Entanglements Cuba-GDR: mobilities, exchanges, circulations

The object of this project is an axis of the international history of the socialist world system: the economic and human entanglements, understood as situations of systematic interaction, between the GDR and Cuba as members of the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA or COMECON, the economic structure of the socialist world system). These interactions are to be examined on the levels of economic exchange and of professional and educational mobility. The focus is on advisors, experts and consultants, trainees and students on the move between the GDR and Cuba and in the socialist world system. Aims of this project are - to explore how these relations of exchange constituted spheres for circulating people and goods, entanglements that held together that world system, or where they did become part of the CMEA`s disintegration. - to delineate the way of functioning of this CMEA migration system. Who were its main actors and what were the sending and the recipient structures? What put people "on the move" and how did this mobility influence them? Where was the claimed "mutual interest", the reciprocity in these relations? What were the intentions of the institutional actors, what were the institutional provisions for this form of temporary labour migration and how did the agency of the individuals deal with this framework? In this period of its CMEA membership and as an agent of "internationalist" interventions in Africa and Latin America, Cuba became a hub between the European centre of the socialist world system and its new African, Asian and Latin American periphery. It is a hypothesis of the project that the movement of advisors and all sorts of development workers from European CMEA states to Cuba, of Cuban trainees and students to Europe, of thousands of Cuban advisors and development workers to Africa, Asia and Latin America, as well as of thousands of students from these continents to Cuba - all this represented a major contribution to the sphere of international, trans-continental circulation within the socialist world system. The project also scrutinizes triangular Cuban-East German cooperation in Africa, especially in Angola. The project breaks new ground by looking at the CMEA not only as a European but as a global organisation and as a temporary migration system. In this perspective, this study is intended as a global-historical approach to the socialist world system. The focus is on the CMEA as a global developmental organization which provided its members from Asia and Latin America with instruments to achieve economic convergence. Principal methods of the project are the analysis of archival material and semi-structured narrative interviews with individual actors. The time frame is the era of Cuban integration into the CMEA, from the early 1970s to the collapse of the socialist world system at the end of the 1980s. Principal researcher is Berthold Unfried, guest professor at the Department of Social and Economic History of the University of Vienna, working with post-doc Eric Burton, a PhD student, and a local collaborator in Cuba.

By accepting extra-European members, among them Cuba in 1972, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) made the promise to "align" the developmental level of its member States. The main idea of the project has been to explore the circulation of persons which the adhesion of Cuba to the CMEA set into motion under a common notion: the overarching concept inter-continental mobility of governmental and Party professionals, experts, workers and students which allowed us an integrated view on these personnel flows as educational, professional, and labour mobility, or, in the broad global history understanding, as forms of temporary migration. - The economic convergence policy within and at the fringes of the CMEA set people into motion: not only Cuban students and youngsters to be trained to skilled workers to the European socialist countries, but also GDR experts and young "Friendship Brigadists" to Cuba. Additionally, we examined quite extensive East German-Cuban triangular cooperation in Angola and Ethiopia which gave some substance to the CMEA's developmental claim in Africa. The socialist world system developed its own forms of globalisation via flows of migration. - These programmes of inter-continental mobility were closely planned and supervised by Party and State organisations. Thus, we call them "State and Party-led mobilities". Party organisations served as points for mediating the profound inequality between the seconded personnel and the locals. Deficiencies in this organizational framing with its high aspirations to organize everything could easily cause these encounters to fail. - The strong link between mobility and education is one main discovery of our research. 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 Party and youth organisation collectives. The examined forms of mobility were closely linked to the aim of personal education based on a broad concept of education in practice, aiming not only at the transfer of professional knowledge but also at the adoption of manners, habits, and behaviour appropriate for socialist citizens. - Despite the conflicts that these encounters generated, the flows of experts, youth activists, students, and workers represented a line of "developmental" relations linking the socialist world. Our research highlights the Cuban role as a link between the European and the "tricontinental" parts of the socialist world. The Cubans were a personnel pool and a cohesive force of this socialist mobility system. - Besides the prolific German archives, we used new Cuban archives for our research, allowing the inclusion of the Cuban perspective. The Cuban archives helped us to substantiate the Global History perspective and to leave behind the dominant Western and eurocentric perspective in analyzing these mobility programs.