Is an Island Off Cuba the Last Surviving Piece of East Germany?

Everybody knows the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. And that West Germany eventually reabsorbed East Germany, after which the reunited country lived happily ever after. Right?

Well, sort of. It’s true that the Unification Treaty signed in August 1990 re-Germanied the Germanies, and that West Germany (now known as “Germany”) inherited East Germany’s territories. But there may have been a tiny oversight. Turns out, there could still be a sliver of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik remaining in the Caribbean, just west of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs.

To understand the situation, we have to go back to 1972, when the wall was still up. Fidel Castro was on a state visit to East Berlin when he presented his GDR comrades with a gift. The small, skinny island of Cayo Blanco del Sur, located a couple miles off the coast of Cuba, is about nine and a half miles long and home to a coral reef, iguanas, and a number of endangered species, but no people. Castro presented it to East Germany, renaming it Ernst Thälmann Island (Cayo Ernesto Thaelman in Spanish), after the doomed Weimar-era leader of the German Communist Party who was arrested in 1933 and executed at Buchenwald on Adolf Hitler’s orders in 1944. (Thälmann was lionized by post-war Communists as an anti-fascist martyr and had many streets and schools named in his honor throughout East Germany.)

Later in 1972, in a ceremony on the southern shores of the island, the East German ambassador to Cuba unveiled a stone bust of Thälmann before a mix of East German and Cuban comrades. The beach that they—and the bust—stood upon was christened “German Democratic Republic Beach” (Playa República Democrática Alemana).

Ernst Thälmann Island was East Germany’s sole overseas possession, and it was kind of a big deal for a while. In 1975, Frank Schöbel, arguably East Germany’s biggest pop star, traveled to Cuba to film a music video for his song “Insel im Golf von Cazones” (“Island in the Gulf of Cazones”). The video featured the commemorative bust of Thälmann, and footage later showed up in a documentary celebrating the great friendship between Cuba and East Germany.

Fast forward to the early ’90s, when the wall had been torn down and reunification paperwork was being drafted in Germany. A treaty on the economic, monetary, and social union came into effect on October 3, 1990, and the German Democratic Republic split itself into five new federal states that joined the Federal Republic of Germany. East Berlin merged with West Berlin to form a new, augmented city-state, which was also added to the new version of Germany. But none of the language in the documents said a word about Ernst Thälmann Island. It appeared to have been forgotten and neglected, thousands of miles away in the Caribbean.

Germany remained silent on the subject of Ernst Thälmann Island until 2001, when Thema 1, a German online newspaper and think tank, ran a report arguing that it belonged to modern Germany. At that point, the whole island had been trashed by Hurricane Mitch three years earlier, during which the bust of Thälmann was knocked over and broken. Cuba, still under Communist rule, seemingly reacted negatively to the article and denied journalists access to the island, claiming their gift to East Germany had only been symbolic. The German Foreign Ministry concurred, telling the news service EFE that the 1972 agreement between the countries was "not a gift, but a change of name." Since then, neither country has seemed willing to press the issue.

The island is also involved in some other international conflicts, too—sort of. Since 1983, a man named Kevin Baugh who founded his own micronation, the Republic of Molossia, has been fighting a war with East Germany, claiming the dispute is focused on Ernst Thälmann Island. The micronation, the bulk of which consists of Baugh’s house and yard in Nevada, made the declaration of war before East Germany went out of business and didn’t bother to dissolve it after 1990, once the nation was defunct. When asked in an interview with Atlas Obscura if he ever plans to visit the tiny island, Baugh said yes, but added, "Of course, that would likely end our never-ending war, which would be a major milestone in our nation's history—and something we may not wish to happen!” The Molossian website also states that since no one lives on the island, there’s no one there to negotiate a peace treaty, although they cannot rule out the possibility of “covertly trained attack iguanas.” For now, the micronation is issuing war bonds to finance the ongoing military effort.

Regardless of who owns it, Ernst Thälmann Island still retains its German moniker on the world’s maps to this day, and you can actually go there and check it out if you want. Tourists are welcome to visit the island—although it should be noted that it’s only accessible by boat and there’s no dock, so you’ll have to drop your anchor a ways from the beach and wade in. If you do, maybe you can put the bust of poor Ernst back up.