Primavera Digital, Eduardo Martínez Rodríguez, El Cerro, Havana, 6 November 2017 — I’ve just finished reading an eBook (which has never been published in Cuba) written by someone who was detained in Cuba’s infamous “Military Units to Aid Production” [known by their acronym in Spanish as UMAP], who endured all of the bloody sordidness of those grim Nazi-Castroite concentration camps. The book is a testament of those days written by Alberto I. González Muñoz in 1994-95, titled God Does Not Enter My Office. It was first published by Baptist Publishing in 2003 and has been updated periodically up to its seventh edition, in 2015, of which we speak here.
The author alleges in the introduction that he does not want this material to be interpreted as an indictment of the Castros’ regime. However, one need only read it to be outraged at the many atrocities and injustices that they committed, causing grave damages to Cuban society up to the present day.
The book recalls testimonies written about Nazi extermination camps, even though there were no crematoria or gas chambers in the UMAP.
The UMAP were intended to effect, through forced labor, an obligatory change in religious persons, homosexuals, and all who were considered hindrances to the Revolution. The UMAP were in operation, to the horror of many, for more than two years–between 1965 and 1967–in remote locations in Camagüey.
In the pages of this book can be found the names of various religious persons who were sent there, subjected to humiliations, officially classified as social blights because of their beliefs, mistreated, and made to labor 16 or more hours daily cutting sugar cane.
It amazes me that personages such as Cardinal Jaime Ortega Alamino, so careful of and complaisant towards the regime as he is–and who a few years ago ordered the forced removal of peaceful protesters from a Havana church–was among the Catholics who endured kicks to the backside and pushing and shoving for the mere reason of being religious.
There is also the case of the Rev. Raúl Suárez, who is seen often in the company of government officials, a gracious host to the delegations from the Pastors for Peace, and who has founded an authorized emporium on 100 and 51st Streets, in Marianao.
Raúl Suárez was in the UMAP–sleeping at night, alongside many other religious persons, on a hard dirt floor, later in hammocks, and after a few months in beat-up bunks–rising at 4:30am, still exhausted from the previous day’s labor, only to be dragged to the work camp, where they would remain sometimes past midnight, cutting and hauling sugar cane by hand.
Could it be they have a poor memory, or is it rather that they fear losing all that they have gained?
Nothing justifies the barbarity that was the UMAP. Crimes against humanity are never defensible. There will come a time when we will be in a position to hold the perpetrators accountable. We do not forget.
eduardom57@nauta.cu
Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison
