Internationalism, Cooperation and Personal Entanglements between Cuba, the German Democratic Republic, and Angola in the Socialist World

ABSTRACT

On the basis of German and Cuban archival documents, the present article tries to apply the global history notion of ‘entanglement’ to the study of intercontinental personnel circulations within and at the margins of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA). It shows the flows of personnel which were set in motion by the implementation of the CMEA’s task of achieving convergence in the sense of ‘aligning the developmental level’ of its member states. At the same time, it examines the contribution of these personnel flows to the convergence function of the CMEA. Angola is taken as a case study by investigating the Cuban–East German–Angolan entanglement in intercontinental mobility, with a specific focus on the circulating personnel; by examining institutional and everyday practices of dealing with inequality in these encounters; and by evaluating Cuba’s role in the CMEA on the level of personnel encounters, exchanges, and interactions. The present contribution zooms into personal encounters between Cubans, East Germans and Angolans in Angola while assessing how the organisational setting of these encounters mediated inequality.

KEYWORDS:

• CMEA
• Cuba
• internationalism
• development
• solidarity
• socialist World System
• (Labour, Educational and Professional) migration

Few people would spontaneously associate the socialist world, a world composed of closed nation-states, with flows of professional and educational mobility.¹ The CMEA, that world’s economic organisation, provided a low level of integration and coordination between its member states, as well as in its relations with non-European partners. Its members operated on a bilateral or on a trilateral basis. The CMEA emerged as a coordinating organisation in the best case with cooperation taking place between (‘socialist’) nation-states.

The present article instead points to other features of the socialist world, to areas of activity that held it together. The CMEA’s 1962 ‘Fundamental Principles of the International Socialist Division of Labour’ and 1971 ‘Complex Programme’ featured the objective of ‘aligning the developmental level of the CMEA countries’.² The integration of non-European countries thus delegated to this organisation a task of achieving economic and social convergence among its members. In accepting Cuba as the second extra-European member in 1972, the claim of achieving convergence among its members came to include that country which, following its own explicit assessment, was deemed ‘under-developed’. The socialist economies were political economies, that is, economies with political priorities in which the political interest commanded the economy. They were thus potentially inclined to take on such a task of convergence in the sense of ‘aligning the developmental level’, or – in the terminology of the competing system – a development task.

The present contribution provides an overview of our ongoing research on intercontinental entanglements and personnel mobility in the socialist world.³ Additionally, it presents some more in-depth explorations into the vast archaeological terrain at some sites. The article first examines lines of Cuban cooperation with European CMEA member states and how it spread to Africa. Its focus is on how this cooperation was implemented on the ground in Angola in interpersonal relations within a framework established by state and party organisations; such liaison organisations served to bridge inequality across these worlds. Subsequently, it takes a closer look at Cuban civilian personnel assistance to Angola and how Cubans dealt with the inequality encountered in that cooperation.

This article envisions itself as a contribution to, first and foremost, global history, adding a strand of the history of the ‘socialist world system’, a field that is certainly still understudied; to the history of ‘development’, adding an alternative strand of the institutionalised efforts to tackle inequality in the world to that field of research; and to the history of temporary migrations, adding flows of professional, educational and labour mobility within and at the margins of the CMEA.

The literature on the subject of Cuban mobilities in the socialist world is split into different fields of research. The periodisation of revolutionary Cuba’s history introduced by Carmelo Mesa-Lago in the 1970s continues to provide a valuable framework. Mesa-Lago has distinguished periods of politically driven ‘voluntarism’ from periods of ‘realism’, with both notions calculated on the relation between the Cuba’s capacities and its political ambitions at home and in the world. He interpreted the second half of the 1960s as such a period of economic ‘voluntarism’, when Cuba tried to build its own independent version of socialism, followed by a period of ‘realist’ alignment to a greater entity capable and willing to provide economic assistance, the CMEA.⁴ Another valuable contribution to Cuban studies from outside of Cuba is an article by exile Cuban scholars Jorge Perez-Lopez and Sergio Diaz-Briquets, which links Cuban studies to migration studies.⁵ In Cuba itself, this research subject has not yet been developed, due to archives being closed. Up until now, the most relevant parts of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) archives have only been accessible to a single international researcher, Piero Gleijeses, but no Cuban historians have been allowed into these archives. Even without access to Cuban archive material, some international scholars have produced well-informed works on Cuban ‘internationalism’ in general and in the field of education and health services.⁶ The author has tried to bring together the fields of Cuban, CMEA, and migration studies in a recent article.⁷

In addition, the CMEA has not yet been studied as a development organisation.⁸ A recent publication solidly based on archival material, including from the CMEA’s archives in Moscow, concentrates on commercial relations with non-socialist developing countries.⁹ The symposium in which this volume originated attempted to advance this line of inquiry.¹⁰ The CMEA’s ‘Standing Commission on Technical Assistance and Cooperation’ has also been examined to some extent.¹¹ The task of the commission was limited to coordinating assistance (and later on also foreign trade) to non-CMEA countries – thereby not treating relations between the GDR and Cuba. A recent article based on archival material from Eastern European states agrees with some findings in the present contribution concerning Cuba’s role in the CMEA.¹²

The mobility aspect of the socialist world has been treated in several large volumes of ‘Socialist Globalizations’ projects.¹³ The present author’s research project prefers the notion ‘mobility’ over ‘migration’ because it is broader – including objects, attitudes, ways of living – and because the broad global history notion of ‘migration’ (including explicitly temporary forms) has not yet changed our spontaneous understanding of ‘migration’. A recent special issue on Angola is missing discussion of one of the main CMEA actors in that country, the GDR.¹⁴

Regarding Cubans in Angola, one can build on the pioneering works of Piero Gleijeses. He assembled new Cuban archives that offer insight into the organisation of what the Cubans called ‘Cuban internationalism’. However, he focuses on its military side, and the GDR is largely absent from his account.¹⁵ While Gleijeses mobilised Cuban archives and complemented them with a considerable number of interviews, Christine Hatzky’s no less seminal book on Cubans in Angola is essentially based on Angolan archives as well as on a broad range of interviews.¹⁶ As in the case of Gleijeses with Cuban archives, the archival material was being presented for the first time to the international academic community, and it is thus far only accessible to its author. A main value of Hatzky’s book is in the extensive presentation and analysis of those interviews that provide approaches followed in the present article. The PCC’s International Department archives that Gleijeses consulted are not open to the public.

This contribution complements the Cuban archival sources using files of the Cuban Foreign Ministry and, above all, the archive of the party’s youth organisation: the Union of Young Communists of Cuba (Unión de Jóvenes Comunistas, or UJC).¹⁷ As many ‘internationalists’ were young people, the party delegated part of the framework of organisation and supervision to its youth organisation. This Cuban material is combined with interviews with Cuban ‘internationalists’ and documents from the copious archives of the GDR on trilateral cooperation in Angola.¹⁸ About 30 interviews have been conducted in the years from 2015 to 2020 with former ‘internationalists’ in Havana, using a snowball extension method - being handed over from one interviewee to another and to ever more - starting from persons interested in the history of this experience. These were semi-structured biographical interviews, starting with the individual life-history, and conducted mostly in the houses of the interviewees, sometimes in a formal and sometimes in a quite informal setting; some were in the presence of various other ‘internationalists’ taking more the form of a conversation around a table.¹⁹ As a result of the archive situation, the Cuban view is much better documented than the Angolan side, which in most cases only appears indirectly in Cuban and East German reports.

The CMEA Period in the History of Socialist Cuba

The CMEA period was part of a ‘realistic’ turn of Cuban policy from the wreckage of the Cuban economy, epitomised by the grandiose failure of the ‘Gran Zafra’ effort in 1970.²⁰ This reorientation arose after efforts at ‘autochthonous’ development had ended in economic deadlock. In the view of the GDR, this had been an example of ‘voluntarism’, particularly economic voluntarism. In an analysis of the state of the Cuban economy by GDR economists conducting a review of the country as a CMEA candidate, those economists interpreted the Cuban alignment with the socialist world economy as expressing the failure of what they called a ‘voluntarist’ economic policy. This voluntarism implied subordinating the criteria of economic efficiency and professional knowledge to the political impetus of revolutionary impatience. ‘The party of Cuba’, they concluded, ‘had for many years proceeded from the subjective assumption that it has already passed into building communism, thereby ignoring the economic laws of socialism. For example, material incentives were completely rejected; instead, a wage system was created that was independent of performance’. Consequently, ‘the development of [Cuba’s] industry and agriculture is now being created increasingly by implementing the economic laws of socialism, after an (unfortunately very late) evaluation of the experiences of the other socialist countries’.²¹

Cuba entered the new ‘realistic’ CMEA period of its history with reservations, keen to preserve an independent stance. On the basis of some testimonials, Cuba had aspired to gaining special membership in the CMEA²² and it was indeed to realise a special role in that organisation. The entry of Cuba into the CMEA followed a period of efforts to create a genuinely Cuban path towards socialism, including efforts to organise the ‘Three Continents’ by steering between the Soviet and Chinese orbits – and by doing so in a revolutionary perspective, in contrast to the Non-Aligned Movement. In 1966, Cuba set up its own ‘International’ of the ‘Three Continents’, the ‘Solidarity Organisation of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America’, ‘Tricontinental’ for short.²³ Although an ‘International’ as a political association of the socialist states and their leading communist parties no longer existed as a formalised organisation, and although Cuba never became a member of the military alliance of these states – instead always remaining a member of the ‘Non-Aligned States’ – Cuba’s new ‘International’ association became more or less obsolete with its CMEA integration. The Third Worldist mission of the Tricontinental was then integrated into Cuba’s role in the CMEA. Within the CMEA, Cuba pressed for a stronger commitment of the CMEA towards Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Cuban internationalism thereby changed its methods from the guerrilla of Che Guevara in the ‘tricontinental’ period to large-scale interventions with a military side complemented by civilian assistance, thereby morphing into a new form of internationalism.²⁴

The integration of Cuba into the CMEA made possible large-scale Cuban development projects in the ‘Three Continents’. From its membership in the CMEA in 1972, Cuba profited from large-scale resource transfers from the European CMEA states, above all from the Soviet Union.²⁵ In an effort to extend to the ‘Three Continents’, the Cuban government spread this collaboration to Africa and Asia. Cuba took joint actions in African, Asian, and Latin American countries during the whole CMEA period. From a recipient of assistance from Europe, Cuba turned into an actor providing development efforts in countries like Angola while using the framework of the CMEA.

