Analysis
Cuba, Che Guevara, UMAP, executions and due process
Che Guevara is best analysed on two separate but connected planes. On the one hand, there is his direct and documented role in early revolutionary violence in Cuba, including his authority at La Cabaña and his relationship to executions. On the other, there is his place within a broader revolutionary political culture that linked labour, discipline, re-education and citizenship, a climate from which the UMAP camps later emerged.
That distinction matters because it avoids two common errors: exaggerating claims that are not well proven, or dissolving real responsibilities into vague ideological language.
Che Guevara: political-military actor, not just symbol
Ernesto “Che” Guevara was a central figure of the Cuban Revolution, a theorist of guerrilla warfare, a high official of the new regime and a global symbol of revolutionary leftism. But for this discussion, the myth matters less than the actual role. Britannica's biography of Che Guevara summarises one crucial fact: after Fidel Castro's forces entered Havana in January 1959, Guevara spent several months at La Cabaña, where he supervised executions of people considered enemies of the revolution.
That point is enough to establish a firm baseline: Che was not a peripheral observer nor merely a propagandistic icon. He had command authority and took part in a revolutionary apparatus that combined political purging, exemplary punishment and consolidation of the new power.
His relationship with violence also did not begin at La Cabaña. The same Britannica entry notes that during the guerrilla stage he at times acted as executioner or gave execution orders against suspected traitors or deserters.
La Cabaña and executions: what can safely be said
The strongest and most defensible claim is this: Che Guevara held authority at La Cabaña and supervised executions there.
That allows three things to be said without inflating the case:
- he had real responsibility in early repression;
- he was not a passive spectator;
- and his role was not confined to revolutionary discourse.
The logic used to justify those executions was revolutionary in essence: punishing those seen as responsible for Batista-era crimes, consolidating the new regime, preventing counterrevolution and sending a signal of force. The historical and legal problem is not only whether some adjudicative organs existed, but what real guarantees those procedures offered.
Revolutionary tribunals and due process
The most useful source here is the International Commission of Jurists report *Cuba and the Rule of Law* (1962). It examines legislation, courts, prisons and the functioning of the early revolutionary system and describes a panorama of serious deficits in judicial independence, legality, procedural guarantees and protection against political power.
The most prudent and solid formulation is not to say that “everything was a sham” in a loose way, but something more precise:
the revolution did create organs of adjudication, but the contemporary evidence collected by the International Commission of Jurists describes a system with grave deficits of independence and due process.
That report shows, among other things:
- rapid alteration of judicial structures;
- weakening of judicial and prosecutorial independence;
- broad politicisation of the judicial apparatus;
- subordination of justice to revolutionary logic;
- and prison and procedural conditions under serious criticism.
This is exactly the kind of problem a tradition centred on the rule of law and legal certainty tries to prevent.
The phrase “I like killing”: what can and cannot be said
Here precision matters. For years, different versions of a phrase attributed to Che have circulated along the lines of “I discovered that I really like killing” or similar formulations supposedly tied to letters or campaign memories.
The problem is documentary traceability. In this research, there does not appear to be a critical primary edition or an indisputable facsimile strong enough to treat that line as a fully secured quotation.
That does not prove it false, but it does require caution. A serious article should put it this way:
there are widely circulated quotations attributed to Che about taking pleasure in killing, but their primary traceability is weaker than the available evidence regarding his real and documented participation in executions.
What the UMAP camps were
The UMAP—Military Units to Aid Production—were agricultural forced-labour camps operated by the Cuban state in Camagüey between 1965 and 1968. A brief overview in the *Oxford Research Encyclopedia* describes them as militarised compounds and labour camps intended to reform those who did not fit the revolutionary ideal. A study by Tahbaz published through the University of Delaware similarly defines them as agricultural forced-labour camps operating under the cover of compulsory military service.
Those targeted included, among others:
- homosexuals;
- Jehovah's Witnesses;
- other religious believers;
- conscientious objectors;
- people deemed “antisocial”;
- and persons seen as politically deviant or unreliable.
That point matters because it avoids too narrow a framing. The UMAP were not only an institution of repression against homosexuals, even if that dimension is one of the most infamous and visible. Their logic was broader: forced labour, moral disciplining, political punishment and economic production.
The logic behind the UMAP camps
Recent scholarship allows the UMAP to be described not as an isolated accident, but as the radicalisation of a logic already present in the early revolution. In the chapter “The Elasticity of Truth” from *Laboring for the State*, Rachel Hynson shows that these camps were built on earlier forced-labour farms and on a growing idea: that physical and disciplined labour was part of building the revolutionary citizen.
Hynson also stresses a crucial legal element: Law 993 of 1961 allowed action against people deemed dangerous or antisocial without robust due-process guarantees. That connection between legislation, political suspicion and labour punishment shows that the UMAP did not emerge out of nowhere. They were the consolidation of a way of thinking about social order. That logic also fits with a worldview in which the collective project claims priority over the concrete person, a wider problem that can be read through the lens of individualism versus collectivism.
