JEP » Issues » Socialisms in Development » A Cuban Cycle of Developmental Socialism? Cubans and East Germans in the Socialist World System

A Cuban Cycle of Developmental Socialism? Cubans and East Germans in the Socialist World System

Autor*innen: Unfried, Berthold
https://doi.org/10.20446/JEP-2414-3197-33-3-69
Volume XXXIII • Issue 3 • 2017
Pages 69-90
Keywords: Internationalism, International Solidarity, Socialist World System, Council of Mutual Economic Assistance, Cuba, GDR

Abstract

Based essentially on archive-material from the GDR – and some from Cuba – this contribution demonstrates how the interactions between the German Democratic Republic and Cuba were projected into a multilateral cooperation in Africa in the framework of the socialist world system. The circulation of material and personal resources – advisors, experts, solidarity workers of European socialist countries in Cuba, Cuban workers in Europe, Cuban Internacionalistas in Africa, the thousands of students from Africa at the Isla de la Juventud in Cuba – constituted spheres of international connectivity within the socialist world system in the era of its expansion to the three continents Asia, Africa and Latin America. In this period of alternative ‘globalization’ from the mid-1970s to 1990, Cuba, as a member of the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA/COMECON), established itself as a trans-continental hub between the European centre of that system and its African periphery. The contribution concludes by summing up elements of a ‘Cuban cycle’ of ‘anti-imperialist’ developmental socialism as the last of the long reverberations of the October Revolution.

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