Castro's Cuba was an eager adopter of anything Communist Block. Under Soviet "nation building", where everyone has the same system, and speaks the same version of Marxist-Leninist jargon, all sorts of practices transfered over quite easily. The Miami Herald finds, there is new evidence of how the most sinister aspects of Eastern Block rule made their way to Cuba.
Recently found East German documents show the tight relationship between Castro's Ministry of the Interior and the Stasi East German Secret police. Honnecker and Castro had a natural affinity, a relationship that lasted right up to the day the Wall fell. East Germany was a repressive bastion of orthodoxy till the bitter end, the dreaded Stasi with German efficiency kept the population in line. It is hardly surprising that Castro wanted his Interior Ministry patterned on the Eastern Blocks most dreaded secret police.
''East Germany had a major role in building up Cuban counterintelligence as well as its foreign intelligence services, providing training for decades . . . right up to the final days of East Germany,'' said Chris Simmon, a career U.S. counterintelligence officer and expert on Cuban intelligence.
Basically, Cuba's system of State Security was patterned closely on that of a system, who employed hundreds of thousands of informants to keep track on dissidents and everyday citizens.
''The repressive system that existed in East Germany . . . is the same one that exists today in Cuba,'' he says. ``What MININT learned from the Stasi has not been forgotten. On the contrary, [the strategies and techniques] are alive today despite the fall of the Berlin Wall.''
Amazing, Cuba is still a one party dictatorship ruled by the Communist Parts, and committed to Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy by its own admission. With a Stasi-trained secret police repressing its people, its hard to not call the place a totalitarian police state.
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