Our East German friends

In case you have not seen it, there is a fascinating feature in Sunday’s edition of The Miami Herald on the very close (and very disturbing) ties between the Castro regime and the now-defunct Stasi.

As has been documented already, the highly efficient and much feared East German secret police spent the 1970s and much of the 1980s training their Cuban counterparts, the equally feared Ministry of the Interior (the MINIT).

You know, little things like how to become more efficient at spying on your own people, how to trap visitors and tourists, how to arm and fund "liberation movements" elsewhere in the Americas and Africa ... and how to thoroughly crush all forms of political dissent at home.

In fact, the Herald article says, the Stasi was still training the Cubans just months before the demise of the Berlin Wall and the spectacular collapse of Communism in the old Soviet bloc.

The Stasi is no more, of course, but I am sure the old spies in Berlin will be please to hear that their legacy lives on. In Cuba.