[BRIEF NOTE] East Germany in the Caribbean

[rfmcdonald]

Via Strange Maps, Alex Harrowell at A Fistful of Euros describes the interesting story of Ernst-Thälmann-Insel, a small island off the southern coast of Cuba that, according to the German Wikipedia entry, was apparently transferred to East Germany in the early 1970s as part of a deal ensuring East German purchases of Cuban sugar. Though Cuban authorities deny that there was any actual transfer of sovereignty to East Germany (and thus, perhaps, to reunified Germany even though Ernst-Thälmann-Insel doesn't seem to have been mentioned in the reunification treaties), the fact that such a gesture was made points to the closeness of relations between the most advanced Soviet-bloc Communist state and one of the most notable Third World Communist states. For East Germany, in particular, relations with the Third World were quite important for reasons indicated by the Library of Congress' East Germany country study:

First, in the late 1960s and 1970s, East Germany, functioning as a divided state enjoying little international status as compared with West Germany, turned to the newly independent states of the Third World to gain recognition in return for economic and technical assistance. Comparative technological and economic backwardness vis-à-vis West Germany was less important in the Third World arena than in the West; East Germany could still proffer much-needed assistance to these economically backward states. Second, East Berlin launched a propaganda campaign to identify West Germany as the heir to Germany's imperial past, while representing itself as a German state able to offer all the qualities usually associated with Germans, such as efficiency, without the taint of a colonial past.

Cuba was of particular note, but various left-leaning and Soviet-aligned countries in Africa and Asia were also recipients of East German largesse.

Reunification changed all this, of course. Now, relations between Germany and Cuba are strained by Cuban political and cultural authoritarianism and are mitigated only somewhat by the presence of German tourists.