Ernst Thälmann Island

Template: Infobox Island / Maintenance / image missing

The Ernst- Thalmann Island (Spanish Cayo Ernest Thaelmann ) is an approximately 15 kilometer long and 500 meter wide Cuban island. It is located about 25 kilometers west of the Bay of Pigs off the southern coast of Matanzas province, to which it also belongs administratively.

Since the Ernst- Thalmann Island is located in a restricted military area, it is not officially allowed to travel to the island.

History

On 19 June 1972, the Cuban President Fidel Castro handed over on the occasion of a state visit to the GDR, Erich Honecker a map in which the Cayo Ernest Thaelmann ( " Ernst- Thalmann Island " ) and the Playa RDA ( " GDR beach " ) were recorded. This renaming of part of the chain of islands Cayos Blancos del Sur ("white islands of the South" ) in the Caribbean was officially recorded in the Cuban Presidential Decree 3676/72.

On 1 July 1972, the journalist Joachim Conrad, one of the first guests reported since the naming, in the New Germany, that the vegetation of the island mainly from " small ( n ) palm trees, brambles, casuarina trees ( n ) with schachtelhalmartigen branches and iron- hard wood " and there are on the wetland to the Zapata Peninsula side facing mangroves.

On the occasion of the 28th anniversary of the death of Ernst Thalmann and the World Festival 1973 in East Berlin Thalmann a bust on the island was unveiled on August 18, 1972 solemnly. In this present were the Deputy Ambassador of the GDR, Cuba, some officers of the GDR teaching vessel MS JG Fichte, the first secretary of the Cuban youth and around 100 Cuban participants in the World Festival of 1973.

1975 sang the two East German Schlager- Stars Frank Schöbel and Aurora Lacasa on the Ernst- Thalmann Island specifically for the East German television show "On the Road with music - Cuba " composed song "Island in the Gulf of Cazones ".

It is likely that a large part of the island was devastated by Hurricane Mitch in 1998. Among other things fell by the Thalmann bust.

2001 founded editors of the Internet newspaper "theme 1" a web page should be auctioned on the parts of the island.

Rumors that the island of the GDR would have been time donated, they would say after the reunification, now part of the territory of the Federal Republic of Germany, deprived by uniform statement, both the Foreign Ministry and the Cuban Embassy in Germany without foundation, "Here it acted around a symbolic act that has nothing to do with ownership. "