The Gray Quinquennium and the UMAP
By Harold Cárdenas Lema
From La Joven Cuba (The Young Cuba)
“It is also necessary that the young men who have not demonstrated a correct attitude toward their studies or their schools’ discipline and display specific deviations that might reveal in them some type of petit-bourgeois softness […] perform an honorable task currently performed by Cuban youths, i.e., enter the Obligatory Military Service (SMO) so that, later, depending on their behavior in our glorious Revolutionary Armed Forces, they might fill the gaps that now exist in their records, which prevent them from entering our universities.”
– Miguel Martín, Secretary General of the Union of Communist Youths (UJC), 1965
These words represent the recruitment of the “sickos,” the religious youngsters, the rockers and other truly antisocial sectors into something very different from the SMO: the UMAP.
The Military Units for Support to Production (a euphemism, no doubt) hosted religious youths, rockers, homosexuals and true delinquents. All of them together had “to gain strength” through hard labor.
Ironically, interned into the UMAP were some major figures in our national culture, who endured this period with resignation. Because they were revolutionaries long before they entered the UMAP, they never left the island or compromised their ideas, as often happened with many of the spokesmen for “the hard hand.”
The UMAP sent out its first summons in 1965 and continued to do so until 1968. A cloak of silence remains draped upon it, drawing attention to itself, likely a product of the shame it represented for our nation’s history. But this silence ends up being more harmful because it becomes a weapon against ourselves that we could have easily channeled through dialogue or debate.
The UMAPs, with their headquarters in Camagüey, were unable to create a single revolutionary; instead, they provoked a logical resentment among the people they housed.
The very concept of the UMAP seems illogical, rather reminiscent of the bourgeois families that used to send their children to military school “to make them men.” That notion was not far from the Revolution but, in the mind of some, was close enough to the revolutionary moral that was demanded from Cubans.
Many figures in the national culture were in the UMAP; among the recruits who experienced exhaustion and alienation there were Armando Suárez del Villar, Pablo Milanés, Félix Luis Viera and many others.
At the units in Monte Quemado, Anguila and others, part of the national pride was destroyed, the revolutionary cultural policy was sullied and – while culture was turned into the people’s patrimony – many people were obligatorily excluded and reeducated.
The words of the UYC’s secretary general in 1965 concealed a crass blackmail threat: if you want to enter the university, you must first go through the UMAP and get rid of your deviations and “softness.”
In any case, history will judge where the deviations were, whether anyone found the Revolution while tilling the soil, or if in fact that concept was completely foreign to the revolutionary and truly transforming idea of The New Man.
