Douglas Selvage: Hegemonie und Eigeninteressen. Die Etablierung von Geheimdienstbeziehungen zwischen dem Ostblock und Kuba, 1959–1970, in: Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung 2023. Berlin: Metropol Verlag, pp. 93–114.
The state of relations between the Soviet secret police, the KGB, and its Cuban counterpart, the Ministerio del Interio (MININT), varied greatly during the first decade after the Cuban Revolution of 1959. The KGB sought to assist Cuba in professionalizing its organs of repression; this meant, in effect, their Sovietization. However, Fidel Castro’s general resistance to simply adopting Soviet models, and his occasional conflicts with Moscow over foreign policy, created bilateral tensions that affected the level of cooperation between the KGB and MININT. These fluctuating relations help to explain why the KGB’s East German ally, the Ministry of State Security (MfS or Stasi) entered into formal cooperation with MININT only in 1965. Thereafter, the quality and extent of its cooperation with MININT, closely monitored by the KGB, varied in accordance with the state of Cuban-Soviet relations. After Castro reached a modus vivendi with Moscow in 1968, relations between MININT and its Soviet and East German partners improved, and in 1974 it was formally integrated into the structures of bilateral and multilateral cooperation among the Soviet-bloc security services.
