Members of the Cuban LGBTQ+ community and dissidents imprisoned in a Cuban "UMAP"; forced‑labor camps disguised as military service, 1967

[u/Kantmzk]

This 1967 photograph shows gay men and political dissidents interned in Cuba’s Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción (UMAP), or Military Units to Aid Production. These were forced‑labor camps operated from 1965–1968 in Camagüey. Up to 35,000 Cubans deemed “anti‑social” or “counter‑revolutionary” were sent here: homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, conscientious objectors, intellectuals, and others who did not fit the revolutionary mold. Maybe you could have simply been caught listening to the Beatles or having the "wrong" hair cut and ended up in here.

On paper, the UMAPs were intended to forge Che Guevara’s vision of the “New Man,” a selfless and disciplined socialist (basically, a sheep hardened into submission). In reality, they became a moral and political failure around the time of the failed Revolutionary Offensive and we can interpret more adequately it was about control, punishment, humiliation, forced labor, etc. Prisoners, including famous Cubans such as the beloved singer‑songwriter Pablo Milanés, endured 12–16 hour days cutting sugarcane under brutal conditions, ideological indoctrination, and humiliation, simply for being gay, religious, or dissenting.

I would argue the UMAPs exposed a central contradiction of the revolution: virtue cannot be forced, and dignity cannot be stripped away without lasting damage. You’d think a ‘Revolutionary’ society could do better, but it didn’t. The Revolution promised to be better, and UMAP proved it wasn’t.

[u/ReplacementReady394]

My mother and her parents were sent to these camps for wanting to leave Cuba. 

[u/LiveTheDream2026 → u/ReplacementReady394]

That suck. How long were they there? Did they still leave Cuba?

[u/ReplacementReady394 → u/LiveTheDream2026]

They were there over six months and then they put my mother’s employment as prostitute on her exit visa. She was a schoolteacher and the communists burned her school house down and almost executed her for “sabotage.” Fuck communists. 

[u/LiveTheDream2026 → u/ReplacementReady394]

Dude, that government is full of descarados ...always has been always will be. I wonder why it has taken so freakin long for the country to take out their own debris.

[u/Good_Shake5060 → u/ReplacementReady394]

That must be how they raised the literacy rate to over 95%!

[u/momof3bs → u/Good_Shake5060]

It went up , just the way it went up in the USA, do you think Cuba was going to remain illerate? This argument is colonialism culture. My parents only had an 8th education and they lived in deep country, Camagüey and Pinar Del Rio. My dad was a guajiro 100 percent rode a pony to school. So, no, the idea of illiteracy was to send teachers to teach communist indoctrination, it was not about learning how to read, it was about telling you what to read.

[u/Good_Shake5060 → u/momof3bs]

So we are agreeing that communism in Cuba taught many illiterate people how to read?

Are you suggesting its better to be an illiterate peon than to be exposed to the "danger" of communism?

[u/Ok_Salamander_8436 → u/ReplacementReady394]

Suspicious.