Ernst-Thälmann-Insel

I've posted about the Strange Maps website before, but thanks to that site I've learnt something that's too surreal for words.

I honestly believed that East-Germany ended with the unification of October 3rd, 1990. However, that's not quite the case. Let's go back to the year 1972, when this story started...
In June of that year, Fidel Castro visited East-Germany. As a present, he gave the communist party of that country a small island in the caribic. That the "gift" was actually the price Cuba had to pay to obtain the right to a higher production of sugar is beside the point; the point is that East-Germany got an island. It was named Cayo Blanco del Sur (white island of the south), until it was later renamed Cayo Ernesto Thaelmann, after a leader of the German Communist Party in the thirties, called Ernst Thälmann.

Now we should skip a whole bunch of years, and flash-forward to 1990, the year of the German unification. In the German-German contract of unification (Deutsch-Deutschen Einigungsvertrag), it was agreed that five new federal lands (bundesländer) and Berlin were added to the federal republic of Germany. There was no mention of the island. If the island was actually part of the deal, you'd expect it to be part of the contract, right?

The situation right now: Havana has more or less taken control of the island, claiming that the gift of 1972 was merely a symbolical one. But officially, East-Germany lives on as a tiny island in the Caribbean...