Cuba thus became one of the most active CMEA members. The archives of the CMEA’s Standing Commission on Technical Assistance and Cooperation (SKTUZ) reveal that Cuba acted as a fulcrum for the political collaboration of the CMEA with non-CMEA countries from the ‘Three Continents’, especially those on a ‘socialist path of development’. These included countries such as Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, and Nicaragua, countries which a revolution or a war of independence had orientated towards the socialist world without being members of the CMEA. Cuba advocated a common policy of the CMEA member states towards a stronger integration of these extra-European states.²⁶ Cuba became a major initiator of ‘international solidarity’ (Internacionalismo) in the self-termed socialist world system on an intercontinental scale.²⁷

Three years after its accession to CMEA membership, at the request of the ‘socialist’ People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola, or MPLA) government of Angola, Cuba started a massive military and civilian intervention in Angola. It took its own decision to save that ‘socialist’ (according to its self-definition) regime as a candidate for CMEA activity in the ‘Three Continents’, followed by other countries.²⁸ Sticking to its pre-CMEA world revolutionary stance in a modified form as a member of the CMEA, Cuba circumvented Moscow’s policy of détente whenever this policy seemed to come at the cost of the aspirations of the people from the ‘Three Continents’. Integrating these aspirations, Cuba turned into an active builder of the socialist world system with its attempts to draw into its sphere of influence countries from the ‘Three Continents’.

Gleijeses and Hatzky have presented Cuban-Angolan cooperation as an essential bilateral cooperation. The present contribution adds the CMEA level – and shows how the cooperation of Cuba with other European CMEA states spread to Africa. The CMEA was no supranational organisation.²⁹ As an economically weakly integrated organisation, the CMEA rarely acted on a multilateral level in the “Three Continents”. The decisions to intervene in a specific country or region were taken at the highest political level of the respective nation states. The CMEA entertained commissions following areas of responsibility for product lines (e.g. sugar, oil, citrus, etc.) or services (e.g. labour) by organising meetings of the respective ministers and experts. But at most it coordinated the action of its member states in third countries, by assembling them in subject-specific commissions. The implementation again was the affair of each single member state or bi- or trilateral cooperation among them. Multilateral CMEA projects like the construction of the Las Camariocas nickel plant in Cuba showed a tendency to be never-ending. Additionally, the CMEA issued its own grants for universities and professional high schools in its member states for students from ‘developing’ countries outside the CMEA. Until 1987 more than 7500 such grants had been offered.³⁰ These were financed at the CMEA level but implemented by the respective nation-states.

At the economic level, Cuban ‘internationalism’ was implemented in bilateral or trilateral cooperation with European CMEA countries in Angola. In the present article, the triangular cooperation with the GDR in Angola is described as one such example. This cooperation tied Cuba closely to the socialist world, as demonstrated by the level of the international Cuban-East German-Angolan personal entanglements engendered by that cooperation. Entanglements are here understood as interactions over a certain period of time – in this case one-and-a-half decades – and which qualify as systemic, meaning that they were part of the socialist world system, made up by the member states of the CMEA and linked to one another by an overall politico-economic framework. These were thus part of larger integrated comprehensive programmes of ‘International Solidarity’, of ‘Scientific-Technical and Cultural-Scientific Relations’, and of trade relations according to ‘mutual interest’, which constituted what was called in the terminology of the competing system integrated ‘development’ programmes. The ‘solidarity’ line was conceived as assistance without economic interest while ‘mutual interest’ included ‘mutual economic interest’. ‘Scientific-Technical and Cultural-Scientific Relations’ were in between these two other options, i.e. transfers at advantageous conditions for the economically weaker partner. These ‘development’ programmes had a strong educational basis: mass literacy, mass education, higher education, the building of educational systems, and the training of teachers. Additionally, the development and educational mission of personnel set in motion were supposed to contribute to their self-education, to their progress towards the ‘integral development’ (allseitige Entwicklung, educación integral) of their personality. Hence one emphasis of this article is on personnel flows set in motion by such development efforts. The other emphasis is on education and self-education as part of this mobility experience.

Forms of Party and State organised socialist intercontinental personal mobility: Experts, ‘Internationalists’ and ‘Brigadists’

We can examine the organised circulation of the following groups between Cuba, the GDR, and third countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as part of a socialist system of intercontinental personnel flows occasioned by the party and state organisations. After Cuba’s admission to the CMEA, thousands of experts from European CMEA countries, foremost the Soviet Union, then Bulgaria and the GDR, were sent to Cuba. In 1980, the total figure was 2,500 from all CMEA countries.³¹ In the mid-1970s, a shift in CMEA policy to ‘immaterial exports’ promoted the export of experts and advisory services in a broad range of conditions from ‘solidarity’ services free of charge to services to be paid in convertible currency.³² Cuba took the initiative in sending civilian and military personnel to the ‘Three Continents’. Thousands of development workers (called Internacionalistas, people accomplishing a task of ‘international solidarity’) were sent from Cuba to Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Nicaragua and Vietnam – to name just a few major destinations. After the Soviet Union, Cuba became the largest CMEA provider of personnel to countries of the ‘Three Continents’. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, Cuba had 8,250 civilian ‘internationalists’ in action in the peak year of 1979, nearly 6,700 of them in Angola. That number levelled off in the following years to around 5,000 or 6,000, declining to approximately 3,000 by 1988.³³ By contrast, they had risen to around 4,000 in Nicaragua at the onset of the 1980s.³⁴ Who were these ‘internationalists’? With regard to the very diverse types of their mission, it is difficult to establish a common social or educational profile. The government advisor, executive administrator, the economic expert, the chicken rearing expert, the nurse, the doctor, the student teacher or the administrative staff had few features in common. They were generally young, ideally without family, although especially senior staff went with spouses, leaving behind children in Cuba; and they were ideally members of the PCC or the UJC, yet far from all were. In Angola, the UJC attempted to balance a perceived gender imbalance by encouraging the sending of women.³⁵ In Nicaragua, female ‘internationalists’ were called back when the security situation deteriorated seriously in the mid-1980s.³⁶

Cuba provided these personnel services for politically friendly countries free of charge, making exceptions for those countries endowed with foreign currency. Angola, with its oil and coffee production sold on the world market, was for some years (from 1978 to 1983) made part of US$-paying category before it once again received assistance at no cost.³⁷ As a consequence, the Angolans reduced the number of Cuban personnel from 7,000 to 4,000.³⁸ The introduction of remunerations thus also served as an economic regulator for the ever-increasing demand for Cuban ‘internationalists’ free of charge. At the same time, 6,000 experts of non-socialist countries, among them many Portuguese, were active in Angola.³⁹

A special form of intercontinental mobility were youth brigades. ‘Friendship Brigades’ (Freundschaftsbrigaden) – founded in 1964, shortly after the US Peace Corps – were the first state party organisations sending youth to the ‘Three Continents’. Organised by the Central Council of the Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend, or FDJ), these Friendship Brigades were conceived of by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) as a specific form of international solidarity. That is, they were part of the foreign policy and of the ‘scientific-technical’, ‘cultural-scientific’ and economic relations of the GDR with developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.⁴⁰ Their activities focused on providing technical and professional training and education for young people in the countries of mission; assisting the GDR’s development efforts in the countries of mission; and supporting the activities of the local youth organisations by advisors, especially through assistance in the formation of national youth organisations. Participants in these brigades were selected according to not only their professional, but also their political and moral, qualities. They were to bring about ‘people’s friendship’ and provide mutual education between the participants in their organised encounters. Their mission was supposed to be part of their all-around education (allseitige Erziehung) into an integrally-developed socialist personality.

The imperative of mutual ‘friendly’ or ‘internationalist’ understanding was not easy to implement in practice. Activity reports reveal a delicate uncertainty over the controversial questions of how to practice ‘friendship’ and internationalism on the basis of gross inequality. The ‘friends’ from the ‘Three Continents’ were supposed to be handled with kid gloves and their peculiarities respected. That overall maxim stood in potential conflict with the educational paradigm of socialist ideas about development: ‘developing new ways of thinking and behaving’. This tension was expressed in a concern about how to deal with otherness in the practice of cooperation. The emphasis on otherness, on cultural differences that should be respected, was in contrast to the universalistic notion of progress towards socialism as a common human matter based on a similar model that might apply to everyone.

At the end of the 1970s, the Cuban youth organisation began to follow the example of the FDJ and the Komsomol, its counterpart in the Soviet Union. The UJC sent Technical Youth Brigades (Brigadas Técnicas Juveniles) to Angola and Libya with the task of integral education (formación integral) and training for both the locals and the brigadists in the health and construction sectors.⁴¹ In order to meet the great need for teaching personnel in Angola, a new line of postings was created. Brigades of pre-graduate teacher-students, called Destacamentos Internacionalistas, were sent to Angola and to Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s. Such ‘internationalist departments’ of students who had not yet graduated had already been deployed in Cuba to the secondary-level boarding schools in the countryside (Escuelas Secundarias Basicas en el Campo).⁴² Starting in 1978, prospective teachers of the Destacamentos Pedagógicos Internacionalistas began to be sent to Angola. They comprised more than 2,000 persons, more than half of them women, from a total of around 11,500 ‘internationalists’ in Angola’s education sector, 500 of them in higher education.⁴³

These students were to continue their education during their missions, which thus could be seen as practical training, as learning by doing. They were sent into the struggle for education in Angola without much preparation: they lacked textbooks, were assigned teaching tasks for which they were unprepared, and had to adapt to communicating in Portuguese as well as becoming accustomed to the local teaching methods and establishing discipline in their classrooms. All this transpired under conditions of a devastating civil war. In the countryside, the Cuban teachers also had to go around armed.⁴⁴ This was armed education.