The UMAP combined economic function, political punishment and moral discipline.
Che's relationship to the UMAP camps
This is one of the most delicate points and one of the easiest to exaggerate. It is not prudent to claim without nuance that Che “created” the UMAP or directed them personally. The chronology complicates that claim: the UMAP functioned mainly between 1965 and 1968, and by then Che no longer occupied a central internal administrative role in Cuba.
What can be said cautiously is different. First, Che was part of a revolutionary culture that linked labour, discipline and citizenship. Second, Rachel Hynson's chapter shows that both Fidel Castro and Che Guevara denied between 1962 and 1964 the existence of the rumoured Guanahacabibes camp, considered by contemporaries a precursor of the UMAP. Third, the early extra-judicial labour repression of “antisocial” and “deviant” persons created an environment from which the UMAP later emerged in more institutionalised form.
The prudent formulation is therefore this:
Che does not appear here as a direct administrator of the UMAP, but he does appear as part of the ideological and political framework that legitimised re-education through labour and the official denial of precursor camps.
Guanahacabibes and the precedents
The Guanahacabibes episode matters precisely because it pushes the story backward. It shows that the UMAP were not a sudden invention of the mid-1960s, but the radicalisation of earlier practices.
That makes it possible to say something important without exaggeration:
The UMAP did not emerge from nothing; they were the radicalisation of earlier mechanisms of re-education, forced labour and social control already present in the early revolution.
Homosexuality and the revolution
There is sufficient basis to affirm that homosexuals suffered discrimination, hostility and repression during the early decades of the revolution. A *Latin American Research Review* article on organisation, labour and revolution in Cuba states this explicitly and presents the UMAP as the most infamous institution within that process.
That persecution was not only legal. It was also symbolic, social and cultural. It affected the very possibility of being considered a fully legitimate subject within the revolutionary ideal of masculinity, labour, discipline and social usefulness.
Fidel Castro and the late admission of responsibility
One important closing point is that Fidel Castro belatedly assumed political responsibility for the persecution of homosexuals in the 1960s. In 2010, Reuters reported that Fidel called that persecution a “great injustice” and said that if anyone was responsible, it was him.
That recognition does not erase what happened or change the coercive nature of the system, but it matters because:
- it admits, belatedly, that the repression existed;
- it indirectly confirms its gravity;
- and it shows that even from within the revolutionary narrative it became difficult to defend that policy as legitimate.
Nuremberg, Cuban revolutionary tribunals and due process
The comparison with Nuremberg requires care. It is not serious to equate different contexts mechanically. The most defensible comparison is a comparison of procedural guarantees.
Article 16 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg established explicit guarantees meant to secure a fair trial: detailed charges, translation for the accused, the right to defence, the right to present evidence and the possibility of cross-examining witnesses. The trial record preserved by Yale Avalon also shows the importance attached to technical defence and cross-examination.
Moreover, by the time revolutionary trials were being held in Cuba, basic international standards already existed. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) protected in Articles 10 and 11 the right to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal and the presumption of innocence. The common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions (1949) prohibited sentences and executions without prior judgment by a regularly constituted court with indispensable judicial guarantees.
Against that, the ICJ report describes a highly politicised judicial system with heavily questioned guarantees and subordination to revolutionary logic.
The most prudent comparative conclusion is therefore this:
Nuremberg was criticisable in some respects and took place under exceptional conditions, but its formal procedural framework contained explicit fair-trial guarantees that do not appear with the same clarity or strength in the Cuban revolutionary tribunals described by the International Commission of Jurists.
What is safe to affirm and what is not
It is safe to affirm
- that Che Guevara bore real responsibility in La Cabaña and in early executions;
- that the UMAP were forced-labour camps operating between 1965 and 1968;
- that their victims included homosexuals, conscientious objectors and religious believers;
- that the revolution developed mechanisms of labour-based re-education and social control;
- that there were serious deficits of due process according to contemporary sources such as the ICJ;
- and that Fidel Castro later assumed political responsibility for the persecution of homosexuals.
It is not prudent to affirm without nuance
- that Che directly ran the UMAP;
- that every extreme phrase attributed to Che is solidly proven by primary documentation;
- that the Cuban revolutionary tribunals were simply “identical” to any other historical experience without attention to differences of form and context;
- or that the repression of homosexuals reduces only to the UMAP and not to a wider climate of hostility and humiliation.
Conclusion
The key issue here is not to turn Che Guevara into a caricature, nor to dissolve his responsibility into revolutionary mythology. The important thing is something more precise: Che played a real role in early revolutionary violence, including La Cabaña and executions; the Cuban Revolution linked labour, discipline and citizenship in coercive ways; the UMAP were an extreme expression of that logic; and the problem was not only symbolic or moral, but also legal and institutional.
The deeper point, then, is not only whether the revolution punished certain enemies or marginal groups, but how it did so: with what concept of citizenship, with what relation between labour and obedience, and with what level of respect—or contempt—for the basic guarantees of due process.