BY ANITA SNOW
Associated Press

HAVANA - Cuba charged Friday that the U.S. base on the east end of the communist island had become a ''concentration camp,'' deriding its use as a holding center for terrorism suspects.

''In the territory illegally occupied by the Guantánamo Naval Base, hundreds of foreign prisoners are subjected to indescribable humiliations,'' said a statement released Friday by Cuba's National Assembly.

Cuba has long opposed the presence of the American base, which operates in the eastern part of the island under a treaty signed long before the 1959 revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power.

The statement said the prisoners are ''totally isolated, without the possibility of communicating with their families or access to appropriate legal defense.'' It added that ``some of the very few who have been freed have narrated the horrors of that concentration camp.''

However, U.S. officials have repeatedly argued that the prisoners were being well treated.

''Should our servicemen and women be in the same position, I would hope they would be treated in the same humane manner,'' Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, commander of the detention mission at Guantánamo, told The Associated Press in an interview earlier this year.

The U.S. government holds more than 600 men on the base. They were detained in Afghanistan and Pakistan and elsewhere on suspicion of terrorism.