The Cuban teachers provided an all-round education, that is, one going beyond the specific subjects they taught. It encompassed what we might call ‘educational issues’ in a large sense: discipline in attending classes and in studying, as well as a collective spirit, hygiene, new roles for girls and women, and new gender relations.⁴⁵ Gifted pupils and vulnerable pupils like war orphans were sent to the ‘internationalist schools’ on the Isla de la Juventud in Cuba. In the framework of its internationalist programme, Cuba received, given its specialisation in educational services, approximately 40,000 secondary- and primary level pupils from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, with 8,000 of them from Angola. In its CMEA period, Cuba became the world’s study centre for students from the ‘Three Continents’, second only to Moscow and with greater numbers than the GDR.⁴⁶ Students from Africa, Asia and Latin America were thus being educated within the Cuban educational system. This was the extension in Cuba of the Cuban educational efforts in Angola. The other extension was represented by the European CMEA countries to which the Cubans sent university students and vocational students for education and training. Some soldiers, after having served in the Cuban military mission in Angola, got the opportunity to participate in the Cuban contract worker programmes in socialist Europe, for instance in the GDR or Hungary.⁴⁷

The UJC also sent advisors for building or upgrading its Angolan counterpart, the youth organisation of the MPLA. That youth organisation had sided with Nito Alves in the bloody clashes in May 1977 within the state party, the MPLA. Subsequently the MPLA’s youth organisation leadership was entirely dismantled by the victorious faction of the MPLA. Afterwards consultancy by the Cuban UJC began, aiming at an extensive restructuring of its brother organisation, but this process was not without conflict. Up to 100 UJC advisors assisted in this reconstruction at all levels.⁴⁸ Another one of the advisors’ tasks was to help to organise a mass literacy campaign.

East German and Cuban youth brigades were part of a larger brigade movement linking the socialist countries to the countries on the ‘socialist path of development’. The trans-continental encounters of young people of the socialist world were organised in the form of brigades. The Soviet youth organisation, Komsomol, and communist youth organisations in European socialist countries sent such brigades. The World Federation of Democratic Youth sent the ‘Juan Antonio Mella’ brigade to Africa, initiated by Cuba; solidarity brigades came to Cuba from the USA and Jamaica, and Cuba sent brigades to Chile. Cuba dispatched a large number of youth brigades to countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Cuban students were supposed to form brigades in various socialist countries of Europe during their study holidays as a complementary act of reciprocity.⁴⁹ These solidarity brigades were supposed to mediate ‘friendship between the young people of the states of the socialist world’, while providing a framework for personnel mobility.

Triangular and Multilateral Cooperation in Angola

Angola was the setting for one of those ‘hot wars amid the Cold War’, which, in the final phase of the competition between the two systems, seemed to shift the balance of power in favour of the socialist world system.⁵⁰ The Soviet Union and, above all, Cuba, as a new CMEA member state, were bringing the mantle of the CMEA into play as a development organisation thanks to their massive military and civilian aid. Angola was supposed to become a showpiece for the development policies of the CMEA countries. It seemed an appropriate country for demonstrating how decolonisation could be accomplished successfully, on the basis of rich natural resources, ‘along the socialist path of development’.

The first on the scene were the Cubans when the advance of the MPLA’s competing independence movements, the FNLA and UNITA, threatened to cut off the lifelines to Luanda, the capital city, at the end of 1975. The massive deployment of Cuban troops decided the military situation in favour of the MPLA. Cuban specialists followed in the wake of the military: coffee and sugar experts, teaching personnel, chicken production and citrus fruit experts, transportation and civil engineers, and other staff. A civil emergency programme was planned to replace the Portuguese colonial administration and its experts while also getting the Angolan economy going again. The decisive contribution of Cuba consisted of supporting the Angolan military, assisting the education and health sectors, as well as educating several thousand Angolans in Cuba (specifically, on the Isla de la Juventud in Cuba). For comparison: more than 1,000 Angolan technicians received training in the GDR.⁵¹

After militarily propping up the MPLA government in Luanda in ‘Operación Carlota’ between November 1975 and March 1976, it became a matter of developing sectors of the economy. Everything was brought in from Cuba, recalls Santiago Castro, who was commissioned in 1976 to set up chicken-breeding operations in Angola: the eggs in the incubators were Cuban, as was the entire personnel, from the feeding specialists and the butcher to the chicken battery directors.⁵² The Cuban expertise in the citrus sector and in industrial chicken rearing, to name just two examples, had originally been developed by the GDR. Cuban citrus and chicken rearing specialists then came to Angola to pass on this expertise.

Angola was the theatre of multilateral cooperation not only for Angolans but also for Soviets, East Germans, Czechoslovaks, Yugoslavs, and even Vietnamese. The CMEA member states took the lead management in certain programmes, e.g. Cuba in the coffee, sugar, citrus and poultry production.⁵³ This was the CMEA in action, though not as a multilateral organisation but via its member states. The CMEA’s role was that of a coordinator. A ‘Standing Commission of the CMEA’s Executive Committee’ to coordinate the member states’ activities in Angola was established. The representatives of the CMEA members active in the country held monthly meetings to inform each other about their respective activities. But a real coordination of the working plans did not happen, as the GDR’s commercial representative reported.⁵⁴ Nor did the CMEA negotiate trade agreements with Angola for its member states. On the contrary, some CMEA countries acted as competitors. They made bids for certain services, undercutting their competitors from other CMEA countries with the aim of outdoing them. Or they competed with the others as buyers of coffee or crude oil.⁵⁵ This shows the dual nature of the CMEA as an organisation trying to organise the interests of its member states in joint commissions while watching them compete with each other instead of collaborating in practice.

Since the beginning of the 1980s, Angola tried to win over the CMEA as a multilateral donor, in addition to its individual member states. Angola had observer status at the CMEA since the mid-1980s. In 1984, Angola expressed a desire for multilateral cooperation with the CMEA. Angola’s attempts to get closer to the CMEA were presumably instigated by Cuba in its role of chairing the CMEA’s Citrus Commission. Cuban specialists came to Angola in 1980 to look at the citrus orchards and work out a programme for their restoration.⁵⁶ In 1987, a CMEA–Angola Joint Economic Commission was founded as an attempt to lift cooperation to the multilateral level. In 1987, the head of the GDR delegation, the deputy head of the GDR Planning Commission, Dieter Albrecht, was appointed chairman of the CMEA delegation at the first meeting of the CMEA–Angola Joint Economic Commission.⁵⁷ This shows the GDR as a proponent of cooperation with Angola. Yet the GDR representatives themselves warned against having hope that the CMEA would become a multilateral actor in Angola. They did not consider it realistic to expand the cooperation beyond the bilateral level: ‘From the experience of the GDR in cooperation with the CMEA, however, it should be made clear that in the interests of the swift implementation of the problems at hand, one should not wait for multilateral agreements.’⁵⁸ Such was the advice of the chairman of the Joint Economic Commission CMEA–Angola to his Angolan colleagues.

Against the background of the coordination difficulties of the CMEA, varying forms of trilateral and multilateral cooperation among the CMEA countries were developed in Angola. Although the present article is concerned with triangular relations between the GDR, Cuba, and Angola, we should not leave out the role of the Soviet Union. Besides Cuba, the Soviet Union was Angola’s most important partner. It was responsible for military aid, sending advisors and weapons. Yet it was also active in a number of civil sectors. In 1977, there were 500 civilian specialists from the Soviet Union in Angola, including government advisors and planning specialists.⁵⁹ The role of the Soviet Union in Angola was essential. If quadrilateral relations have not been mentioned in this article, this is only due to the sources available. In GDR or Cuban archival materials, the Soviet Union is only indirectly discernible.

Cuba maintained economic structures within the framework of its own civil administration. In Angola, it had an economic office, whose chairman was a high official (vice-ministro) of the Cuban Ministry of Labour,⁶⁰ as well as a trade policy department. The Cuban coffee and citrus specialists tried to get agricultural production going again under the adverse circumstances of the war. Cuban sugar experts were also active in Angola where they restarted sugar refineries.⁶¹ Cuba delivered 70,000 tons of sugar on commercial (i.e. not preferential) terms against direct payment, at the same time providing a loan of US$15 million for printing schoolbooks.⁶²

Nonetheless, these figures show that the magnitude of commercial economic relations between Cuba and Angola was negligible. In the 1980s, the ‘People’s Republic of Angola’ conducted 90% of its foreign trade with non-socialist countries.⁶³ The GDR had some economic benefit through barter trade agreements allowing it to obtain Angolan coffee harvested with Cuban assistance and some oil produced under Cuban protection; spending convertible currency was therefore not required.⁶⁴ But the massive politico-military support from Cuba was not reflected on the level of economic dealings. In addition to agreements on ‘scientific and technical cooperation’, Cuba also concluded agreements on economic trade relations. Yet its share of commercial trade in relation to the other activities in Angola was (alongside the Soviet Union) the lowest among the CMEA countries.

Business and trade were certainly not the Cubans’ strength. They guarded the oil production facilities in Cabinda run by US companies, the economic lifeline of the Angolan MPLA government. But they did not make an economic profit from this oil. Cuban cooperation in Angola revealed economic logic subordinated to political goals.⁶⁵ It was thus not engaged in that oil-rich country for economic profit. Even the temporary hard currency compensation of Cuban services by the Angolan state did not make this mission an economic gain.⁶⁶ The intervention had political goals: to make Angola a showpiece that an ‘underdeveloped’ country could be successfully developed on a ‘socialist path of development’.

