"Organization, implementation and interactions of a socialist system of temporary migration. The framing of the Cuban personnel circulation within the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) by the organizations of the Communist Party of Cuba, 1972-1990"
The implications of the Cuban participation in the trans-continental movement of people within the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), particularly with the German Democratic Republic (GDR), are unknown in all their magnitude. The dissertation project examines how the Communist Party of Cuba, the highest political decision maker in the country, and its organizations both on the island and abroad faced the not always easy tasks of selection, preparation, supervision in the field and final return of thousands of advisors, specialists, workers, trainees, students on the move between Cuba and Europe, Africa and Asia. Which interactions happened between the involved Cuban and East German institutional and personal actors? Which were the particularities associated with the “development” (in the sense of achieving economic and societal convergence) momentum in the bilateral relations between economically unequal partners? How was the “mutual interest” proclaimed by the CMEA put into practice? How did the individual actors get involved in this circulation, what were their experiences and the results from these encounters? The research uses information from Cuban and German archives as well as narrative interviews with individual actors. The thesis is integrated into the Research Cluster “Social and Economic Spaces” of the Doctoral School of Historical and Cultural Studies. This dissertation is part of the FWF/Austrian Science Fund sponsored research project "Entanglements between Cuba and the GDR: mobilities, exchanges, circulations within the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance", directed by Berthold Unfried at the Institute of Economic and Social History, University of Vienna.
This project explores an axis of the international history of the Socialist World System: the systematic economic and human interaction between the GDR and Cuba as members of the CMEA. These interactions are to be examined on the levels of economic exchange and of professional and educational mobility. The focus is on the people on the move between the GDR, Cuba and various hubs within the CMEA sphere and its periphery. This research applies a Global History approach to the Socialist World System emphasizing reciprocity and mobility. The time frame is the period of Cuban integration into the CMEA (1972–1990). The project breaks new ground by looking at the CMEA not only as a European but as a global developmental organization serving as framework for a temporary migration system.
eMail: claudia.martinez-hernandez@univie.ac.at
Institut für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte
Projektfinanzierung: FWF-Projekt "Entanglements between Cuba and the GDR: mobilities, exchanges, circulations within the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance"
