Cuba legalized same-sex marriage in September. Along with being an advance in rights, it may be interpreted as an act of historic justice inside a regime that locked up homosexuals in its early days. However historic traumas usually are not healed by merely intervening within the authorized construction. The trauma is saved within the reminiscence and that isn’t the place the Cuban state has seemed. This trauma is that of the pressured labor camps, which operated within the Sixties and Seventies, and whose victims weren’t solely those that desired individuals of the identical intercourse but additionally those that, amongst different sins, beloved Jesus or just needed to bop the twist.
Wanting the place the official narrative doesn’t look is the article of vital historiography. As such, whereas viewing the legislation handed in Cuba with satisfaction, one may also delve into what occurred by studying El cuerpo nunca olvida (or The physique by no means forgets), a examine by Abel Sierra Madero that ambitiously analyzes the difficulty of labor camps, a topic that’s typically touched upon however stays little investigated. The Cuban tutorial additionally conceives reminiscence as an area for justice and considers it pressing to work on it within the face of an institutional “technique” that promotes “an amnesiac transition, the washing of the nationwide reminiscence and the rewriting of historical past.”
Madero explains that in 1959, the revolutionaries took energy and started to assemble the “New Man.” In 1965, Che Guevara wrote that it was essential to create “a harmonic set of channels, steps, reservoirs and well-oiled apparatuses that make the march potential, that permit the pure choice of those that are destined to march within the vanguard and who dispense rewards and punishments to those that fulfill their duties or act towards the society below development.” The jail experiments had been put in with the change of regime however it was exactly in 1965, when Guevara penned Socialism and Man in Cuba, that the Navy Units to Assist Manufacturing (UMAP) had been instituted, the “hardest” a part of the system based on Sierra Madero, who lives in the USA. Some 30,000 individuals handed by means of the UMAP camps, which served as facilities of manufacturing and political correction. Among the many numerous varieties and levels of twentieth century focus camps, the historian compares Cuba’s case with that of Franco’s Spain.
Varied kinds of “delinquent components” had been despatched to the UMAPs, below the pretext of performing obligatory navy service. Homosexuals and non secular individuals predominated. Sierra Madero says that the revolution additionally served as “a challenge of nationwide masculinization.” There have been models throughout the system reserved for homosexuals. The picture that illustrates this text – taken furtively as images was prohibited – corresponds to a hormone remedy session. It was supplied to the creator by a psychologist who labored within the camps, certainly one of Sierra Madero’s many sources, who embody an evangelical who recollects how they had been tortured with “simulated executions.”
The UMAPs had been closed in 1968 within the face of complaints from abroad. After visiting the island in 1966, Graham Greene wrote that the acronym sounded “like one thing out of science fiction, as if humanity was buried in it.” Different observers of the revolution had not but matured their vital sense, such because the younger Mario Vargas Llosa and Susan Sontag. In a 1969 article, the American author stated of the repressed: “They’ve lengthy since been despatched dwelling.”
Different fashions of pressured labor and correction changed the UMAPs through the Seventies, however they’ve remained a paradigm of a repressive period that based on Sierra Madero has been subjected to a technique of erasure. The creator urges the preservation of the reminiscence now so the present and the longer term Cuba can come to know itself, quoting William Faulkner: “The previous isn’t lifeless. It’s not even previous.”
