“We would never come to believe that a homosexual could embody the conditions and requirements of conduct that would enable us to consider him a true revolutionary, a true Communist militant,” Castro declared in 1965. “A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant Communist should be,” Castro added, as James Kirchick recalled in Sunday’s Daily Beast.

Castro started corralling gays that year, often through cruel lies.

“Many received false telegrams telling them they had been called for military service and should appear at a chosen location — where they would then be rounded into trains, trucks, and buses and sent to the camps with little food or water,” Benjamin Butterworth wrote this week at Great Britain’s PinkNews.com.

UMAP inmates, according to Butterworth, reported being “threatened with execution, stuffed with dirt in their mouths, buried in the ground up to their necks, and tied up naked outside in barbed wire without food or water until fainting.”

While Castro’s regime decriminalized consensual gay sex in 1979, it struck a major blow for inhumanity when it corralled HIV patients and forcibly quarantined them in sanitaria between the mid 1980s and 1993. The late Jonathan Mann, M.D. — founder of the World Health Organization’s Program for AIDS — condemned these as “pretty prisons.”

Castro’s abuses continued in 1997 when Human Rights Watch found that the Marxist dictator “heightened harassment of homosexuals, raiding several nightclubs known to have gay clientele and allegedly beating and detaining dozens of patrons.”