More than 25,000 Cubans were interned in the Military Units for Aid to Production (UMAP), genuine concentration camps where the Cuban regime confined, punished, and condemned homosexuals, Catholics, and young people suspected of their cultural or intellectual references of not sympathizing with the so-called "revolution" to forced labor.
Between 1965 and 1968, the Cuban regime implemented this policy that violated human rights, which led to the suicide of many young people, and subjected thousands to hormone therapy, electroshock treatments, and behavioral and reflexological experiments. Other testimonies reported torture with electrodes, or treatments that included insulin-induced comas to modify "homosexual behaviors."
Sixty years after that atrocity committed against tens of thousands of people, the history of the UMAP continues to be concealed or minimized by a regime that tries to cleanse its image with the recognition of rights for the LGTBIQ+ community, but without delving into its criminal past of persecution, exclusion, and violence against homosexuals.
The heirs of the totalitarian, macho, and communist power in Cuba took advantage of the "mea culpa" expressed by Fidel Castro during an interview granted in 2010 to the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, in which he took responsibility for the creation of the UMAP.
Since then, and without opening the classified files on the matter, they have wanted to turn the page on those events, starting with the deputy Mariela Castro Espín, daughter of General Raúl Castro and director of the National Center for Sexual Education (CENESEX), architect of the false historical revision of that tragic episode.
However, Cuban civil society has made it a priority to shed light on what happened in the more than seventy camps of the UMAP, as well as in the offices of the officials who executed that perverse "re-education" plan.
To this end, Cuban activists shared a link to an open-access documentary repository where anonymous sources have made public a series of documents "written between the years 1966 and 1968, taken around that time from military units in the former province of Camagüey and kept safe until today."
This was indicated on his social media this Monday by independent journalist José Raúl Gallego, sharing the link so that the documents "can be disseminated, read, and used by citizens, journalists, and researchers, with the aim of being analyzed and contextualized for a more accurate and situated understanding of the information they provide."
"They are documents that are part of the history of our country, of the historical memory of the nation, and they must be available to all Cubans and interested individuals," emphasized Gallego.
The creation of a "Model Center" to restructure the Ministry of Interior's Homosexual Service, whose objectives were to "erase all effeminate or antisocial behavior"; an interview conducted in 1966 with an inmate; or the establishment of Pre-military Schools for homosexuals, in which they would be classified by typologies (A, B, and C) according to their “homosexual manifestations” and their discipline, are some of the documents made public by Cuban civil society.
A psychological "essay" on changes in motivations; a document about the Catholic and Protestant religions, as well as their relationship with state power since 1959; and another focused on the Cuban Council of Evangelical Churches and Jehovah's Witnesses, among others, make up the documentary corpus recovered for the memory and history of the totalitarian communist regime in Cuba.
According to Gallego, "its content corroborates part of what the victims of the UMAP have recounted, since the horror and abuses went far beyond what appears in these texts, and it confirms the homophobic, discriminatory, and violative nature established as official policy, from which the main figures of the Cuban regime and their spokespersons have tried to distance themselves."
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