UMAP: When Darkness Reigned — The human cost of “correction” in revolutionary Cuba

[Luis Gonzalez]

UMAP: When Darkness Reigned — The human cost of “correction” in revolutionary Cuba

The Last Wire

They didn’t call them prisons.
They called them “rehabilitation.”

In 1960s Cuba, the UMAP camps became a system of forced labor targeting those labeled “undesirable” — religious believers, homosexuals, artists, and anyone who didn’t conform to the state’s vision.

This wasn’t random abuse. It was organized. Structured. Justified.

Men were taken, worked in brutal conditions, and subjected to humiliation — all under the banner of national improvement.

The real danger isn’t just what happened.

It’s how easily it was explained away at the time.

History shows this pattern clearly: once a government decides who doesn’t belong, the machinery follows.

Full article at The Last Wire

Question:
At what point does “protecting a system” become destroying the people inside it?

[andy58-in-nh]

Question: At what point does “protecting a system” become destroying the people inside it?

Cuban camp slogan: "Where work shapes the man."
Nazi camp slogan  "Work will make you free".
Soviet camp slogan: "Liberation through honest toil."
Communist China camp slogan: "Reform through labor."

The lie is always the same, isn't it? Through forced labor, your personal identity is to be vanquished by the state.

And if one is unfortunate enough to live and work "freely" in such a place - in a hospital for example - your role, agency, and compensation are determined by systemic state bureaucrats on behalf of the "collective good", which is a soul-crushing abstraction, as well as a lie.   

[Luis Gonzalez]

Question: At what point does “protecting a system” become destroying the people inside it?

Cuban camp slogan: "Where work shapes the man."
Nazi camp slogan  "Work will make you free".
Soviet camp slogan: "Liberation through honest toil."
Communist China camp slogan: "Reform through labor."

The lie is always the same, isn't it? Through forced labor, your personal identity is to be vanquished by the state.

And if one is unfortunate enough to live and work "freely" in such a place - in a hospital for example - your role, agency, and compensation are determined by systemic state bureaucrats on behalf of the "collective good", which is a soul-crushing abstraction, as well as a lie.

There are few surviving accounts of what went on in those camps. There’s a generally agreed number (30,000) who were put through “the system” but not the salver came out. No one knows the actual death toll.

[Smokin Joe]

There are few surviving accounts of what went on in those camps. There’s a generally agreed number (30,000) who were put through “the system” but not the salver came out. No one knows the actual death toll.

It is likely that they were based, at least loosely, on the Soviet model.

Perhaps a fair comparison can be found in the number of German POWS who returned home in the years after the war: 5% survived and made it back, whether the 95% died, were 'absorbed' (married a local upon release) and refused to leave, or were 'converted', we will never know, but my bet is on the former.