The gulag system for political dissent didn't end with the UMAP camps, it continued for decades -
Prison LaborHuman Rights Watch interviews with former Cuban prisoners provide disturbing evidence that Cuba abuses labor rights in its prisons. The Cuban government has an extensive system of prison labor camps, and runs clothing assembly, construction, furniture, and other factories as well as agricultural camps at its maximum and minimum security prisons.244 The Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners require prisons to have physically fit convicts take part in vocational training and engage in meaningful, rehabilitative work for equitable remuneration.245 However, Cuba's insistence that political prisoners participate in work programs and its inappropriate pressuring of inmates to work without pay in inhuman conditions violate international labor and prison rights standards.
The ILO's Abolition of Forced Labor Convention of 1957, which Cuba ratified in 1958, requires states to "secure the immediate and complete abolition" of forced or compulsory labor "as a means of political coercion or education or as a punishment for holding or expressing political views or views ideologically opposed to the established political, social or economic system."246 Thus Cuban prison authorities' requirement that individuals work while serving prison terms for holding anti-government views violates the Abolition of Forced Labor Convention.
Authorities at the Boniato prison in Santiago pressured Luis Alberto Ferrándiz Alfaro to employ the skills that led to his twelve-year sentence for enemy propaganda—he had designed anti-Castro stamps and flyers—for the benefit of the prison factory. Prison officials working for the Interior Ministry's Desa Company (Empresa Desa) reminded Ferrándiz Alfaro that since both he and his wife were imprisoned in 1993, their two young children lacked financial support.247 Under duress, Ferrándiz Alfaro accepted a post with Desa as a designer for numerous items, including jewelry and furniture.248 In return, the prison director sent eighty pesos per month (approximately U.S. $3.81) to the couple's children. Few prisoners receive even meager compensation. Ferrándiz Alfaro recalled the prison director commenting that other prisoners received their payment in "air and sun." Ferrándiz's work for the Desa Company ended when the Cuban government forced him into exile in Canada in February 1998.249
Ferrándiz Alfaro's wife, Xiomara Aliat Collado, who received a seven-year sentence for enemy propaganda, also was obligated to work. Prison guards told her that if she did not work in the prison's assembly factory she would lose her right tovisits with her children, her right to parole, or be sent to work in the nearby agricultural camp. From her arrest in March 1993 until March 1994, she worked at the Aguadores Prison in Santiago. After she was put under a year of house arrest to care for her ill son, she was imprisoned again and worked in the Ciudamar Prison factory in Santiago from March 1995 until her release in April 1996. Prison guards forced Aliat Collado to work in clothing assembly plants, where she made undergarments, women's clothing, and costumes for carnival celebrations. The inmate-workers did not attach any brand name labels to the clothing. Aliat Collado believed that the clothes were sold in state craft stores. The prisoners also made prison uniforms, envelopes, and paper holders for ice cream, which she said were used at the Helado Coppelia ice cream store in Santiago. She said that she often felt dizzy and weak while she worked, due to malnourishment, but that prison guards accused her of pretending to be ill, failed to provide sufficient food, and required extremely long hours. The workdays often extended from 7:00 a.m. until 10:00 p.m., with a short mid-day break. The armed prison guards who patrolled the factories often required workers to labor seven days a week.250
At this writing, Juan Carlos Recio Martínez, a journalist with the Cuba Press agency, is serving a one-year sentence in a labor camp, without internment. In February 1998, a Villa Clara court found him guilty of having failed to denounce an acquaintance who had drafted a document urging abstention from local elections.251 In June 1998, he began serving his sentence at the Abel Santamaría Cooperative, near Camajuaní in Villa Clara province, where he was forced to do agricultural work from approximately 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. each day.252
In October 1997, Cuban authorities arrested five members of the Pro Human Rights Party of Cuba in Cienfuegos. In March 1998, the court found the human rights activists guilty of "other acts committed against state security" (otros actos contra la seguridad del estado).253 The tribunal sentenced two of the defendants,sixty-nine-year-old Angel Nicolás Gonzalo and sixty-six-year-old Reynaldo Sardiñas Delgado, to one year in a labor camp without internment. Given Gonzalo's and Sardiñas Delgado's advanced age, Cuba may be violating the Standard Minimum Rules, which recommend that only physically fit prisoners work. Forcing the human rights activists to work also violates the ILO ban on compulsory labor for political prisoners.254
https://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/cuba/C ... 696_409719
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