I love IKEA. Their stuff is cheap. It looks good. They were among the
first to use same-sex couples in their advertising. In 2002 the Swedish
company ran a print ad in the Netherlands that showed two men kissing
while their daughter perched atop a pair of tables, the copy declaring,
"My daddies are also a set."
So I was mortified to learn that in the 1970s and '80s they used slave labor.
That's what it's called when you use the cut-rate work of political
prisoners who get locked up in their cells every night and can't exactly
negotiate a raise or even a coffee break.
The news that IKEA used East German forced labor was reported as early as July 2011 in a German.........
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelly-cogswell/ikeas-dirty-little-secret_b_1510027.html
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Friday, May 11, 2012
STASI records show Cuba deal included IKEA furniture, antiques, rum and guns
Posted on Wed, May. 09, 2012
STASI records show Cuba deal included IKEA furniture, antiques, rum and guns
The controversial contract to use Cuban prison
labor to build IKEA furniture was part of a broader deal between firms
run by the Cuban and East German security services that also involved
Cuban antiques, cigars and guns, according to a researcher in Berlin.
Documents on the deal, found in the archives of East Germany’s
notorious STASI security agency, also refer to Cuban prison labor and
indicate that former Cuban leader Fidel Castro personally approved the
overall deal, said researcher Jorge Luis García.
Garcia told El
Nuevo Herald on Wednesday he published an article about the deal in 2006
that mentioned the Cuban manufacture of furniture “for export to
Sweden,” and posted a note about it in his blog, STASI-MININT
Connection, early last year.
But the deal blossomed into scandal
last week after a German newspaper reported that an IKEA subsidiary in
Berlin and an East German company had contracted for Cuban prison labor
to build 45,000 tables and 4,000 sofa groupings in 1987.
The
Berlin Wall fell two years later and East Germany — officially the
German Democratic Republic — disappeared in 1990 into the Federal
Republic of Germany, also sometimes called West Germany.
It
remains unclear how much of the 1987 deal was carried out, said the
Cuban-born García, who was interrogated in the STASI’s underground cells
in East Berlin in 1987. He now guides tours of the cells and researches
the agency’s archives.
It was also unclear if prison labor was used to make Cuban products that were not part of the IKEA contract.
One document Garcia found in the archives show the East German firms
involved in the deal were Delta GmbH and Art and Antiquities, known as
KuA, both controlled by the Interior Ministry, in charge of domestic
security. The STASI, which monitored and repressed domestic dissent, was
a much feared part of the ministry.
But the companies were
officially branches of the government’s foreign trading agency,
Kommerzielle Koordinierung. The agency was led by the notorious
wheeler-dealer Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski, a STASI officer who
defected in 1989.
The document shows that the Havana side of the
deal was EMIAT, and described the company as owned by Cuba’s Interior
Ministry, or MININT. Like its East German counterpart, MININT is in
charge of domestic security and runs Cuba’s prisons as well as the
General Directory of State Security, which monitors and cracks down on
dissidents.
García said the German-language document shows that
three officials of KuA and Delta visited Cuba and met with MININT and
EMIAT officials Sept. 17-26 of 1987 to discuss a broad array of deals.
“There were visits to production centers. In part, those centers are in
penitentiary establishments of the MININT,” Garcia quoted the document
as saying. “EMIAT wants to increase the use of those installations for
the manufacture of products for export.”
The same document
reported that Cuban Foreign Commerce Minister Ricardo Cabrisas had met
with the East German visitors and told them “This cooperation has been
authorized by Compañero Fidel Castro.”
García added that the
document also reported that EMIAT “supplies the guest houses of the
government and the Central Committee” of the Cuban Communist Party. “It
is also a commercial branch of the MININT.”
A separate document,
in Spanish and dated Sept. 26, 1987, is a memorandum of understanding
that lists all the agreements reached by the East German visitors and
their Cuban hosts, but does not give all the details of all the deals.
The memo notes that the agreements included a deal on “the production
of furniture for export to Sweden” — the world headquarters of IKEA —
with a total value of 12 million German Marks. But it does not
specifically mention IKEA or prison labor.
It appears from the memo that Delta acted on behalf of the Swedish furniture and housewares chain.
Also mentioned in the memo are deals on textiles as well as 10,000 tons
of grapefruit juice valued at 4.5 million marks, 200,000 bottles of rum
and 200,000 cigars — all three products highly coveted in East Germany
because of their “tropical” image.
KuA also ordered three
containers of “antique furniture,” the memo added. Castro’s government
seized tens of thousands of valuable antiques, paintings and sculptures
as wealthy families fled abroad in the early years of the revolution and
had to leave their property there.
The Cuban partners also asked
for KuA help in exporting to the non-communist world what the document
called “Oldtimers” — the antique U.S.-made cars and trucks still seen in
Cuban streets to this day. “400 Oldtimers are ready for export,” the
document said.
Also mentioned in the memo were sales to East
Germany of Cuban shellfish, coffee, precious metals and even coffins,
García said by telephone from Berlin. He also provided digital copies of
some of the documents.
But there was no indication of which agreements were turned into legal contracts, or which contracts were actually carried out.
Cuba’s
economy went into a tailspin in the late 1980s as Soviet President
Mikhail Gorbachev began cutting subsidies to the island.
Other
documents published in Germany last week showed that the initial batch
of IKEA sofas produced in Cuba had quality problems, and that a group of
Delta officials had to travel to the island to fix the issue. There was
no indication of what happened.
The memorandum of understanding
was signed by three representatives of Delta and KuA as well as EMIAT
chief Lt. Col. Enrique Sanchez, the first secretary at the Cuban embassy
to East Germany and Gen. Santiago Borges. García said other STASI
documents show Borges ran MININT logistics.
García said another
document in the STASI archives, reporting on the East Germans’ trip to
Cuba, showed Havana authorities were so happy that they made KuA
president Axel Hilpert an honorary MININT colonel and upgraded his
flight home to first class.
After he returned to East Berlin,
Hilpert brokered the sale of 2,200 U.S.-made Colt pistols in Cuban
stockpiles — apparently left over from pre-Castro days — to a Los
Angeles weapons dealer, according to the document quoted by García.
Hilpert, a long-time STASI agent code-named “Monika,” became wealthy
after the collapse of East Germany, telling reporters that he had made
profitable contacts with Western business people during his years at
Kommerzielle Koordinierung.
He was investigated in the 1990s in a
case involving forged Cuban mail stamps, and the mishandling of some
funds during the final days of East Germany, and is now jailed while
under investigation on other complaints.
But he is still the
co-owner of record of the four-star Resort Schwielowsee in the former
East Germany, which hosted a 2007 gathering of G-8 finance ministers. A
single room at the lakeside resort near Berlin goes for about $160 a
night.
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