‘We can say with satisfaction that the close cooperation between members of the FDJ Friendship Brigades and members of the UJC in Cuba has also proven itself on the African continent – as in the People’s Republic of Angola or in the Republic of Guinea’, the FDJ reported in 1977–78.⁶⁷ The Cubans, together with East German specialists and Friendship Brigadists, organised the harvest and transport of Angolan coffee.⁶⁸ In the case of coffee, the second most important export sector for Angola, Cuban coffee specialists, transport workers, and the military, as well as the Friendship Brigadists, helped to secure the (meagre) harvest; that coffee was then exported partly to the world market and partly to the GDR in barter. The proceeds from the world market were used to pay for part of the Cuban services from 1979 to 1983. Starting in 1981, the GDR purchased 11,000–15,000 tons of coffee annually from Angola on a barter basis as a replacement for failed Ethiopian coffee deliveries (which were also based on barter). This was recognised by the GDR as a ‘political decision by the Angolan party and state leadership with the aim of forming ever closer relations with the GDR’ and as a special acknowledgment of the role played by the GDR. That made the GDR, as its officials proudly stated, the only CMEA state to be granted an exception from Angola’s rule of only selling coffee in exchange for foreign currency.⁶⁹

Tens of thousands of tons of coffee were stored in coffee warehouses which had been unable to be moved since the infrastructure had been destroyed. Cuban specialists were able to revive the logistics of coffee export.⁷⁰ However, an attempt to operate the coffee plantations left behind by the Portuguese planters as state farms with Cuban participation had little success. Coffee exports fell steadily.⁷¹

Vietnam, the third non-European member state of CMEA since 1978 following Mongolia and Cuba, offered to send 1,000 rice specialists to Angola to help it achieve self-sufficiency in rice production. Cuba worked together with the Soviet Union and Vietnam on this programme.⁷² It is noteworthy that war-torn Vietnam sent not only students and workers to Europe for training but also thousands of professionals to Africa to train African personnel.⁷³ Vietnamese military advisors also tried to convey to Nicaraguan colleagues their experiences of guerrilla warfare against (US-trained) troops.⁷⁴ In 1983, the GDR’s special trade representative attempted to arrange a triangular trade deal, according to which Angola should supply the GDR with additional coffee for rice from Vietnam.⁷⁵

The triangular relationship between Angola and its two main supporters, the Soviet Union and Cuba, was anything but conflict-free. There were massive strategic differences between the Soviet military advisors and the Cuban troop command.⁷⁶ These differences also had an impact on relations with the GDR. The ‘Cuban comrades also have a slightly different view than we do on certain questions about development in Angola’, the GDR Ministry of State Security cautiously explained to its boss Erich Mielke.⁷⁷ The internal fractioning within the MPLA, which erupted in bloody clashes in May 1977, found the Soviet Union and Cuba on opposing sides.⁷⁸ Cuban representatives spoke ironically of three factions within the MPLA: pro-Western, pro-Western, and ‘capitulistas’, as was reported by the embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Luanda. Agostinho Neto’s successor as president, José dos Santos, was said to have had a difficult stance against politically intransigent Cubans during his visit to Havana.⁷⁹ Yet, by and large, the cooperation worked in a way that made Angola for some time a showpiece for the intercontinental assistance of the CMEA in Africa. The Cuba–Soviet Union axis was decisive for the cooperation of the CMEA countries with Angola in both political and personnel respects.

Divergences appeared in material expectations and living standards. Regarding questions of food and lifestyle, opinions diverged over what was a reasonable standard. The Cubans, including many women, worked in Angola on terms that the East Germans generally found unacceptable. The Angolan comrades were amazed at the ‘high demands for housing and living conditions’ placed on them by the FDJ Friendship Brigades, something reported by the secretary general in the GDR foreign ministry in 1977 – and not without sympathy for the Angolan position. The North Korean and Cuban comrades would never have made such demands.⁸⁰ Complaints about the food – monotonous meals that would have been unusual in the GDR, consisting only of noodles or of roasted game or of fish ‘without anything else’ – are documented among Friendship Brigadists and skilled workers from the GDR. Dissatisfaction with the unfamiliar living conditions in Angola meant that half of the Friendship Brigadists in Gabela considered abandoning the mission after they had returned to the GDR on a brief vacation.⁸¹ That was the case in spite of all the talk of political solidarity and the possibility of receiving part of one’s ‘pocket money’ in foreign currencies. The Angolan side, which was responsible for the lodging and food supply, refused to pay in convertible currencies the provisions for the Friendship Brigadists which had been flown in from the GDR by its own supply chains.⁸² The ‘normal living standards of the GDR specialists’ were far above those of their colleagues in other socialist countries, as a report by the GDR’s State Security noted critically.

Ultimately these circumstances appeared to reinforce ‘some reservations of the partners about working with GDR specialists’.⁸³ Those in charge of the GDR also had ideas about cadre protection which differed from those of their Angolan colleagues. Security problems for the East German collectives related to the ongoing civil war led to tensions with the Angolan side when they resulted in the work being stopped, for the Angolans perceived such security measures as breaches of contract.⁸⁴

These two examples show the gap between the material demands of East Germans and Cubans in Angola. In terms of the living standards they required, the Cubans were less demanding and less expensive, and, in the view of the Angolans, they were less complicated in their demands for security. Owing to security concerns, Cubans showed up armed and thus did not require any special safety precautions. Since the East Germans had no troops in Angola, the Cubans were charged with the security issues. This distinction in lifestyles and expectations about the material standard of living was not a deliberate demarcation but an expression of the fairly different conditions in the emissaries’ respective countries of origin. After all, Cuba, following its self-definition, was an ‘under-developed’ country. Generally speaking, the different emphases in the orientations of the GDR and Cuba in Angola – the higher degree of economic interest and of paid expert services on the German side – did not translate to open criticism, at least not in the sources at disposal for this article.

Cuba’s Role in the Socialist World as a Personnel Provider

By far the most important area of Cuban cooperation with Angola was the posting of personnel. In the period from 1975 until the end of the Cuban mission in 1991, Cuba sent around 50,000 civilian specialists to Angola.⁸⁵ In addition to the soldiers who decided the war in the MPLA’s favour, the Cuban state sent thousands of civilian ‘internationalists’: in 1982, 5,000 such Cubans were working in Angola, 1,500 of them in popular education (which included primary and secondary schools), 400 doctors, another 180 Cubans in the health sector, 200 agricultural specialists, and 120 in the university sector.⁸⁶ Cuba also sent several thousand construction workers to reconstruct the destroyed infrastructure in Angola and to train Angolans.⁸⁷ While the experts from the European CMEA countries mostly worked as consultants or trainers, the Cubans also worked operationally, that is, their teachers taught Angolan children in place of the Angolan teaching staff, who were unavailable or missing. This provision of personnel kept the Angolan state alive or, put better: it helped to develop it in the first place. It formed the personnel lifeline for the country, just as the Cuban and Soviet military missions formed its military lifeline and state participation in the oil production revenues of the US corporations formed its financial lifeline.

The Angolan example demonstrates Cuba’s role in providing much of the human cohesion for the CMEA. The country became the CMEA’s personnel pool for the extra-European sphere.⁸⁸ Cuban personnel – those sent in mission were called ‘internationalists’ to underline the political side of their mission – helped to foster the coherence of the CMEA as an intercontinental organisation. Cuba thereby became a link between the continents and a platform in the CMEA for the ‘Three Continents’. The countries on a ‘socialist path of development’ at the margins of the CMEA became theatres of multilateral socialist cooperation. The Cubans sent out specialists, doctors and nurses, and, above all, teachers. Their numbers were second only to the Soviets. At the end of the 1970s, more than 40.000 Soviet specialists (engineers, experts, trained workers) were working in ‘developing countries’.⁸⁹ There were not much less Cubans in absolute numbers. At the beginning of the 1980s, a total of 25.000 ‘internationalists’, and, by 1987, more than 20.000 Cuban teachers were reported to have been in mission in the ‘Three Continents’.⁹⁰ In the 1980s, Cuba is said to have been the country in the world with the highest percentage of citizens sent on civil foreign missions.⁹¹ Around 30 percent of the delegates of the PCC congresses in 1980 and 1986 had undertaken “internationalist” missions.⁹² This shows that the sending of ‘internationalists’ was a major aspect of Cuba’s foreign policy in its CMEA period.

The Cuban ‘internationalists’, in comparison with their European colleagues in Angola, had a reputation of simplicity and modesty: they lived without great material needs and demands; they were known for their adaptability to work in conditions without expensive technical devices; and they agreed to work in much more frugal conditions than their East German colleagues.⁹³ The ‘internationalists’ lived in more modest settlements and their costs were thus considerably lower than those of specialists from European CMEA countries.⁹⁴

How did Cubans in Angola deal with the inequality they were faced with? And what were the regulations and practices for dealing with situations of inequality in such encounters?

The political claim of ‘international solidarity’ or ‘internationalism’ went hand-in-hand with a separation in life-worlds.⁹⁵ This was intended to prevent mixing among diverse groups of people, something that experience has shown to lead to undesirable phenomena, such as conflicts on the basis of different ways of life or of the merging of bodies (sexuality, prostitution) and objects (illicit barter). In addition, every external contact was seen as a potential security risk. Thus, Cuban communities had limited exchanges with the surrounding population. Contacts were restricted by the authorities not only for security reasons – in a civil guerrilla war, the enemy is invisible and may be the relative of your pupil – but also as a result of a realistic assessment of potential perils due to uncontrolled interactions between such unequal groups of people, thereby resulting in black market activities, prostitution, or conflicts based on different customs.

The Cuban ‘internationalists’ lived in separate communal lodgings (predios). They were organised in collectives, as was typical of social and political life at that time. In party and youth organisation meetings, participants would give accountability reports on their professional and personal development. They were evaluated, and cases of irregular and deviant behaviour were discussed and punished. In Angola, the food supply often even came from Cuba because there was nothing to buy in the country itself. All of this gave rise to a specifically Cuban world in Angola: Cuban enclaves where the ‘internationalists’, many of whom had left the island for the first time in their life, found a Cuban life in very different surroundings. This was internationalism in practice, the organisational expression of a special way of dealing with ‘intercultural encounters’, as it would be called ex post facto.

A paramount instruction to the Cubans was to respect local customs. But they had difficulties accepting the traditional role of women as ‘beasts of burden’ or the importance of ‘backward’ tribal habits like traditional medicine in Angola.⁹⁶ In the archives, one finds repeated entreaties to ‘respect the laws and customs of the country’ of mission, giving the impression that this had to be repeatedly emphasised. The Cuban ‘internationalists’ thus found themselves faced with the challenge of all those living and working in situations of gross inequality. Inequality in material living conditions – with so many starving people around – provoked memories of the Cuban ‘internationalists’, of ‘backward’ habits that Cuba’s progressive society had overcome, such as poor hygiene, appalling relations between men and women, and bewilderingly apathetic attitudes towards death.⁹⁷ All this gave the impression of people who were living in very different communities.⁹⁸ ‘An encounter between science and local customs is at work in Angola’, read the caption under a depiction of a Cuban doctor with a raised index finger standing before a traditionally dressed Angolan peasant woman.⁹⁹ This image epitomises the sentiment of belonging to an advanced society bringing progress to a society less advanced on the ladder of the stages of human history.

Such inequalities represented elements of separation from the local population, elements grounded in everyday life. The prescription of solidarity had to coexist with this sense of profound material and cultural differences. Cuban ‘internationalists’ had problems becoming accustomed to ‘backward’ customs of the locals in Angola. The head of the Cuban civil administration in Angola, Jorge Risquet, described ‘cultural backwardness, technical ignorance, illiteracy’ as the main problems of the ‘Angolan people’.¹⁰⁰ The prescriptions for respecting differences had to coexist with the essentially socialist drive for ‘progress’ expressed in this statement. Further, it was an expression of the ‘developmental’ worldview of Cuban officials. After all, the Cubans had come to Angola, along with other citizens of socialist countries, to assist that country as agents of change on its ‘socialist path of development’ – viewed as the path of profound change on all levels.

Education in Mission

Just as they did in the GDR and other European socialist countries, the Cubans built self-government structures in Angola, thereby allowing them to re-create (to a certain extent) their Cuban lives back home. In Angola, these structures of civilian self-government were the corollary of the independent military mission. They consisted of an economic office, party and youth organisation structures, the heads of mission of the different sectors of collaboration, a security apparatus, and logistical structures. Such self-government replaced non-existing or deficient Angolan structures for each sphere of everyday life. The head was the Cuban ambassador to the country. In Angola, at first, this position was filled by Jorge Risquet, the Africa specialist of the party leadership, a veteran of the 1965 Cuban internationalist military mission in Congo-Brazzaville, and later the Cuban minister of labour, who managed the huge Cuban infrastructure.¹⁰¹

Part of this Cuban self-administration was a complementary party structure. The regulatory apparatus of the party and its youth organisation provided education and discipline. Just like the East Germans who were sent abroad and who built their own party world in the countries of mission¹⁰², the Cubans recreated their own party world. The UJC archives reveal the reality of this internal life ‘through the Party’s eye’. The party and its youth organisation acted as educational organisations: ‘The UJC worked to raise the labour demeanour of internationalist youth, improving their discipline, strengthening the social prestige of their professions and for raising their efficiency as workers’.¹⁰³ Discipline, formal education, and social behaviour, including ‘difficulties with the haircut’ - thus the tasks and functions undertaken by the UJC members sent abroad could be summarised.

In the party and youth organisations, Cubans sent abroad underwent constant evaluation. The archival materials show a tight framework of organisation and of educational and self-educational activities: there were individual plans and reports, self-evaluations, the writing of autobiographical sketches recording personal development, and trimestral and annual evaluations of the work and personal performance.¹⁰⁴ Time and again, the documents reveal the significance of self-criticism, emphasised for the process of educating oneself, based on a ‘feeling of responsibility for the evil in us’ (… sentirnos responsables de lo malo en alguno de nosotros).¹⁰⁵ These young internationalists were ‘worked over’ in Angola in the meetings of the UJC collective by means of ‘criticism and self-criticism’. These self-statements were complemented by personal evaluations conducted by the party or UJC organisation. Negative evaluations could be that the person in question had lost ‘all authority’ and this could lead to a ‘loss of the grade of an advanced personality’. The positive aspect of this personal evaluation was demonstrating the progress made while in the country of mission. The mission was thus seen as part of the personal development of the developers. The Cubans acted as developing developers, part of the plan that the mission contribute to a process of ‘crecimiento’, that is, the growth of the socialist personality in mission.

Contacts, Interactions, and Conflicts

What kinds of interactions developed between Cubans, East Germans, and Angolans?

The general attitude of the authorities was prudent separation and the formalisation of contacts. Wherever possible, there were separate organisations, and contacts were then organised through these organisations. The official media of contact were brigades (as entities of interaction), youth festivals, official ‘friendship’ meetings, cultural-geographical information evenings, celebrations, and folk and sporting events – all of them arranged on the basis of a common Marxist-Leninist worldview displayed in that official sphere. In practice, this ideal was often subverted by individuals meeting informally, fraternising in all possible circumstances, and engaging in contact; consequently, conflict of all sorts took place. Beyond the lines of institutional entanglement, situations of personal entanglement could be quite diverse between ordinary Cubans and the locals at the workplace or in joint projects. In addition, there were Cuban physical entanglements with the local population. On the one hand, the encounter of the Cubans with their counterparts could be characterised by formal and prudent internationalism aiming to bridge a gap of substantial divergence. On the other, such encounters could also be characterised by mutual understanding on the basis of similar age or political affiliation. Experts came into conflict or shied away from contact with their local counterparts because they sensed an unbridgeable disparity. Or alternatively, they engaged in productive professional cooperation.

Contacts and interactions did not always go smoothly. We should not forget that most of the Cuban ‘internationalists’ were travelling out of Cuba for the first time in their lives. The same was true for most of their East German counterparts and even more for their Angolan ones.

Despite separation regulations, the Cubans ‘fraternised’ with the local population in the sexual sense – primarily Cuban men with local women. Sexual contact with locals, though not encouraged, was tolerated if it did not infringe on security regulations, health prevention, or ‘socialist morality’, and did not lead to pregnancy. After having rigid attitudes in the beginning, the Cuban authorities took a pragmatic view of things. The interstate framework organising intercontinental mobility within and at the margins of the CMEA operated in a quite specific way. The control of personnel was largely left to the country and party of origin – as far as its was able to put a system of surveillance into practice – which was seen as responsible for ‘its’ citizens even if they were situated abroad. Each respective national representation was held responsible for its co-nationals. The Cubans built a sort of Cuban self-government in Angola as well as in the GDR. When problems occurred with Cubans in Angola or in the GDR, the Angolan or East German authorities turned to the Cuban embassy to undertake educational or punitive measures. The ‘internationalism’ of the socialist world thus displayed strong national-state and national-cultural features. The Cubans on the move between the continents were seen as Cubans first. They were to live out their cultural habits in the framework of an internationalism comprised of ‘national colours’ and they were supposed to come home endowed with a strengthened Cuban national conscience as a consequence of their mission. As the lines of mobility of the Cubans were designed as temporary endeavours, less emphasis was placed on integration measures. Remaining in the country of mission was not part of the programme, it was viewed as an undesirable, exceptional situation. Or it was viewed potentially as an expression of inadequacy on the part of the applicants who, instead of their training, were more concerned with personal relationships or, in the case of the GDR, driven by interests of a higher level of material livelihood. Such requests were therefore treated restrictively.¹⁰⁶ ‘Friendship between peoples’ and ‘proletarian internationalism’ took place at political and cultural festivals such as the ‘Festival of Friendship of Young People’ and the ‘friendship meetings’ of political organisations. Spontaneous contact outside of this framework was to be reduced to a minimum, based on the pragmatic experience that they potentially led to problems. Yet much informal contact still took place in everyday life.

Conclusion

In this article, the CMEA appeared in the form of the actions of its discrete member states as a weak coordinating instance. It has shown Cuba in its role as an intercontinental mediator and its personnel entanglements as a cohesive force in the socialist world system. Despite the conflicts that these encounters generated, they are presented as a factor linking the socialist world. Flows of experts, youth activists, students, and workers represented a line of development relations linking Cuba, the GDR, and Angola. The intercontinental contacts between people of very diverse backgrounds were one of the few efforts to put into practice the ideal of ‘proletarian internationalism’ or of ‘friendship between peoples’. The present contribution thus claims that the intercontinental mobility of thousands of specialists, experts, technicians, workers and students became a factor of cohesion of the weakly integrated CMEA. Triangular or multilateral trans-continental CMEA cooperation – with European-Cuban-African cooperation in countries like Angola, Ethiopia, and Nicaragua – created a situation of Cuban-European-African entanglement. All these people from the socialist world who were set in motion across the continents were brought into contact with each other. They were crossing the borders of their nation-states of origin, thereby substantiating the notion of a socialist world system through the circulation of personnel. By means of these personnel mobilities, the socialist world system developed its own particular forms of globalisation – or probably more appropriately called internationalisation if we consider that the decisive actors remained pronounced nation-states. Cubans supplied the core of the intercontinental personnel interface in the socialist world. Cuban ‘internationalists’ served as a bridge between European and Angolan worlds.

These forms of mobility demonstrate that the socialist programmes aiming at convergence between the European and non-European member states of the CMEA at its margins (such as in Angola) were intensive in the formation of human resources. Education and training by means of personnel transfers played a more important role than capital transfers. Behind the prescriptions of equality, they show a developmental hierarchy: Cuba was to be developed by the European socialist countries, Angola by both Cubans and Europeans.

These mobility programmes were closely planned and supervised by party and state organisations. Contacts and encounters were to take an officially organised form. Party organisations served as platforms for mediating inequality between the deployed personnel and the locals. However, these relations could easily degenerate into conflict on the basis of divergent lifestyles in the case that they could not be bridged by the official uniting practices and the ideology of ‘internationalism’. The rank and file could turn recalcitrant to ‘educational efforts’ at making them decent socialist citizens sensitive to the surroundings of their socialist brother states. International understanding was not necessarily increasing. It was an open-ended affair. Encounters could result in relations of mutual transfer or alternatively in relations of conflict that might ultimately lead to disentanglement.

Cuba and the GDR come to the fore as educational states. The Cubans as well as the East Germans sent abroad were to be supervised and educated in mission by collectives led by party and youth organisations. The forms of mobility examined in this contribution were closely linked to the aim of personal education based on a broad concept of education in practice. It aimed not only at the transfer of professional knowledge but also at the adoption of manners, habits, and behaviour appropriate for socialist citizens. Even more, this integral education was supposed to lead to the ‘deletion of the deformations, the hereditary burden and the ballast which the society of exploitation has deposited for centuries in the human conscience’ as well as to ‘form human beings liberated from the ballast of selfishness and ignorance’, as a Cuban party official put it.¹⁰⁷ Such an education included capacity-building and professional training on the ground, as well as political-civic education and guidelines for behaviour. If the organisation and close monitoring of personal contacts was the means of bridging divergence, education was the main instrument for bringing more equality into this divergence.

