Research

This project explores 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 for 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 in the 1970s and 1980s.

Project leader and principal researcher is Berthold Unfried
Project collaborator as doctoral student Claudia Martínez Hernández
Project collaborator for special tasks of archival research Berthold Molden

• Organization, implementation and interactions of a socialist system of temporary migration.
  The framing of the Cuban personnel circulation within the CMEA by the organizations of the Communist Party of Cuba, 1972-1990.
  MSc. Claudia Martínez Hernández