"I started thinking about it when I was twelve or thirteen. And it frustrated and unsettled me that there was something that wasn't clear," she says. One day, she simply asked her mother directly. Her mother didn’t want to tell her anything, but Katrin, who wishes to remain anonymous, didn’t let up until her mother told her the whole story.
In the late 1980s, her mother worked at a factory in the former GDR, where contract workers from the so-called "socialist brother states" were also employed. Her mother fell in love with a colleague from Cuba and entered into a relationship with him. Katrin was born from this union.
But the situation was complicated: her mother was already married at the time, and romantic relationships between GDR citizens and contract workers were officially frowned upon.
In fact, this was not uncommon. According to the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship, around 200,000 contract workers came to the former GDR as migrants to work on a temporary basis. There are no official records on how many of them entered into relationships in their host country, the GDR, or on the children born as a result. At the time, very little was said about this topic in the former GDR, but it is now the subject of academic research. In 2022, for example, the German Emigration Centre in Bremerhaven held an exhibit on Cuban-German history in the GDR and FRG. In this context, people also spoke about their diverse personal and family backgrounds in relation to Cuba and the two former German states.
Katrin Hoffmann now describes her story as "a family secret".
"I never talked about it with my father, my German dad," says Katrin. "With my mum, yes, and with my aunt, whom I told everything. But never with my father. My aunt was angry with my mother, how could she do that and so on."
"But for me, it was a relief when my mother told me everything. Now I knew why I looked the way I did. That was okay. I was just glad to know."
Katrin was born shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Before she was born, her biological father had to leave the GDR and return to Cuba. Her mother knew nothing of this; one day he simply stopped coming to work. And that was the end of it.
Although many other personal stories resemble Katrin's, there were hardly any opportunities for personal contact between the GDR and Cuba, or vice versa. GRC Tracing Service employee Britta Busse worked in the field of international tracing in the 1990s and recalls:
"The letters arrived here in parcels from the Cuban Red Cross. Many came towards the end of the 1990s and then again from 2008 onwards, when Cuba opened up politically. At first, the searches were conducted via the mothers, since the children were still minors, but once they came of age we were able to contact the children directly."
"My mum had kept a photo of my Cuban dad, so I knew what he looked like, but I can't say I really longed for him," says Katrin Hoffmann. "I had a family. My dad —my German dad— is also my dad. We have a good relationship and I had a completely normal childhood with him. Even though we never talked about it and probably never will. That's just the way it is."
When Katrin got older and had children of her own, things changed. "Then I really wanted to look for my biological father. I had no idea whether he was still living in Germany or had returned to Cuba. What if he lived just around the corner?"
She began searching for his name on social media, without success. She came across a television programme that promised to help people find their relatives, but "I would have had to appear with my name and face."
Finally, she turned to the GRC Tracing Service. At a GRC advice centre in Brandenburg, she decided to submit a tracing request, wrote down what she knew about her family circumstances and left everything else to the Red Cross.
And the GRC Tracing Service did what it always does on the basis of its humanitarian mandate: it searched for the whereabouts of the missing father and forwarded Katrin's search request to the Cuban Red Cross. It did not take long for the local tracing service staff to return a telephone number and an address, along with a letter stating that the sought person —her unknown father— was living in Cuba and agreed to his contact details being passed on to the person searching for him, his unknown daughter.
Katrin did not hesitate for long. Together with her best friend, she sat down with the phone number, a messaging app, and a translation app. They wrote a message, translated it into Spanish and sent it off.
"Of course, he was delighted," she recalls today, six months later. "We also spoke on the phone, with video and everything. He's older than in the photo, but I recognised him right away. The language was the tricky part. It worked better with short messages." Katrin sent pictures of herself and her children, and for the first time her father was able to see his grandchildren.
"But then after a while, it was enough, somehow. I was very happy to make contact with him, but it didn't have to be much more than that. It satisfied my curiosity and perhaps my uncertainty, I would say. I'm at peace with myself now, and that's a good feeling."
Will they meet? That doesn't seem to matter much to Katrin. Cuba is far away, and you don't just travel there on a whim. But she has certainty. And that has brought her contentment.