The Intergovernmental Agreements with Cuba were signed on 5 May 1978 by Czechoslovakia and on 19 April 1980 by Hungary. Officially, they constituted one of the forms of scientific and technological cooperation, as the project involved, besides the temporary employment of Cubans in Czechoslovak and Hungarian companies, also their training. The main, long‐term objective of the agreement was to improve the workforce of Cuban workers who, after returning to Cuba, were to contribute to the development of their economy.
An important argumentation rôle was also played by the so‐called ‘demographic complementarity’, a term used mainly by the Cuban party (Entrevista a Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, 1980, 9) for an ageing society and slower growth of the population in Eastern Europe compared to Cuba.
[…]
Estimates of the total number of (mostly young) people sent from Cuba in the 1970s and especially in the 1980s to work in the so-called socialist camp countries are around 80,000 by some authors (Ocaña, 2009; Pérez‐López & Díaz‐Briquets, 1990). However, there are no official statistics. Throughout the project’s lifetime (1978–1990) in Czechoslovakia, it is estimated that 23,000 Cuban citizens were recruited, temporarily employed and trained in the country (Boušková, 1998, 36).
According to Böröcz (1992, 10) ‘between early 1985 and the end of 1987, altogether 3,200 Cubans arrived in Hungary’ with a four‐year work contract. Melegh and Sárosi (2015, 240) calculate with a cumulative inflow of 4,232 Cubans for the period 1980–1989 — including both guestworkers and university students — based on data from the Hungarian Central Statistical Office. Nonetheless, no separate, yet comprehensive statistics are available on guestworkers.
[…]
First of all, the Czechoslovak party informed the Committees about the possibilities of training in the desired professions in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and about companies which could accept Cubans. Havana then provided a selection of workers. The result was, as in all other areas of intergovernmental science and technology cooperation, the so‐called ‘annual protocols’ containing lists of Czechoslovak organizations and numbers of Cuban citizens with their existing or planned specializations and arrival dates.
As early as May 1978, when the agreement was signed, the first group of about 300 workers arrived from Cuba.8 In December, there were already about a thousand young Cubans, men and women, employed in ten textile companies, spending their Christmas in Czechoslovakia.9 The plan then envisaged the recruitment of another 2,000 Cubans by the end of 1979 and further increases in the following years (3,500 new workers were to be recruited each year).
However, the number of Cuban workers in Czechoslovakia did not grow so quickly. At the end of 1980 there were some 4,600 Cubans training and working in the companies, around 5,000 in 1984 and nearly 10,000 in 1986 (the numbers include running and new contracts together).10
It can be estimated that in relation to other Central and Eastern European countries, Czechoslovakia employed by far the highest proportion of Cubans in the labor program. According to Cuban sources (Granma daily), for example, during the period 1984–1985 the labor program in Eastern Europe was attended by 12,000 people, of which 9,000 were in the CSSR (Se capacitarán otros cuatro mil jóvenes cubanos en Checoslovaquia, 1984, 5; Tesoro, 1986, 53).
[…]
Applicants for a working stay had to be of legal age, they could not exceed 27 years and had to have completed basic education. Another necessary condition, theoretically, was good health and pro-revolutionary thinking. Membership in the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) or the Union of Communist Youth (UJC), however, was not a condition (Jóvenes cubanos en la RDA: Un balance positivo, 1982, 9).
Although at present stage there is little known about the background and previous experience of Cuban guestworkers, it is mentioned in the contemporary press that some of the men used to fight in Angola (Vendégmunka, 1988, 14). It would be highly attractive and interesting to analyze the existing assumption that the participation in the labor program was, for the Cubans, a form of reward for their participation in the war.16
Admittedly, this paper’s flaws make it tougher for me to recommend it. For example, Eurocentrism:
the complex discourse of the ‘civilization mission’, applied in this case by the Czechoslovak state on the Vietnamese.
Classic Cold War‐style reductionism:
the lack of unskilled labor — no matter how this labor shortage was, in substantial degree, due to hoarding, typical of socialist economies (Kornai, 1980, 1992).
Stereotyping:
arriving Cubans must have been closely watched by the Hungarian authorities […] it cannot be expected that the CTC served as a real channel for the workers in which to express their opinions, air their problems and channel their needs. […] These figures must, however, be seen in the context of the often-exaggerated statements common to socialist economies.
Bizarre, context‐free claims:
unwillingness by Czechoslovak citizens to perform some unpopular, heavy manual jobs
And notice how when the authors admit something positive about the people’s republics, it is suspiciously only then that they need to add ‘balance’ to the subject (you know, just in case you doubted for a single microsecond that antisocialists were writing this):
The fact that the Cuban side was able, as we see, to step up and refuse to send the workers it had already pledged, may be saying another important thing about the character of the socialist programs and the relationships between the governments: a strong political accountability (commitment to international solidarity) of the host government to the sending government.
Similar traits may be found in the Western labor programs: in the FRG case, an equivalent accountability was embodied in pressure exercised by the unions and shared European Economic Community membership (Alamgir, 2017a, 106–107). Coming back to the particular Cuban demands, […]
I am therefore anticipating a little hostility as a result of my sharing this. With all of that being said, I would not go so far as to call this paper ‘useless’ to us—there are some useful bits of information therein—but if I knew of a better paper on this topic, I’d share that one instead.
Finally, I want us all to behold this example of the brilliance of ‘decommunization’:
Racism was on the rise in Hungary in the years preceding and following the régime change. There were incidents against Arabs, Black people, [Roma] and Cubans. Possibly the worst one occurred on 24 April 1988, when a group of skinheads, waiting for the metro at the Kőbánya Kispest station after a concert, attacked a group of guestworkers — mostly women, employed by the Kőbányai Textilművek textile company (Apor, 2017; Zs, 2016, 103). Eight Cubans were injured, some seriously.
The police arrested the perpetrators: eventually 15 of them, aged between 16 and 20, got a prison sentence. Yet they soon received amnesty, among other prisoners, due to the proclamation of the Republic of Hungary, on 23 October 1989 (Angster, 1992, 10–12).
(Emphasis added.)
Referring to the Eastern Bloc’s neoliberalization as ‘democratization’ is without a doubt the meanest thing that I have ever seen anybody say about democracy.