The lines of entanglement between Cuba and the GDR as CMEA members as well as their triangular entanglement in Angola evolved for less than two decades. In such a short period, the effectiveness of the CMEA as the framework for development efforts could not have been tested. In the case of Cuba, it came at the cost of importing an economic system that quite soon turned out to be non-competitive in relation to the capitalist one. In Angola, such an economic system was never implemented. The MPLA regime survived the collapse of the socialist world, reinventing itself as an oil-rentier state beyond ‘socialist orientation’. The personal circulations, however, had a ‘globalising’ effect: they linked continents through flows of people. Inasmuch as the system collapsed from its centre, the general outcomes of these programmes remain uncertain. The convergence programme through the described personnel flows ended for politico-economic reasons external to the relations between Cuba and the CMEA. The Cuban socialist globalising line of sending military and civilian internationalists ended with the collapse of the socialist world. It was replaced by Cuban personnel exchange programmes on a humanitarian and a commercial basis in another era – the era of the globalisation of the capitalist world system.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no potential conflicts of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Gerda Henkel Foundation and the; FWF/Austrian Science Fund [P 32212-G31].

Notes

¹ Although research is increasingly drawing attention to this: see, for example Vladislav Zubok, ‘Introduction’, in Patryk Babiracki, Kenyon Zimmer, eds., Cold War Crossings. International Travel and Exchange across the Soviet Bloc, 1940s–1960s (Arlington: Texas A&M University Press, 2014), 10; James Mark, Artemy M. Kalinovsky, Steffi Marung, eds., Alternative globalizations. Eastern Europe and the postcolonial world (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020).

² ‘Grundprinzipien der internationalen sozialistischen Arbeitsteilung vom 7.6.1962’, printed in Curt Gasteyger, Europa zwischen Spaltung und Einigung 1945 bis 1993. Darstellung und Dokumentation (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 1994), 214–219; ‘Schrittweise Annäherung und Angleichung des ökonomischen Entwicklungsniveaus der Mitgliedländer des RGW’, in Rat für gegenseitige Wirtschaftshilfe, Komplexprogramm für die weitere Vertiefung und Vervollkommnung der Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung der sozialistischen ökonomischen Integration der Mitgliedländer des RGW (Moscow: APN, 1971), 13–16.

³ This article is a preliminary result of two research projects: ‘Entanglements Cuba-GDR: mobilities, exchanges, circulations within the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA/COMECON)’ (lead researcher: the author, research collaborator: Claudia Martínez Hernández), FWF/Austrian Science Fund, 2019–2023; and ‘Trans-continental circulations within the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. The example of labour mobility between Cuba and the GDR (1975–1990)’, Gerda Henkel-Stiftung, Düsseldorf (lead researcher: the author), 2018–2019.

⁴ Carmelo Mesa-Lago, The Economy of Socialist Cuba. A Two-Decade Appraisal (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981); Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Breve historia económica de la Cuba socialista. Política, resultados y perspectivas (Madrid: Allianza Editorial, 1994).

⁵ Jorge Perez-Lopez, Sergio Diaz-Briquets, ‘Labor Migration and Offshore Assembly in the Socialist World: The Cuban Experience’, Population and Development Review 16:2 (1990), 273–99.

⁶ Jorge Domínguez, To Make a World Safe for Revolution. Cuba’s Foreign Policy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), 147–183; Michael Erisman, John Kirk, eds., Cuban Foreign Policy Confronts a New International Order (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991); John Kirk, Michael Erisman, Cuban Medical Internationalism. Origins, Evolution, and Goals (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Anne Hickling-Hudson, Jorge Corona González, Rosemary Preston, eds., The Capacity to Share. A Study of Cuba’s International Cooperation in Educational Development (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Julie Feinsilver, ‘Fifty Years of Cuba’s Medical Diplomacy: From Idealism to Pragmatism’, Cuban Studies 41(2010).

⁷ Berthold Unfried, ‘A Cuban cycle of development socialism? Cubans and East Germans in the Socialist World System’, Journal für Entwicklungspolitik 23:3 (2017), 69–90.

⁸ This approach has not been put forward in: Uwe Müller, Dagmara Jajesniak-Qast, eds., ‘Comecon revisited. Integration in the Eastern Bloc and Entanglements with the Global Economy’, Comparativ. Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und Vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 5–6 (2017).

⁹ Max Trecker, Red Money for the Global South: East-South economic relations in the Cold War (London: Routledge, 2021), uses the asynchronous term ‘Global South’, which blurs the distinction between ‘socialist path of development’ and other ‘developing countries’ resulting in a different treatment by CMEA countries.

¹⁰ Conference Report, ‘Alternative Forms of Globalization? The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) as Development Organization’, 13–14 November 2020, [accessed online: H-Soz-Kult, 28 January 2021: https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-8856].

¹¹ Sara Lorenzini, ‘Comecon and the South in the years of détente: a study on East-South economic relations’, European Review of History / Révue Européenne d’Histoire 21:2 (2014), 183–99; Sara Lorenzini, Una strana guerra fredda. Lo sviluppo e le relazioni Nord-Sud (Bologna: Il mulino, 2017), 116–17.

¹² Radoslav Yordanov, ‘Cuba and the Soviet Bloc. Searching for the Last Guardians of Socialism’, Journal of Contemporary History 56:4 (2021), 1171–94.

¹³ The ‘mobility’ approach has been popularized in the high time of ‘Globalization’ theories by John Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), and the Global History wave, conceptualized for the field of ‘development experts’ by Hans-Dieter Evers, Wissen ist Macht: Experten als strategische Gruppe (Zentrum für Entwicklungsforschung, Universität Bonn, Working Paper Series Nr. 8, 2005), and more recently applied to the broad field of this study by: Anna Calori et al., eds., Between East and South. Spaces of interaction in the globalizing economy of the Cold War (Berlin, De Gruyter, 2019); James Mark, Artemy M. Kalinovsky, Steffi Marung, eds., Alternative globalizations. Eastern Europe and the postcolonial world (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020); Christina Schwenkel, ‘Rethinking Asian Mobilities: Socialist Migration and Postsocialist Repatriation of Vietnamese Contract Workers in East Germany’, Critical Asian Studies 46:2 (2014), 235–258; Alena Alamgir, ‘Mobility: Education and Labour’, in James Mark, Paul Betts, eds., Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the age of decolonization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 290–317.

¹⁴ ‘Decolonization, the Cold War and Armed Conflict in Southern Africa, 1974–1988’, Journal of Cold War Studies 21:1 (2019).

¹⁵ Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom. Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). Gleijeses made documents from the Cuban archives which he used available at: Wilson Digital Archive, https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/.

¹⁶ Christine Hatzky, Kubaner in Angola. Süd-Süd-Kooperation und Bildungstransfer 1976–1991 (Munich: De Gruyter, 2012).

¹⁷ The UJC-documents used by Hatzky are dispersed pieces from private collections.

¹⁸ Bundesarchiv Berlin (BA), sections GDR and SAPMO (archives of the Party and the mass organisations).

¹⁹ One such person was Nancy Jiménez in Angola, an ‘internationalist’ turned historian (cf. one of her books quoted infra) who had already opened her address book to Christine Hatzky and Piero Gleijeses. Others include former officials of the Cuban administration in Angola, such as Emiliano Manresa and Pedro Ross. Additional interviews were made possible by occasional acquaintances: in Cuba it is very likely that one will run across persons with an ‘internationalist’ past. These interviews were also complemented by the Angolan archive material and those interviews with Angolans realised by Hatzky in her book Kubaner in Angola.

²⁰ This is the periodisation established by Mesa-Lago, Breve historia económica de la Cuba socialista.

²¹ Information über einige Maßnahmen, die in den letzten Wochen in Kuba durchgesetzt wurden, WPA Havanna/Hinkelmann, Havanna, 14 September 1972, Bundesarchiv Berlin (BA), SAPMO DY 30/27030. This view was shared by representatives of other socialist European States as is shown in Yordanov, ‘Cuba and the Soviet Bloc’, 1174, 1187.

²² Raúl Roa Kourí, En el torrente (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 2017), 293–294; Raúl Roa Kourí, interview by Claudia Martínez and Berthold Unfried, Havana, 28 February 2019.

²³ In this optimistic vein: John Gerassi: ‘A New International is Born’, in Irving L. Horowitz, José de Castro, John Gerassi, eds., Latin American Radicalism. A Documentary Report on Left and Nationalist Movements (New York: Random House, 1969), 532–42; recently, the proceedings of an international conference at the occasion of the 50-year anniversary of the ‘Tricontinental’ have been published: R. Joseph Parrott, Mark Atwood Lawrence, eds., The Tricontinental Revolution. Third World Radicalism and the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

²⁴ Berthold Unfried, Claudia Martínez, ‘El Internacionalismo, la Solidaridad y el interés mutuo. Encuentros entre cubanos, africanos y alemanes de la RDA’, Estudos Históricos 61 (2017), 425-47, [accessed at: https://bibliotecadigital.fgv.br/ojs/index.php/reh/article/view/68804/68285].

²⁵ Summarised in Unfried, ‘A Cuban cycle of development socialism?’.

²⁶ SKTUZ-meetings, BA Berlin DL 2/16935, 16972, 16979.

²⁷ Not every scholar is willing to see the socialist countries as forming a socialist world system. See, for the discussion of this debate: Christopher Chase-Dunn, ed., Socialist States in the World-System (Beverly Hills-London-New Delhi: Sage, 1982); Zeev Gorin, ‘Socialist Societies and World System Theory: A Critical Survey’, Science & Society 49:3 (1985), 332–366; Berthold Unfried, ‘Sozialistisches Weltsystem? Die Praxis internationaler Zusammenarbeit der DDR’, Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte 22:1–2 (2022), 183–207.

²⁸ The independence of the Cuban decision from the Soviet Union has convincingly been argued by Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom, but already before by William LeoGrande, Cuba’s Policy in Africa, 1959-1980 (Policy Papers in International Affairs 13) (Berkeley: University of California, 1980), and Peter Shearman, The Soviet Union and Cuba (London-New York-Andover: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987).

