What were the UMAP, the camps where Cuba imprisoned homosexuals in the 1960s?

Four Cuban cadets dressed in olive-green uniforms walk in single file across the courtyard of a military facility under a cloudy sky. (Illustrative image Infobae) Between 1965 and 1968, the Cuban state applied a policy of confinement and forced labor against homosexual men whom it considered carriers of a "capitalist deviation" incompatible with the Revolution. The mechanism used was the Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP), camps located in rural areas of the then-province of Camagüey, where thousands of people were detained without prior trial or formal charges. Two years before the creation of the UMAP, Fidel Castro's government had already begun raids in Havana neighborhoods targeting people identified as "pederasts, prostitutes and pimps." Those mass detentions of 1961 marked the beginning of state hostility toward the male homosexual population that deepened in the following years. On March 13, 1963, during an official speech, Castro set out the government's ideological stance by associating homosexuality with conduct foreign to the model of the "true revolutionary." The Cuban government established the UMAP in 1965 as a variant of Mandatory Military Service intended for those it considered "unfit" to bear arms. Under that classification fell not only homosexuals, but also Jehovah's Witnesses, practicing Catholics, young people without work or studies, and people identified as opponents of the system. The UMAP functioned as agricultural labor camps, mainly in the sugar harvest, with workdays that could exceed twelve hours a day. Internment took place without judicial process, under the legal figure of "social dangerousness," contained in the Code of Social Defense in force at that time. This norm defined that condition as "the special proclivity in which a person finds himself to commit crimes, demonstrated by the conduct he exhibits in contradiction with the norms of socialist morality," which allowed someone to be detained without having committed a specific crime, according to the Cuban Code of Social Defense. Inside the camps, the authorities alternated agricultural labor with ideological indoctrination sessions and treatments aimed at modifying the sexual orientation of the internees. Internal documents written between 1966 and 1968, made public in 2024, show that the government planned to classify homosexuals into three categories according to their political stance: those sympathetic to the Revolution, counterrevolutionaries who did not wish to emigrate, and counterrevolutionaries who did seek to leave the country. Those same documents describe the proposal for a "Model Reeducation Center," conceived to "erase all effeminate or antisocial behavior" and to "detect cases of possible cure" who would be referred to specialized institutions. The plan even contemplated a similar facility under the Ministry of Education for minors under 17 years of age. AME3207. ARTEMISA (CUBA), 07/18/2021.- A man drives a military truck today, in San Antonio de los Baños, southwest of Havana (Cuba). Supporters of Miguel Díaz-Canel's government maintain a presence in San Antonio de los Baños (southwest of Havana), the town that a week ago sparked the strongest anti-government protests in recent decades. EFE/ Yander Zamora International protests and criticism from cultural sectors within Cuba, including the Union of Artists and Writers, led to the closure of the UMAP starting in 1968. The State did not then offer a public explanation for the end of the program. In 2010, Fidel Castro acknowledged his responsibility in the persecution for the first time. "If anyone is responsible, it is I," he declared to the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, attributing the lack of attention to the issue to his focus on the October Crisis of 1962 and other matters of government during those years.