The Military Units to Aid Production, known by the Spanish acronym UMAP, were agricultural labour camps run by the Cuban armed forces in Camaguey province from November 1965 to July 1968. They took men liable to the draft who were classed as unsuitable for regular service: conscientious objectors, Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists, Catholic priests and Protestant ministers, gay men, farmers who resisted collectivisation and others labelled antisocial or counter-revolutionary. A 1967 report by the Organization of American States described over 30,000 internees working ten to twelve hours a day, seven days a week, without pay, in congested barracks with poor food and water and no electricity or showers, and concluded that the camps served both to supply free labour and to punish young people who refused to join communist organisations. The Cuban government maintained that the units were a form of military service rather than labour camps; Fidel Castro said in a 2010 interview that there had been moments of great injustice, and the state has since presented the camps as an error. Historians including Abel Sierra Madero argue they should be understood as an instrument of social engineering combining military, judicial, educational and psychiatric means.
The Cuban government conscripted men classed as unfit for military service or socially deviant into agricultural labour camps in Camaguey
UN estimates put Cuba at about 7.8 million in 1965; the 1970 census counted 8,569,121. No narrower denominator is available, since the camps drew on men called up under military conscription and no published figure gives the size of that cohort.
No verifiable death toll exists. The figures most often quoted, 72 deaths under torture and 180 suicides, come from Norberto Fuentes, a former Cuban intelligence officer writing after his break with the government, and have not been corroborated from records; the camps' principal harm was compulsory unpaid labour and confinement rather than killing.
Unpaid compulsory labour and confinement of men conscripted on political, religious and sexual-orientation grounds were documented in a 1967 report by the Organization of American States and in extensive testimony by former internees.
Cuba