²⁹ Randall W. Stone, Satellites and Commissars. Strategy and Conflict in the Politics of Soviet-Bloc Trade (Princeton University Press, 1996), following a line of debate opened by Michael Marresse and Jan Vanous, Soviet Subsidization of Trade with Eastern Europe. A Soviet Perspective (Berkeley: University of California, 1983).

³⁰ Prot. der 17. Tagung der Stv. der Min. f. Hoch- und Fachschulbildung der RGW-Länder, Varna 26.-29.5.1987, BA Berlin 16974/4; Trecker, Red Money for the Global South, 142.

³¹ Following Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, ‘Entrevista a Prensa Latina’, Prague, 20 June1980, Granma, 21 June1980, cit. in: Julio Diaz Vázquez, ‘Cuba: integración económica socialista y especialización de la producción’, Economía y Desarrollo 63 (1981), 150.

³² This momentum is the subject of the author’s forthcoming (de Gruyter 2024) book: Berthold Unfried, ‘Entwicklungshilfe’ und ‘Internationale Solidarität’: Globalisierungsunternehmen in Zeiten der Systemkonkurrenz.

³³ Elías Bestard Pavón, La colaboración de Cuba con los países de Africa Subsahariana (1959–1988), (MA thesis: ISRI La Habana, 1989), Anexo VII; Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom, 84, gives the number of 7,000 civilian ‘Internationalists’ in Angola for 1978.

³⁴ Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom, 321.

³⁵ Francisco García Ferrer / J’ del Grupo de Colaboradores to c.ro Luis Orlando Domínguez / Primer Secr. del Comité Nacional de la UJC, Luanda, 15 November 1976, and Segundo Secretario to Primer Secretario, La Habana 31 January 1976, Archivo Central de la UJC, Sección de Cuadros 1975/76.

³⁶ Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom, 321; Interview with Ester Moncada, former teacher in Nicaragua, La Habana 19 October 2015.

³⁷ Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom, 327; Acuerdo Especial, 5 November 1977, Wilson Digital Archive [accessed on 13 October 2021 at: https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/117931].

See Gleijeses’ acrimonious assessment of Hatzky’s ‘discovery’ (Hatzky, Kubaner in Angola, 207–214) claiming that Angola paid material compensation for Cuban services in Angola, that this was the case only for 5 years (1978–1983), https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/110997/h-diplo-review-essay-135-cubans-angola-south-south-cooperation-and. The temporary payment by Angola for Cuban services had actually been noticed before by others: Sergio Díaz-Briquets, Jorge Pérez-López, ‘Internationalist Civilian assistance: The Cuban Presence in Sub-Saharan Africa’, in Sergio Díaz-Briquets, ed., Cuban Internationalism in Sub-Saharan Africa (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1989), 52-54; Sergio Roca, ‘Economic Aspects of Cuban Involvement in Africa’, in Carmelo Mesa-Lago, June S. Belkin, eds., Cuba in Africa (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982), 164-165, 171-172; Domínguez, To Make a World Safe for Revolution, 154-156, based on Cuban press sources; see also Piero Gleijeses, ‘La causa más bonita: Cuba y Africa 1975–1988’, in Piero Gleijeses, Jorge Risquet, Fernando Ramírez, eds., Cuba y Africa. Historia común de lucha y sangre (La Habana, 2008), 36-37.

³⁸ Acuerdo Especial, 5 November 1977, Wilson Digital Archive [accessed on 19 February 2015 at http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/117931].)

³⁹ On the basis of Cuban documents: Gleijeses, ‘La causa más bonita’, 37.

⁴⁰ Sekretariat des Zentralrates der FDJ, Bericht über die Arbeit der FDJ-Brigaden in Entwicklungsländern und die Konzeption für die Gestaltung der Arbeit der FDJ-Brigaden in den Jahren 1978/79. Berlin, 28 February 1978, BA Berlin SAPMO DY 24/22233. As pars pro toto for an already considerable literature on these brigades see the outcome of joint research in a previous research project: Eric Burton, ‘Solidarität und ihre Grenzen. Die ‘Brigaden der Freundschaft der DDR’, in Frank Bösch, Caroline Moine, Stefanie Senger, eds., Internationale Solidarität: Globales Engagement in der Bundesrepublik und der DDR (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018), 152–85. For the example of the Komsomol: Robert Hornsby, ‘The post-Stalin Komsomol and the Soviet Fight for Third World Youth’, in Cold War History 16:1 (2016), 89-94.

⁴¹ Informe de cumplimiento del plan de atención al exterior, Archivo Central de la UJC, La Habana, Dep. de Actividades científico-técnicas 1982, Seccion 7 Departamento de Organizacion 1982, 11-2-340/2.

⁴² Archivo Central de la UJC, Secretariado nacional 1972, 4.0.2: Actas de reuniones: 4-2-110/2.

⁴³ Nancy Jiménez, Mujeres sin fronteras (La Habana: Editora Política, 2009), 69, 96-97; Hatzky, Kubaner in Angola, 109.

⁴⁴ See the reports: Informes según provincias, Personal collection Lidia Turner, La Habana.

⁴⁵ See Hatzky, Kubaner in Angola, 278-279.

⁴⁶ This number is mentioned in documents of the Departamento de becas del MINREX, Archives of the Min. of Foreign Affairs (MINREX), Havana; Jiménez, Mujeres sin fronteras, 65; Hatzky, Kubaner in Angola, 239-246. For the Soviet Union: Constantin Katsakioris, ‘Transferts Est-Sud. Echanges éducatifs et formation de cadres africains en Union soviétique pendant les années soixante’, Outre-Mers 354-355 (2007), 90-91, tables of the numbers of African students until 1980.

⁴⁷ Berthold Unfried, ‘Intercontinental Labor Migration within the Socialist World: Cuban Contract Laborers in the German Democratic Republic, 1975 to 1990’, Yearbook of Transnational History 5 (2022), 141; Carta de Juan Vicente Monzón, del Comité Nacional UJC, a Julio A. Peña Hernández, Jefe Sección UJC-OPJM del CCPCC. 8 November 1988, Archivo Central de la UJC. 4.0.8 Documentos enviados al PCC para su información, José Ramón Machado Ventura 15-1-464/3; Susanne Ritschel, Kubanische Studierende in der DDR: Ambivalentes Erinnern zwischen Zeitzeuge und Archiv (Hildesheim-Zürich-New York: Georg Olms, 2015), 230–231.

⁴⁸ Informe sobre la colaboración de la UJC con la JMPLA, 23 October 1979, Archivo Central de la UJC, Segundo secretario1979, 5.0.9 Atención a Angola 9-3-282/3.

⁴⁹ The full dimension of these brigade exchanges emerges from the UJC-archives, Primer Secretario.

⁵⁰ Piero Gleijeses, ‘Kuba in Afrika 1975-1991’, in Bernd Greiner, Christian Th. Müller, and Dierk Walter, eds., Heiße Kriege im Kalten Krieg (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006), 469–510.

⁵¹ Cuba: Jiménez, Mujeres sin fronteras, 65, gives the number of 8,000 Angolan graduates in Cuba, more than one quarter (approximately 2,600) of them in higher education; Unfried, Martínez, ‘El Internacionalismo, la Solidaridad y el interés mutuo’, 425–47; Hinweise für das Gespräch mit Gen. Bernardo de Sousa, Mitglied des ZK der MPLA-Partei der Arbeit und Minister für Transport- und Nachrichtenwesen der VR Angola, 26 September 1985, BA Berlin, SAPMO Berlin, DY 3023/1464, fol. 311.

⁵² Santiago Castro Mesa, interview by the author, La Habana, 28 October 2015.

⁵³ 4. Tagung der Ständigen Arbeitsgruppe beim Exekutivkomitee des Rates für Fragen der Koordinierung der Hilfe für die SRV, die DVRL und die VRA, Moskau 9, 10 March1977, BA Berlin DE 1/57139.

⁵⁴ Aktivitäten der DDR im Rahmen der Beziehungen RGW-VR Angola, BA Berlin DL2/10624; Botschaft der DDR/HPA in der VR-Angola, Berichterstattung zu den Ergebnissen und Problemen der Zusammenarbeit der ML RGW in der VR-Angola, Luanda, 30 October 1978, BA Berlin DL 2/10624.

⁵⁵ Informationen über handelspolitische Aktivitäten in Beziehungen zu Entwicklungsländern, 1978–1981, Delegation der SU in der SKAH, 24 September 1979 (über 1. Halbjahr 1979), BA Berlin, DL 2/20086.

⁵⁶ Faddejew an G. Weiss über Gespräch mit Lopo do Nascimento, 19 January 1982, BA Berlin DL 2/10624; for the citrus project see also Anne Dietrich, ’Zwischen solidarischem Handel und ungleichem Tausch: Zum Südhandel der DDR am Beispiel des Imports kubanischen Zuckers und äthiopischen Kaffees’, Journal für Entwicklungspolitik 3 (2014), 48–67.

⁵⁷ Dieter Albrecht, Information über die Ergebnisse der 1.Tagung der Gemischten Kommission für die Zusammenarbeit RGW-VR Angola vom 6.-8.5.1987 in Luanda, BA Berlin, SAPMO DY 3023/1464, 359.

⁵⁸ Wolfgang Rauchfuß an Günter Mittag, Hinweise für das Gespräch mit Gen. Lopo do Nascimento, Berlin, 28 June1985, BA Berlin SAPMO DY 3023/1464, 307.

⁵⁹ Comrade Koschelew, 109. EKA-meeting (1984), BA Berlin DL 2/12798.

⁶⁰ Emiliano Manresa, who held this function, interview by the author, La Habana, 26 October 2015.

⁶¹ Pedro Ross, interview by the author, La Habana, 14 March 2015; Michael Wolfers, Jane Bergerol, Angola in the Frontline (London: Zed Press, 1983), 145.

⁶² Vermerk über die Tagung der Handelsräte der ML RGW in der VRA am 22 April 1982, BA Berlin DL 2/10624.

