The Umap or the slavery of youth

By: Pedro Corzo - 03/04/2025

Guest columnist.
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Cuban filmmaker Lilo Vilaplana and the tireless fighter against Castro's totalitarianism, Reinold Rodríguez, have committed to bringing to the big screen one of the most painful tragedies suffered by Cuban youth: the Military Production Assistance Units (UMAP).

They did an excellent job with the film Plantadas, without overlooking Plantados, so we are confident that this will be a testimony of immense value like the previous ones.

The sadism of the Castro regime's highest hierarchy—Fidel Castro, Raúl Castro, and Ernesto Che Guevara, with the complicity of the entire upper echelons of government—arranged a repressive scheme that sought to severely harm young people who expressed their opposition to the Revolution in various ways. First, they were militarized; second, they were forced to perform work contrary to their abilities; and third, they were foisted upon the conscripts a web of lies and manipulations aimed at socially crippling them.

The first and permanent targets were the Church, the political opposition, the free press, and independent economic activities, part of a long and painful relationship.

In 1960 and 1961, Guevara and Raúl Castro launched an official persecution against prostitutes, pimps, and homosexuals, but also against any individual who did not hide their rejection of the new order.

Those arrested in the raids were concentrated on the Guanahacabibes Peninsula. The official version stated that these individuals had to be rehabilitated, and according to reports at the time, more than 4,000 people of both sexes were imprisoned in that region. As a document from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights denounced in May 1963, "all of this without a written sentence, carried out by a police captain, without procedure or legal basis, much less a constitutional one."

While this was happening, the prisons were filling up with political prisoners. The firing squad grew deafening, and the harassment of those who decided to leave the country gave rise to the ever-present protest rallies.

In November 1963, the Castros implemented Mandatory Military Service, a novel method of imprisoning young people. The SMO was another instrument of oppression and ideologization that should be thoroughly studied.

The creative capacity to repress and control was inexhaustible, and they invented the UMAP, a sinister plan aimed at subjugating the citizenry.

Thousands of young people were literally kidnapped. They were taken from their homes, schools, and religious seminaries. They were deceived and rounded up by the police, with no grounds to justify their arrests, much less the forced deportation they were subjected to. They were never formally charged, much less tried by a court, however spurious.

Most of them were of military age, but they weren't called up to the SMO because the dictatorship considered them even more "disposable." The regime didn't want them armed. They weren't trustworthy. They were disaffected young men who committed the original sin of not believing in Castroism.

They were forcibly transported to barbed-wire concentration camps. Guarded by soldiers. Forced to survive in extreme poverty. Held in inhumane conditions, forced into forced agricultural labor. Their visits were monitored. They were frequently punished. Beaten by uniformed henchmen who relished the pain they inflicted. Some committed suicide, others were murdered by the jailers, and some were shot, like the young Alberto de la Rosa.

The UMAP lasted several years. It is estimated that at least 25,000 young people passed through its ranks. Raúl Castro, its architect, said: "The first group of comrades who joined the UMAP included some young people who hadn't had the best conduct in life, young people who, due to poor upbringing and environmental influences, had taken the wrong path in society. They were incorporated in order to help them find a correct path that would allow them to fully integrate into society."

The UMAP was a sophisticated instrument of political repression that, based on existing prejudices, sought to discredit the victims. To say that the UMAP was implemented to seek the social re-education of those repressed is false; its sole objective was to destroy them for being opposed to the regime. It's as absurd and irrational as defending the Castro brothers' dictatorship or believing that when the UMAP disappeared, the repression ended—a mistake, because other brigades like the Centenario Youth were soon created.

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».