institution, but as part of a project “oriented to social and political control" in which the judicial, military, educational, and psychiatric apparatuses were involved.

In research published in the journal Free Letters, Sierra Madero described the UMAP as “academies to produce males”.

The researcher rejected the idea that it was just a homophobic or exclusive discourse because the “purification” process was more complex and took place in all areas of society, including universities and culture.

The Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) carried out censuses of disaffection, encouraged denunciation through a National Information Center, and sent this data to the ministries of the Interior (MININT) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), which were They were in charge of the forced recruitment to the UMAP prisons, he noted.

The researcher linked the operation of the UMAP to "a broader ideological field of social homogenization in which fashion, urban practices of sociability, religious creeds and attitude toward work" were key elements in designing the repression.

The testimonies collected - including those of several psychologists who worked in those agricultural prisons - described the hormone therapy and electroshock treatments, and behavioral and reflexological experiments to which prisoners in the UMAP were subjected.

Other former inmates spoke of torture with electrodes, or other treatments that included insulin-induced comas to modify their homosexual behaviors.

“It was like a school in the countryside… except for the barbed wire", the armed guards, the work days from dawn to dusk, the physical and mental punishments, the isolation of our families, the hunger, the thirst...", described Pedro Bencomo, one of the thousands of Cubans who were victims of the UMAP. .

"Military Service? The SMO law established the age between 16 and 27 years, and in my unit there were ages from 16 to almost 60. We had a man from Havana, lame and white with gray hair, as our permanent barracks. Our toilet "Joaquín was a former nurse at the Mazorra psychiatric hospital, who already had grandchildren," he added.