The Cuban Embassy in the GDR. A hoard of secret police Salsa, Sun, national security - and who take care of civil rights in Cuba?
Author: Dr. Jochen Staadt
Radio Berlin Germany: Political feuilleton
28/08/2002
Cuba is in fashion. More than 200,000 German tourists it attracts each year on the beautiful island. In the stream of normal left sun swim Agriculture, sex tourists and socialists of all kinds. What one is expensive - namely the Caribbean flight - others take their place by the way, thanks to very cheap. The talk is of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul and her trip to Cuba. On 7 December 2000, the Minister said the decision of the German Parliament on the importance of development cooperation with Cuba, "My visit to Cuba in May this year and the start of official development assistance to the country are already showing positive effects."
She meant not the situation of political prisoners in Cuba. She spoke instead of the training of Cuban environmental experts in Germany and the German non-governmental organizations would be strengthened by the commitment of the federal government in their activities. One is the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation of the PDS. Your experts teach the Cuban farmers, like the agricultural collective economy to work properly.
They make lively up where the GDR had to stop 1989th However, the SED dictatorship, the fraternal socialist state was in the Caribbean with advice and assistance on a completely different territory.
For almost three decades have worked the security forces of Cuba and the GDR closely. Cuban security forces have been trained under the so-called German-Cuban brothers in arms' in the GDR, specialists of the East German state security service trained in Cuba, the special units of the local Interior Ministry. This part of the extensive East German development assistance contributed significantly to the expansion of the Cuban secret police, whose officers are the course designers of the Ministry for State Security in the GDR knowledge of methods for controlling dissidents and opposition groups, the methods of psychological, decomposition 'of dissidents and acquired much more.
The State Security kept it in its internal monitoring reports to benefit in particular, that mimic the Cuban spy in East Germany, the existing system as a role model studied. Also in the area of the prison in Cuba and East Germany were more than twenty years, a contractually regulated cooperation. Cuban dissidents have reported several international human rights organizations about the fact that in the eighties by German consultant to the interrogation of political prisoners the Cuban secret police took part.
criticized in her speech to the Bundestag development cooperation with Cuba Ms Wieczorek-Zeul, namely, 40-year U.S. policy of blockade "against Cuba, at the continuing human rights abuses of the Castro dictatorship, however, they lost nothing. It is expected that the decades of repression transfer from East Germany to Cuba today may affect. The perfected with the help of the Stasi security organs Cuba have not reformed.
An active management of the subsequent losses of the SED regime, can not be confined to the territory of the Federal Republic. The question of the responsibilities that the reunited Germany compared to those with Cuban dissidents and political prisoners, pursued by a repressive apparatus developed with German support, spied on and abused, were interested in the development aid minister apparently not. She wants to pay to Castro without him for it to demand respect for human rights. Ms Wieczorek-Zeul was before 1989, compared to the SED dictatorship to the quieter option in the SPD. She has not learned to do so. Of it is in terms of civil rights in Cuba, to expect anything. After all, contains the report published a month ago, the Foreign Office of, human rights worldwide 'critical words about Cuba. There, the population continue to systematically denied human and civil rights', says the report issued by Foreign Minister Fischer.
It is hoped that the guideline of the German policy towards Cuba is really in the Foreign Office. In Mrs Wieczorek Zeul at least she is in the wrong hands.
Jochen Staadt: Born 1950 in Bad Kreuznach, lives since 1968 in Berlin. According to the study of Germanic and political science at the Free University, he earned his doctorate with a dissertation on East German literature. Publications on the history of German and international student and youth movement of the 60s, the GDR and SED history, espionage in East and West and the history of relations between the two German states. Staadt is project manager for the Research Network SED state at the Free University and author of the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Recent publication: "The cooperation between the Stasi in the GDR and the Cuban MININT '.
Article I