The Miami Herald reports on East Germany’s notorious Stasi security agency and its influence over the tropical version, Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior (MININT). Jorge Luís Vázquez, a Cuban exile who was jailed in 1987 in a Stasi cell, has found hundreds of East German government documents on Stasi relations with MININT, and is nearly finished writing what may well be the most thorough report to date on the links between the two security agencies.

The Stasi reconstructed MININT’s telephone and communications system in 1988 to better facilitate eavesdropping. Before that, in 1981, it modernized MININT’s printing press to enable better, faster production of party propaganda — and false passports used for espionage and subversion, Vázquez says.

The Stasi also overhauled the security system at José Martí International Airport in Havana, installing cameras, migration control booths and state-of-the-art X-ray equipment that mirrored identically the security methods in East Germany.

Coordinated espionage efforts between the Stasi and MININT also helped widen the Cuban secret service’s intelligence gathering. Vázquez’s study reveals that in 1985, Operation Palma Real, a cooperative action of ”electronic espionage” by German and Cuban agents, resulted in valuable interceptions of U.S. telephone and telegraph communications from the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo, Cuba.

Furthermore, the Stasi trained Cuban guerrillas who were being sent abroad to subvert other governments, teaching observation, espionage and interrogation techniques that considerably expanded Cuba’s impact on conflicts ranging from Central America to Africa, according to the documents Vázquez has gathered.

”What we see is a copy of the Stasi system that spread across the developing world — from Angola, Ethiopia and Mozambique to Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador,” as Cubans passed on the methodology and technology to others, he said.

And then there was that intriguing mention of LSD, in a letter from the MININT’s supply department formally requesting from the Stasi some 360 doses of the hallucinogenic. The document does not explain its use.

Related posts

• Smear campaign? (0)
• Cuban Intel: Old Guard (0)
• Piecing together the Dark Legacy (0)
• Jane’s World Armies: Cuba (0)
• Iran-Cuba Nexus (0)