⁶³ Wolfgang Rauchfuß, Alexander Schalck, Gerhard Beil, Dieter Albrecht, Aktualisierte Konzeption zur langfristigen Entwicklung der ökonomischen, wissenschaftlich-technischen und kulturellen Beziehungen der DDR und der VR Angola in Auswertung der Ergebnisse der 5. Tagung des Gemeinsamen Wirtschaftsausschusses DDR/VR Angola, 8 December 1983, BA Berlin SAPMO DY 3023/998, fol. 266.

⁶⁴ For the coffee see supra. For the oil barter deal: Zuarbeit zur 37. RGW-Ratstagung: Zahlenübersicht zum Warenaustausch per 31 August 1983, 30 September 1983, BA Berlin DL 2/10624.

⁶⁵ In contrast to the US side, where the oil companies successfully resisted pressure from the Reagan administration to cut the oil lifeline of the Angolan government. In that case, business primed politics. See Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, Oil and politics in the Gulf of Guinea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 182. For the Soviet side, stressed in Neil MacFarlane, ‘Soviet-Angolan Relations, 1975-1990’, in Raymond Duncan, Cuba’s Impact on Soviet Behavior in Sub-Saharan Africa. From Brezhnev to Gorbachev’, in George W. Breslauer, ed., Soviet Policy in Africa (Berkeley: University of California, 1992), 86.

⁶⁶ This also was the view of the Angolan prime minister Lopo do Nascimento: Informationsmaterial MfAA, Informationsbericht aus Luanda, 23.5. (year missing), BA Berlin, DL2/10651.

⁶⁷ FDJ/Sekretär HK an UJC Nationalkomitee, o.D., BA Berlin SAPMO DY 24/19193.

⁶⁸ Pedro Ross, interview by the author, La Habana, 14 March 2015.

⁶⁹ Bericht über die 4. Tagung des GWA DDR/VR Angola, Mittag-Kommission, 13 May 1981, BA Berlin SAPMO, DY 30/2679, 77. An agreement concerning the delivery of 11,000–15,000 tons of coffee for the years 1981–85 was signed.

⁷⁰ Santiago Castro Mesa, interview by the author, La Habana, 28 October 2015.

⁷¹ AV Luanda/Packeiser, Einschätzung über die Entwicklung der Produktion und des Exports von Kaffee in der VR Angola, Luanda, 20 November 1986, Anlage 1, BA Berlin DL2/13607; David Ottaway and Marina Ottaway, Afrocommunism (New York-London: Africana Publishing, 1981), 121.

⁷² 109. EKA-Tagung (1984), BA Berlin, DL 2/12798.

⁷³ Alena Alamgir and Christina Schwenkel, ‘From Socialist Assistance to National Self-Interest: Vietnamese Labor Migration into CMEA Countries’, in James Mark, Artemy M. Kalinovsky, and Steffi Marung, eds., Alternative Globalizations. Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020), 105.

⁷⁴ Lien-Hang Nguyen, ‘The Vietnam Decade: The Global Shock of War’, in Niall Ferguson et al., eds., The Shock of the Global. The 1970s in Perspective, (Cambridge, Massachusetts-London: Belknap Press, 2010), 168.

⁷⁵ Information über den Aufenthalt des Sonderbeauftragten, Genossen Klaus Häntzschel, vom 5, 14 October 1983 in der VR Angola, BA Berlin SAPMO, DY 3023/1464, 189.

⁷⁶ As Gleijeses, in Visions of Freedom, 343-378, has demonstrated.

⁷⁷ Material für Gespräche mit dem Innenminister der Rep. Kuba, Gen. Sergio del Valle Jimenez, Mai 1979, BSTU Berlin, MfS ZAIG 5492, 45.

⁷⁸ Duncan, Cuba’s Impact on Soviet Behavior in Sub-Saharan Africa, 188-89; Domínguez, To Make a World Safe for Revolution, 158–159.

⁷⁹ Fernschreiben Nr. 127 an AA Bonn aus Havanna, 26 March 1984, PAAA Berlin, BAV 90-HAVA/25291.

⁸⁰ MfAA/Generalsekretär Alfred Neumann, Information über die Reise einer Delegation des MfAA in die Volksrepublik Angola, Berlin, 1 September 1977, BA Berlin, SAPMO DY 3023/1463, 37. For similar Angolan reports on the humility of Cuban material requests in housing in comparison to Soviet ones, see Duncan, Cuba’s Impact on Soviet Behavior in Sub-Saharan Africa, 190.

⁸¹ Stritzke/Büttner an ZK/Markowski, Anlage 2 zu Reisebericht der Abt. IV nach Luanda, Maputo, Dar es Salaam und

Addis Abeba, Luanda, 30 October1977, BA Berlin, SAPMO DY 3023/1463, 145–146.

⁸² Information über Probleme beim Einsatz von FDJ-Brigaden in der VR Angola, Berlin, 19 October 1977, BSTU Berlin, MfS HA II/29644.

⁸³ Bericht über Probleme des DDR-Spezialisteneinsatzes in der VR Angola, 23 July 1980, BSTU Berlin MfS HA XVIII 7603, 65–66.

⁸⁴ Jahresanalyse über die WTZ mit der VR Angola im Jahre 1984, Luanda, 15 November 1984, BA Berlin DL2/12797.

⁸⁵ Hatzky, Kubaner in Angola, 173–174, comparing diverse Cuban figures.

⁸⁶ Vermerk über die Tagung der Handelsräte der ML RGW in der VR Angola am 22 April 1982, BA Berlin DL2/10624.

⁸⁷ Díaz-Briquets, Pérez-López, ‘Internationalist Civilian assistance’, 74.

⁸⁸ The focus of Cuban assistance on the personnel sending is stated e.g. in the: Bericht über die Tagung der Verwaltungsleiter der MAH und der Staatlichen Komitees für außenwirtschaftliche Beziehungen der ML/RGW, Berlin, 29 September – 2 October 1981, BA Berlin DL 2/20039.

⁸⁹ Bericht über die Ergebnisse der Expertentagung der interessierten ML/RGW über die Bedingungen der Entsendung von Spezialisten in Entwicklungsländer, Warna, 25–28 September 1979, BA Berlin DL 2/20039.

⁹⁰ Julio Díaz Vázquez, ‘Cuba: integración económica socialista y especialización de la producción’. Economía y Desarrollo 63 (1981), 28–29; Domínguez, To Make a World Safe for Revolution, 171.

⁹¹ Michael Erisman, ‘Cuban Development Aid: South-South Diversification and Counterdependency Politics’ in Michael Erisman and John Kirk, eds., Cuban Foreign Policy Confronts a New International Order (Boulder-London: Lynee Rienner, 1991), 140; Julie Feinsilver, ‘Fifty Years of Cuba’s Medical Diplomacy: From Idealism to Pragmatism’. Cuban Studies 41 (2010), 87–88.

⁹² Domínguez, To Make a World Safe for Revolution, 281.

⁹³ MfAA/Generalsekretär Alfred Neumann, Information über die Reise einer Delegation des MfAA in die Volksrepublik Angola, Berlin 1 September 1977, BA Berlin, SAPMO DY 3023/1463, fol. 37; Unfried, Martínez, ‘El Internacionalismo, la Solidaridad y el interés mutuo’.

⁹⁴ Jahresanalyse über die fondsfinanzierte WTZ Äthiopien, 20 November 1989, BA Berlin, DL 3/74.

⁹⁵ This feature also appears in Hatzky’s Kubaner in Angola.

⁹⁶ Personal memories in: Hatzky, Kubaner in Angola, 319–21.

⁹⁷ A recurrent topic in interviews by the author, e.g. with Nancy Jiménez, La Habana 18 March 2015 and 24 October 2015.

⁹⁸ Jiménez, Mujeres sin fronteras; Hatzky, Kubaner in Angola, 302–5, 318–20.

⁹⁹ Estrella V. Fresnillo, En otras tierras del mundo (La Habana: Gente Nueva, 1988), 95.

¹⁰⁰ Zusammenfassung einer Rede von Jorge Risquet, Mitglied des Sekretariats des ZK der KP Kubas, gehalten zum Abschluss der II. Konferenz der Parteiorganisation der Zivilen Kubanischen Mission in der VR Angola, 10 October 1976, BA Berlin DY 30/27031.

¹⁰¹ Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom, 82-83; Hatzky, Kubaner in Angola, 204.

¹⁰² Berthold Unfried, ‘Scènes de la vie quotidienne des coopérants de la RDA en Afrique: normes de comportement et transgressions’, in ‘Coopérants et coopération en Afrique: circulations d’acteurs et recompositions culturelles’, dossier thématique, Outre-mers 101:384–385 (2014), 247–66.

¹⁰³ Informe del Comité de la UJC en la RPA a la V asamblea de balance, renovación y ratificación de mandatos de la UJC en la RPA und Informe del segundo chequeo de emulacion especial del II.Contingente del DPI “Che Guevara”, Archivo Central de la UJC, Sección 18: Relaciones exteriores, Subseccion 18.2 Africa y Medio Oriente, 18.2.1 Documentos relacionados con el país: Angola: 9-5-295/6.

¹⁰⁴ Primera asamblea de balance de la UJC en la RDV, 9 February 1975, Archivo Central de la UJC, Sección 31: Relaciones internacionales 1975, 31.0.10.

¹⁰⁵ Informe sobre el viaje a la Union Sovietica en ocasión del 50 aniversario de Komsomolskaia Pravda, 26 May – 4 June 1975, 11, Archivo Central de la UJC, Sección 31: Relaciones internacionales 1975, 31.0.10.

¹⁰⁶ This is demonstrated in the resumé of Carlos Lage Dávila, Primer Secretario UJC, to José Ramón Machado Ventura, La Habana, 29 August 1986, Archivo Central de la UJC, Primer Secretario 1986, 4.0.6: Documentos enviados a Ramon Machado 12-5-388/6. Around 350 Cuban contract workers applied for a residence permit in the GDR, 213 of them had had children there.

¹⁰⁷ Intervención del C.ro Jesús Montané Oropesa, miembro del CC, en nombre de la Secretaría de Organización del Partido, ante el II Congreso de la UJC, Archivo Central de la UJC, II Congreso de la UJC 1972, 1.0.8 Intervenciones 56-1-1816/3.