The Cuban writer and political prisoner Ariel Hidalgo described in an interview with CiberCuba the forced labor conditions he experienced in the Military Units for Production Support (UMAP), the fields established by Fidel Castro's regime in 1965 where he was detained at just 20 years old.
Hidalgo recounted that the day began before dawn: "At the UMAP, they would wake you up at four in the morning, give you a little piece of bread, a bit of milk, and then they would make you walk for miles, many miles, so that by the time you reached the sugarcane fields, it was already daytime, it was starting to dawn."
The routine stretched on uninterrupted until nightfall. "We were working there until it started to get dark. So we almost never saw the camp. We rarely saw it during the day, only at night," he stated.
Inside the sugar cane field, the conditions were stifling. According to Hidalgo, there was no breeze, and the work pace allowed no breaks: "When you finished one furrow, you had to immediately enter the next one without lifting your head."
Physical exhaustion was compounded by the lack of water. "Hunger on one side and thirst on the other—especially the thirst was terrible," he recalled. The canteen ran out quickly, and the inmates ended up drinking from puddles. "There was a puddle that you would think, 'Well, that's infected.' But since there was no water, we drank from it," he noted.
The consequences of returning to the camp were severe: "Many people, when they arrived from work at the camp, came to drink water and would faint. Many people ended up fainting."
The physical deterioration left permanent marks. "There were people who, due to the overall situation we had there, became completely bald. And others who suddenly had little gray hair became gray," Hidalgo described.
The UMAP operated from November 1965 to July 1968, primarily in the province of Camagüey. According to various estimates, between 25,000 and 38,641 people passed through them, including religious individuals, homosexuals, dissidents, and people deemed "undesirable" by the regime.
A specialized book documents 72 deaths and 507 psychiatric hospitalizations among the inmates.
Hidalgo escaped from the UMAP, which earned him a five-year prison sentence.
However, following international reports that labeled the camps as forced labor concentration camps, the regime closed them down and erased the criminal records of those who had been sentenced for escaping. "When I check my criminal record, nothing shows up. I was never in the UMAP. All of that has been erased," he recounted.
The official version of the regime contrasts radically with these testimonies. Mariela Castro, daughter of Raúl Castro, declared in May 2020 that “the issue of the UMAP is greatly exaggerated” and compared them to “rural schools.”
In 2023, he came to deny that there were "any concentration camps" in Cuba against the LGBT community.
The singer-songwriter Pablo Milanés, who was also confined in the UMAP, publicly described them as "a concentration camp," in line with what was documented by the OAS, which in 1967 reported over 30,000 inmates subjected to forced labor, poor nutrition, unsanitary water, and overcrowding.
Filed under: