The “Other” Farewell Letter from Che Guevara to Fidel Castro

See commentary and summary of the letter: The “Other” Farewell Letter from Ernesto Che Guevara to Fidel Castro is Published

“Epistolario de un tiempo”: Carta a Fidel, La Habana, 26 de marzo de 1965

Introductory note by Aurelio Alonso to Ché’s letter to Fidel of March 26, 1965

Original: Discutirla, con veneración e irreverencia

These considerations were thought for the text of the message to which I attach Che’s letter of March 26, 1965 -which is now revealed to us and whose importance I value in superlative degree – with the reflections motivated in me by its reading. Or better to say by successive readings. Guevara’s text constitutes, undoubtedly, an exceptional critical balance of the progress of the Cuban economy in the first five years of the Revolution. But we must not forget that it is an analysis at the time of 1965, and that our reading takes place more than half a century later. Therefore, its merits as a diagnosis cannot be evaluated on the same level as its considerations as a prognosis and as a project. It is not a question of some being valid and others not, but rather that their truthful value cannot obviate the complexity of the history lived afterwards, from whose height our thinking is obliged to create. Read with these precautions in mind, the synthesis made by Che can contribute, like no other, as far as I remember, to a better understanding of the scope of our first efforts, in what aspects we failed then, which failures we corrected and which ones became a burden, and even where we are today, why, and how to set out solutions for change. But for that usefulness to be real, the most immediate thing is that we should not be satisfied with praise and pondering, looking for the adjective that best fits among the exclamation points, but that we should sit down to discuss it, with the mixture of veneration and irreverence that Che himself claimed for the study of the classics of Marxism.

This is the spirit that inspired the writing of these profane lines and the decision to circulate them, hoping, as always in everything I have thought in my life, to contribute with a grain of sand to Cuba’s growth towards the society of sovereignty and total justice that Martí dreamed of and Fidel – and at his side Che – dedicated all their breath to forge.

….

Aurelio

Editor’s note:

[i] For this digital publication …the notes that comrade Aurelio Alonso … made – and which enrich the reading to a great extent – will appear as endnotes at the end of the document, numbered consecutively with Arabic numerals. All the notes, starting with this one, are by Aurelio Alonso.

Letter to Fidel

Havana, March 26, 1965

“Year of Agriculture”.

Fidel:

I bring to your attention the whole of my ideas on some of the basic problems of the State. I will try to be as concrete as possible and try to make a constructive criticism, in case it can serve to improve some problems that continue to be serious.

In addition, I would like to give you a small explanation of our concept of that entelechy called, “The Budgetary Financing System”, on the other hand, I would also be interested in talking something about the Party and, finally, to make recommendations of a general nature.

This presentation will then have four points:

Errors in Economic Policy.

The Budgetary Financing System.

The Role of the Party.

General Recommendations.

As we all began to learn this march towards communism, we established, with the help of the Czechs, the Central Planning Board [Juceplan]. I think it is clear to everyone that planning is a category implicit to socialism and also to this transition period we are living through. The bad thing is that until now, we have not been able to organize a planning that is really a conductive channel and not a crazy valve that sometimes lets gases pass freely and at other times closes hermetically putting the boiler in danger of exploding.

In spite of all the errors in the plan, the orientation and the conception of the Central Planning Board, I think we all agree that there are a series of hierarchical lines of command in the economic sector that must be respected. It is understood that the Government creates the economic-political ideas for development, ideas that come from the initiatives of the leaders and also, if possible given the conditions, from the population itself. These should be passed on to the Board, which would analyze them and make them compatible, and then make a recommendation. The Government would approve or correct these figures, already commissioning the preparation of the plan and the Board would prepare the plan, in discussion with all the agencies, when it was an annual plan, but on the basis of a perspective plan in which the main agencies could be taken into account as advisors.

We have functioned as if this fiction were real but, in practice, what happened: the pretended transfer of development ideas by the Government was simply a compilation of some loose ideas that the Board harmonized by putting its own and submitted to the Government. After an extremely superficial analysis, these lines of development were approved, sometimes changing certain things, always on an annual plan since all the perspective plans have failed before starting. The Board began to make its plans with the idea of restricting the imbalance but, at the same time, receiving pressures from all the productive and non-productive organizations. In such a way, the plan was very unbalanced, it was late and it was necessary to run abroad to ask for imbalances, aid, understanding, etc., etc., etc. Then the Board was in charge of complicating things with its own mistakes.

I believe that we have made many economic mistakes. The first of them, the most important one, is the improvisation with which we have carried out our ideas, which has resulted in a policy of lurches. Improvisation and subjectivism, I would say. In such a way that goals were set that entailed impossible growth. In the first moments these impossible growths were planned in an organic way on the basis of global models in which growths of up to 15 or 20% per year were foreseen. Later this changed, but the dispersion and lack of centralization of economic decisions allowed each one of the organizations to promote plans that, alone, were feasible but that, taken all together, made it impossible to achieve the goals set; and this is how reaching 90% of a plan is considered a real feat in our country. For this reason, a series of unjustified investments have also been made, which were varied or eliminated before completion, but also without adequate justification. Cases like these we have in the promotion of rice and its subsequent restriction, the promotion of corn and its subsequent restriction, that of millet, cotton, pigs, certain investments in cattle that do not seem to me to be justified, those in fishing and a good part of the poultry policy. All this in the field of agriculture.

In the field of industry, we have made similar mistakes in terms of investments. The Antillana de Acero, for example, is a monster that began, as we always begin, to be drawn by the nose; – now the legs of the monster do not fit on paper – . The cement development policy, based on a very large global development concept, which has proved to be excessive. The creation of canning factories that do not currently work. Other factories that require imported raw materials from the dollar area, without really solving problems. The most representative of this type is the INPUD, although from the point of view of construction and rationalization of production is one of the best we have done: but there are countless others that we all know and that have the characteristics pointed out.

Many times, in addition, we have a very backward technology, for example, the Polish radios. On top of that, we were going to make the same mistake in television, until we stopped it. All these are investments that have to be paid for and paid for dearly. Within this group I could put the construction of fishing boats, which is not justified at the present time because of the high price of wood and its lack; I believe that iron could be justified, even if it would be more expensive than those of the world market, as long as it was taken as a line of development that would give losses today as part of the learning process.

Also in this chapter of unjustified investments, we see the acquisition of cruise ships at a time when the company does not have an organization to cope with the increase of its units. Thus, the ships that were supposed to be our foreign exchange saviors have become just another source of expenses, practically without solving problems. Even though the needs were more pressing, the same can be said of the large number of buses purchased when proper maintenance could have solved some problems; perhaps we could have purchased fewer buses. The cattle policy, without the minimum conditions to acclimatize them, in the past, has these characteristics, as well as the fishing boats that are bought in excessive quantities for our organizational capacity. And there are other minor ones; we could mention tourism, which at one time was thought to be the great source of foreign exchange and where many millions of pesos have been buried.

In addition, false general lines of action were taken. We could cite in industry, the case of import substitution, which was the first policy carried out by us; the pretension of an illusory self-sufficiency for now; the well-known mistakes of the demolition of sugar cane, of imported feed for cattle and pigs. I also believe that the purchase of fertilizers at fabulous prices responds to an ill-considered policy and the suppression of some exports that we usually made and that we could have easily maintained; at this moment, seafood, some types of tobacco, henequen rope come to mind.

I insist on the fact that even if we divide all these errors into more or less serious, more or less fatal, the fundamental thing is given by the policy of lurches, and the policy of lurches is given by the superficial treatment on the one hand and subjective on the other, of all the problems of the economy. However, the economy has shown that it has a series of laws and that violating them is very expensive.

One can point out other series of errors of a minor type, of course, which have sometimes had a great impact on our economic management, for example, the lack of demand for responsibility in the management cadres, who are not monitored, therefore, are not criticized in time and are violently withdrawn afterwards. This is part of the big problems that the State has that I intend to address as well.

We have also seen a happy spending policy that suddenly has to be corrected, and it has to be corrected with terrible drasticness, hurting the economy very hard because it is no longer possible to make sufficient discrimination at the time of making the cuts.

In general, it can be said that there has been a lack of awareness of the organization as one of the pillars of development; when the administrative chaos is extreme, certain changes of structure are made, freezes or intermediate actions are carried out in search of solutions; at other times the management teams are removed. The latter means some improvement; obviously, a good cadre works infinitely better than a mediocre or bad cadre, but it must also be taken into account that no matter how good the cadre is, if the general organizational framework prevents it from doing so, it will only be able to perform a limited task.

The decision-making levels are very undefined; personally this has been one of my concerns throughout my period as Minister of Industry, but we have really only been successful here up to the definition of the level of Director and, in some cases, Department Heads; further down, in the production centers, there has been a great deal of lack of definition which we have solved by means of administrative centralization, often excessive.

In other productive organizations, I believe that the lack of definition has been even greater, but since there is no administrative discipline either, anarchy has been total; individual solutions to single problems have been the order of the day and have sometimes provoked a contemplative attitude in the production units, waiting to see what would happen.

All this organizational turmoil has been felt especially in the sphere of services and agriculture where the changes of structure have been more profound; at least they have been much more profound than in industry where the previous structure has been preserved; in any case factories have been consolidated, larger units have been made, others have been annulled, but preserving an organizational system. In the former, practically everything has had to be changed and the results have really been disastrous so far. For all these reasons, the information has not flowed with sufficient accuracy and therefore the control has failed completely. Sometimes we have tried to solve the problem of the organization by means of schemes – the famous organograms that you hate so much – and the creation of positions to occupy the organogram hole, without paying attention to the capacity of the staff and without there having been in many aspects an adequate system of training of the personnel in their jobs. I know that your argument is that in the places where you have been in charge this has not happened, which is true, but I think that if you do a little analysis you would agree with me that you cannot be admitted because you are the Head of State and until recently you were directly responsible for the economy in Juceplan. Your isolated successes only highlight what could have been done with an overall policy on the fundamentals.

To all this must be added the mistakes of the Central Planning Board. As we have already said, the first error consisted in copying the Czechs’ organizational system (they have discarded it today, but that should not worry us, because they have discarded it for a much worse and clearly capitalist one, but the fact that it considered the possibility of extreme control of a whole series of indexes that the Cuban organization was not in a position to do).

I conceive of Juceplan as an organ of elaboration of the Government’s economic policy, in concrete form, and of control of the same in its various aspects. The degree to which this elaboration and control can be carried out cannot be specified, or I cannot specify it, in a concrete way and I believe that not knowing precisely these degrees has led us to the current situation. But in order to have these functions, the Board had to have an executive capacity which it has lacked all the time and which it even lacks today.

The Board has been incapable of directing the economy. We have all seen that inability. At a certain moment, I believe, it was fatal for that to happen, but none of us who have passed through the Board were capable of organizing what I once intended to do: A sufficiently serious control and analysis apparatus so that at a given moment, naturally, the direction of the economy would fall into its hands when the continuity of its work, its warnings, and its analysis would demonstrate the reasons it had.

The methods of calculation are old at the moment; the technical revolution has also reached the economy: the new mathematical methods allow much deeper analyses. Moreover, there is a good part of the bourgeois economy from which it is possible to extract tools of calculation that up to today the socialist economy has ignored and from which it has gone to extract only the most negative and significantly capitalist, as is the tool of control by the market.[ii]

Thus, in the face of organizations that were making progress in the elaboration of their plans and knew concretely their realities, the Board’s global warnings, presumptuous and lacking in reality, did nothing but detract from its prestige. From that first episode of the 24 million pairs of shoes and the enormous export of wood, foreseen by the first plan, until today, the discredit of the Board has been growing and the middle management has already lost faith completely. You do not know what are the terrible marathons to fulfill the plans in time and form (as they say in our language) and that I have always forced all levels of the Ministry to do, but in all, including me, it was clear the idea that this plan was going to be modified even before it was finished and, indeed, it happened like that.

That is why all those in charge of the country’s economy, in the different spheres of production, feel very disappointed and have a growing lack of faith in the central authority. Today, with the incorporation of [Osvaldo] Dorticós, there have been some qualitative changes with respect to that authority and, in addition, specific changes with respect to the methods of relationship, but it still cannot be felt beyond that and if there are no structural and conceptual changes – structural changes corresponding to a new concept – which in turn are in line with the reality of the country, and if the Board is not given the real executive authority it needs, while it is in charge of the preparation of the plans, we will follow a similar path.

Today the Board receives a considerable amount of economic data, and I know from my experience in Industry that it is sufficient for very deep analysis, but the Board’s analytical capacity, which has always been very scarce, remains at levels close to zero. Not to mention the fact that the structure itself or, let’s say, the very cadres of the apparatus in its higher parts, are incapable of helping Dorticós in the practical realization of the plans, no matter how small they may be. The most absolute individualism and the politics of cliques have totally deformed the structure of the Junta. This is so serious that it has come to cover up the main problem; that is to say, the Board as an inefficient, disorganized organism, full of quarrels, is in such a morass that sometimes it has been thought that it is the fundamental aspect and, in reality, the fundamental aspect and that has a great influence on these secondary questions, is the one that does not direct the economy; in such a way, that even when the restructurings are good, they bring us closer to a better organization, etc., etc., it cannot be said of the Board that it is the fundamental aspect of the economy, etc., it cannot be said in any way, that simply by structuring the Board as an apparatus, it will improve things.

I cannot speak about the new reorganization projects, even though they seem to me to be correct in principle, because I do not know them well enough, but in any case, it must be pointed out that this is not the fundamental aspect, although it is quite important, but the real authority that the body in charge of making the plans and controlling them will have and its capacity to be able to impose itself on the executors.

Another of the most important chapters of our mistakes is the one that corresponds to Foreign Trade [Comercio Exterior,  MINCEX].

It is not worth talking about the practical mistakes, the foreign exchange mess, is simply the consequence of a total disorganization and lack of vision of the Board, the Bank and Foreign Trade, in this case.

We have understood Foreign Trade as a body in charge of delivering sugar wherever it wants, and of buying things. And it is true that sugar is our fundamental product, but precisely this policy has been blind to the most basic needs of our economy. We have an open economy; we continue to maintain that structure and we will have to maintain it for a long time. The incidence of the foreign market, of external supplies in industry, is really important: it reaches 19% of the Ministry’s gross industrial production. Therefore, a reduction in foreign trade has an immediate impact on industry, agriculture, investments, domestic trade, transportation, etc.

Our weak and, moreover, deformed industrial base does not allow us to supply agriculture or the people in general, and we have to buy products abroad. But balance sheets have not existed in revolutionary Cuba; and even if the method of balance sheets can be called artisanal, it has its benefits; as a concept it must be used. We separated imports and exports into watertight compartments: exports were the sum of the sugar that could be produced plus the sum of some other products that the producers, INRA and we wanted to deliver, and imports were the sum of what was needed by each of the organizations that had some strength (and almost all of them have had strength because in almost all of them there has been some special plan to be carried out). Now we are greatly indebted and, what is worse, indebted for food, for the use of direct consumption trains, or for ill-conceived investments; so that our debt can never be recovered with the greater contribution that our facilities made with the loan that caused the debt.

Our import capacity decreased notably due to the lack of sugar, and yet we did not look into every last corner to try to get one more penny out of everything. Foreign Trade has made a policy of big sales in big customers; it totally disregards the small supplier or consumer, which, besides, may eventually be a market that may complement ours and, in Africa it is possible to do this, for example; I believe that in Europe and elsewhere too, but in Africa, I know that small operations could have been made that would have meant nothing in the face of the monstrous figures of our foreign trade, but that would have been a step that could have been followed by another and another.

Our Foreign Trade was incapable of long-term planning. It is true that the limitations of the annual trade plans – the most macabre form of immobilization of the economy that can be invented – have slowed down its work a lot, but it has not had the agility to create what has been falling out of the woodwork for years: a continuous flow of a series of fundamental raw materials, as is done in oil, for example, where the problem is reduced to adjusting quantities each year but the fundamental amounts are already assigned. This can be done with all the countries of the world; the capitalists also plan in this sense.

In short, our entire economy lacked the concept of foreign trade as its cornerstone, and when this concept was missing, all the rest followed.

The given orientation must be changed and make every dollar earned or saved our number one task [iii] and, secondly, savings in convention expenses but attending to them as well and without squandering resources.

Up to now, a very rigorous policy has not been followed to seek the replacement of the dollar by an agreement currency in the first place[iv] and then the analysis of the internal possibilities of substitution.

The MINCEX can do a lot, but not alone; it must be hierarchized and embedded in the internal economy apparatus, really led by the Juceplan. The method established in Industries that allows the total inspection of the exportable production of tobacco by the MINCEX should be extended to all the relations of the foreign trade apparatus with the internal economy and vice versa, the latter should be able to inspect the external management of the MINCEX and help it. This system of relations should also be implemented in the internal economy with each other in such a way that Industrias controls INRA productions that are necessary for it (such as raw tobacco, for example) and INRA controls its own (agricultural machinery, etc.).

Even though I have already talked about unjustified investments, I would also like to emphasize, as a specific case that portrays our entire economic panorama, the way in which investments are made. We begin to pay for equipment to socialist countries immediately after we sign contracts; these contracts are fulfilled and the product is shipped, and then it is stored for years in different warehouses or in the open air in the country while the labor force, the equipment or the materials that were destined to carry out that work are transferred urgently to do another at the last minute; works whose equipment is being paid abroad are paralyzed to do others which, unfortunately, are often of no use at all. It is not worth giving examples that we all know, the important thing is to achieve the minimum discipline of not imposing on the MICONS a single more work on the plan, if it is not committed to do it without touching the existing ones (unless, of course, it is a problem of extraordinary real urgency). Do not forget either that people have to live in a house and that we are making fewer and fewer houses, spending less and less on houses, but each house, individually, costs more, so that our rates are constantly falling and this state of affairs must be changed.

I will now go on to explain to you with all the brevity and synthesis of which I am capable our ideas on the Budgetary System.

These ideas are born out of practical experience and have subsequently been converted into theory. For reasons of exposition, I will make here some historical considerations, in the first place, to try to round out the conception.

Marx established two periods to reach communism, the transition period, also called socialism or first period of communism, and communism or fully developed communism. He started from the idea that capitalism as a whole would be doomed to a total rupture after reaching a development in which the productive forces would collide with the relations of production, etc. and he foresaw that first period called socialism to which he did not dedicate much time, but in the Critique of the Gotha Program, he describes it as a system where a series of mercantile categories are already suppressed, product of the fact that the fully developed society has passed to the new stage. Then comes Lenin, his theory of unequal development, his theory of the weakest link and the realization of that theory in the Soviet Union, and with it a new period not foreseen by Marx is implanted. First transition period or period of the construction of the socialist society, which is later transformed into socialist society to become communist society in the end. This first period, the Soviets and the Czechs pretend to have overcome it; I believe that objectively it is not so, since there still exist a number of private properties in the Soviet Union and, of course, in Czechoslovakia.[v] The important thing, however, is not this, but the fact that there are still a number of private properties in the Soviet Union and, of course, in Czechoslovakia.

But the important thing is not this but that the political economy of this whole period has not been created[vi] and, therefore, studied. After many years of development of their economy in a given direction, they turned a number of palpable facts of Soviet reality into alleged laws governing the life of socialist society, I think this is where one of the most important mistakes lies. [vii] But the most important, in my opinion, is established at the moment when Lenin, pressured by the immense accumulation of dangers and difficulties that hovered over the Soviet Union, the failure of an economic policy, extremely difficult to carry out on the other hand, turns back and establishes the NEP giving entrance again to old capitalist relations of production. [viii] Lenin based himself on the existence of five stages in the tsarist society, inherited by the new state.

What is necessary to emphasize is a clearly defined existence of at least two (perhaps three) completely different Lenins: the one whose history ends specifically at the moment when he writes the last paragraph of The State and the Revolution where he says that it is much more important to make it than to talk about it, and the subsequent one in which he has to face the real problems. We pointed out that there was probably an intermediate period of Lenin in which he has not yet retracted all the theoretical conceptions that guided his action up to the moment of the revolution.[ix] In any case, from the year 21 onwards, and until shortly before his death, Lenin begins the action leading to make the NEP and to bring the whole country to the relations of production that make up what Lenin called State capitalism, but which in reality can also be called pre-monopoly capitalism in terms of the ordering of economic relations. In the last periods of Lenin’s life, reading carefully, a great tension is observed; there is a very interesting letter to the President of the Bank, where he laughs at alleged profits of the Bank and makes a criticism of inter-company payments and inter-company profits (papers that pass from one place to another). This Lenin, also overwhelmed by the divisions he sees within the party, is suspicious of the future. Although it is something absolutely subjective, I have the impression that if Lenin had lived to lead the process of which he was the main actor and which he had totally in his hands, he would have been changing with remarkable speed the relations established by the New Economic Policy. Many times, in that last epoch, there was talk of copying from capitalism some things, but in capitalism, at that time, some aspects of exploitation such as Taylorism were in boom which do not exist today; in reality, Taylorism is nothing else than Stakhanovism, simple and pure piecework or, better said, piecework dressed up with a series of tinsel and that type of payment was discovered in the first plan of the Soviet Union as a creation of Soviet society. The real fact is that the whole economic legal scaffolding of present-day Soviet society is based on the New Economic Policy; in this the old capitalist relations are maintained, the old categories of capitalism are maintained, that is, there is the commodity, there is, in a certain way, profit, the interest charged by the banks and, naturally, there is the direct material interest of the workers.[x] In my concept all this scaffolding belongs to what we could call, as I have already said, a pre-monopolistic capitalism. As yet the techniques of management and the concentrations of capital were not in Czarist Russia so great as to have permitted the development of the great trusts. They were at the time of isolated factories, independent units, something practically impossible to find in American industry today, for example. That is to say, today, in the United States, there are only three firms producing automobiles: Ford, General Motors and all the small companies – small by American standards – which joined together to try to survive. None of that was happening in Russia at the time, but what is the fundamental flaw in the whole system? That it limits the possibility of development through capitalist competition but does not liquidate its categories or implement new categories of a higher character. Individual material interest was the capitalist weapon par excellence and today it is intended to be elevated to the category of a lever of development, but it is limited by the existence of a society where exploitation is not admitted. In these conditions, man does not develop all his fabulous productive possibilities, nor does he develop himself as a conscious builder of the new society.

And to be consistent with the material interest, this is established in the unproductive sphere and in the sphere of services. Then arise the grand marshals with salaries of grand marshals, the bureaucrats, the dachas and the curtains in the automobiles of the hierarchs. This is the justification, perhaps, of the material interest of the leaders, the principle of corruption, but in any case, it is consistent with the whole line of development adopted where the individual stimulus is the driving force because it is there, in the individual, where, with the direct material interest, it is a question of increasing production or effectiveness.

This system has, on the other hand, serious obstacles in its automaticity; the law of value cannot play freely because it does not have a free market where profitable and non-profitable, efficient and non-efficient producers compete and the non-efficient die of starvation. It is necessary to guarantee a series of products to the population, of prices to the population, etc., etc., and when it is resolved that profitability must be general for all units, the price system is changed, new relations are established and the relationship with the value of capitalism is totally lost, which still, in spite of the monopolistic period, maintains its fundamental characteristic of being guided by the market and of being a sort of Roman circus where the strongest win (in this case the strongest are the possessors of the highest technique). All this has been leading to a vertiginous development of capitalism and to a series of new techniques totally removed from the old techniques of production. The Soviet Union compares its progress with the United States and speaks of more steel being produced than in that country, but in the United States there has been no standstill in development.[xi] What then?

What is happening then? Simply that steel is no longer the fundamental factor for measuring a country’s efficiency, because there is chemistry, automation, non-ferrous metals and, in addition to that, the quality of steel. The United States produces less but produces a large quantity of steel of much higher quality. Technology has remained relatively stagnant in the vast majority of Soviet economic sectors. Why? Because it was necessary to create a mechanism and make it automatic, to establish the laws of the game where the market no longer acts with its capitalist implacability, but the mechanisms that were devised to replace them are fossilized mechanisms and that is where the technological breakdown begins. Lacking the ingredient of competition, which has not been replaced, after the brilliant successes obtained by the new societies thanks to the revolutionary spirit of the first moments, technology ceases to be the driving factor of society. This does not happen in the field of defense. Why? Because it is a line where there is no profitability as a rule of relationship and where everything is structurally placed at the service of society to realize the most important creations of man for his survival and that of the society in formation. But here again the mechanism fails; the capitalists have the defense apparatus very closely linked to the production apparatus, since they are the same companies, they are twin businesses and all the great advances obtained in the science of war are immediately transferred to the technology of peace and consumer goods make truly gigantic leaps in quality.[xii] In the Soviet Union nothing like that happens, they are two watertight compartments and the system of scientific development of war serves very limitedly for peace.[xiii]

These errors, excusable in the Soviet society, the first to initiate the experiment, are transplanted to much more developed or simply different societies and a dead end is reached, provoking reactions from the other states. The first to revolt was Yugoslavia, then followed by Poland and now it is Germany and Czechoslovakia, leaving aside, due to special characteristics, Romania. What happens now? They revolt against the system but nobody has looked for where the root of the evil lies; it is attributed to that heavy bureaucratic scourge, to the excessive centralization of the apparatuses, the centralization of those apparatuses is fought against and the enterprises obtain a series of triumphs and an ever greater independence in the struggle for a free market.

Who is fighting for this? Leaving aside the ideologists, and the technicians who, from a scientific point of view analyze the problem, the production units themselves, the most effective ones clamor for their independence. This is extraordinarily similar to the struggle of the capitalists against the bourgeois states that control certain activities. The capitalists agree that the State must have something, that something is the service where it is lost or which serves the whole country, but the rest must be in private hands. The spirit is the same; the State, objectively, begins to become a tutelary state of relations between capitalists. Of course, to measure efficiency the law of value is being used more and more, and the law of value is the fundamental law of capitalism; it is the one which accompanies, which is intimately linked to the commodity, the economic cell of capitalism.[xiv] As the commodity and the law of value acquire their full attributions, a readjustment takes place in the economy in accordance with the efficiency of the different sectors and units, and those sectors or units which are not efficient enough disappear.

Factories are closed and Yugoslav (and now Polish) workers emigrate to the countries of Western Europe in full economic expansion. They are slaves that the socialist countries send as an offering to the technological development of the European Common Market.

We intend that our system should reflect the two fundamental lines of thought that must be followed in order to arrive at communism. Communism is a phenomenon of consciousness, it is not reached by a leap in the void, a change of the productive quality, or the simple clash between the productive forces and the relations of production. Communism is a phenomenon of consciousness and that consciousness must be developed in man, of which individual and collective education for communism is a consubstantial part.[xv] We cannot speak in quantitative terms economically; perhaps we may be in a position to arrive at communism in a few years, before the United States has emerged from capitalism. We cannot measure in terms of per capita income the possibility of entering communism;[xvi] there is no total identification between this income and communist society. China will take hundreds of years to have the per capita income of the U.S.[xvii] Even if we consider per capita income as an abstraction, measuring the average wage of American workers, adding the unemployed, adding the blacks, still that standard of living is so high that most of our countries will have a hard time reaching it. However, we are walking towards communism.[xviii] The other aspect is that of technology.

The other aspect is that of technique; consciousness plus production of material goods is communism. Well, but what is production if not the ever greater utilization of technique; and what is the ever greater utilization of technique if not the product of an ever more fabulous concentration of capitals, that is, an ever greater concentration of fixed capital or frozen labor in relation to variable capital or living labor. This phenomenon is taking place in developed capitalism, in imperialism. Imperialism has not succumbed thanks to its capacity to extract profits, resources, from the dependent countries and export conflicts and contradictions to them, thanks to the alliance with the working class of its own developed countries against the whole of the dependent countries. In this developed capitalism are the technical germs of socialism much more than in the old system of the so-called Economic Calculus which is, in turn, heir of a capitalism that is already surpassed in itself and that, however, has been taken as a model of socialist development. We should, then, look in the mirror where a series of correct techniques of production are being reflected that have not yet collided with their relations of production. It could be argued that they have not done so because of the existence of this relief that is imperialism on a world scale but, in the end, this would bring about some corrections in the system and we only take the general lines. To give an idea of the extraordinary practical difference that exists today between capitalism and socialism we can cite the case of automation; while in the capitalist countries automation advances to really dizzying extremes, in socialism they are much further behind. One could argue about a series of problems that the capitalists will face in the immediate future, due to the struggle of the workers against unemployment, something apparently accurate, but the truth is that today capitalism is developing along this road more rapidly than socialism.

Standard Oil, for example, if it needs to refurbish a factory, it stops it and gives a series of compensations to the workers. The factory is stopped for a year, it puts in new equipment and starts up with greater efficiency. What is happening in the Soviet Union, up to now? In the Academy of Sciences of that country there are accumulated hundreds and perhaps thousands of automation projects that cannot be put into practice because the factory managers cannot afford the luxury of having their plan fall down for a year and since it is a problem of compliance with the plan, if they make an automated factory they will demand a higher production, then they are not fundamentally interested in the increase of productivity. Of course, this could be solved from the practical point of view, giving greater incentives to automated factories; it is the Libermann system and the systems that are beginning to be implemented in Democratic Germany, but all this indicates the degree of subjectivism in which one can fall and the lack of technical precision in the management of the economy. One has to suffer very hard blows of reality to begin to change; and it always changes the external aspect, the most strikingly negative, but not the real essence of all the difficulties that exist today which is a false conception of communist man, based on a long economic practice that will tend and tends to make man a numerical element of production through the lever of material interest.[xix]

On the technical side, our system tries to take what is most advanced from the capitalists and must therefore tend to centralization. [I have already noted it above, Che did not see in the centralization inherited from the capitalist experience a dented weapon. AA. note] This centralization does not mean an absolute; to do it intelligently it must be worked according to the possibilities. It could be said, centralize as much as possibilities allow; that is what guides our action. This allows a saving in administration, in manpower, it allows a better use of the equipment by sticking to known techniques. It is not possible to build a shoe factory that, installed in Havana, distributes this product to the whole republic because there is a transportation problem involved. The utilization of the factory, its optimal size, is given by the elements of technical-economic analysis. [Wouldn’t there be room in the political economy of the socialist transition for an analogous reflection that legitimizes the articulation of the fringes of action of the market with the conduction of the plan of the economy? AA. note]

We try to go to the elimination, as far as possible, of the capitalist categories, therefore we do not consider the transit of a product through socialist factories as a mercantile act.[xx] For this to be effective we must make a whole restructuring of prices. That is published by me, I have nothing more to add to the little we have written, except that there is a lot of research to be done on these points.[xxi]

In short, to eliminate the capitalist categories: merchandise between enterprises, bank interest, direct material interest as a lever, etc., and to take the latest administrative and technological advances of capitalism, that is our aspiration.

It can be said that all these pretensions of ours would also be equivalent to pretending to have here, because the United States has it, an Empire State and it is logical that we cannot have an Empire State but, nevertheless, we can have many of the advances of the American skyscrapers and manufacturing techniques of those skyscrapers even if we make them smaller. We cannot have a General Motors that has more employees than all the workers of the Ministry of Industries as a whole, but we can have an organization, and in fact we do, similar to General Motors. In this problem of the technique of administration, technology plays a role; technology and technique of administration have been constantly varying, intimately united throughout the process of the development of capitalism, however, in socialism they have been divided as two different aspects of the problem and one of them has remained totally static. When they have realized the gross technical flaws in the administration, they look nearby and discover capitalism.

Emphasizing, the two fundamental problems that afflict us, in our Budgetary System, are the creation of the communist man and the creation of the communist material environment, two pillars that are united by means of the edifice they must support.

We have a great lacuna in our system; how to integrate man to his work in such a way that it is not necessary to use that which we call the material disincentive, how to make each worker feel the vital necessity to support his revolution and at the same time that work is a pleasure; that he feels what we all feel up here.[xxii]

If it is a problem of visual field and it is only possible to be interested in the work of those who have the mission, the capacity of the great builder, we would be condemned to the fact that a lathe operator or a secretary would never work with enthusiasm. If the solution lies in the possibility of development of that same worker in the material sense, we would be in a very bad way.

The truth is that today there is no full identification with work and I believe that some of the criticisms made against us are reasonable, although the ideological content of this criticism is not. That is to say, we are criticized for the fact that the workers do not participate in the preparation of plans, in the administration of the state units, etc., which is true, but from there they conclude that this is because they are not materially interested in them, they are on the margins of production. The remedy sought for this is that the workers run the factories and are monetarily responsible for them, that they have their incentives and disincentives according to management. I believe that here is the crux of the matter; for us it is a mistake to pretend that the workers direct the units; some worker has to direct the unit, one among all as representative of the others, if you will, but representative of all in terms of the function assigned to him, the responsibility or the honor conferred on him, not as representative of the whole unit before the great State unit, in an antagonistic way. In a centralized, correct planning, the rational utilization of each of the different elements of production is very important and cannot depend on an assembly of workers or on the criteria of a worker, the production that is going to be done. Evidently, the less knowledge there is in the central apparatus and at all intermediate levels, the more useful is the action of the workers from the practical point of view[xxiii].

That is true, but also our practice has taught us two things axiomatic for us; a well placed technical cadre can do much more than all the workers in a factory and a management cadre placed in a factory can totally change the characteristics of them, either in one direction or the other. The examples are innumerable and, moreover, we are familiar with them throughout the economy, not only in this Ministry. The problem arises again: why can a management team change everything? Why does it make all its employees work better technically, i.e. administratively, or why does it involve all employees in such a way that they feel a new tone, a new enthusiasm for work, or a combination of these two things? We haven’t found the answer yet and I think we need to study this a bit more. The answer has to be intimately related to the political economy of this period and the treatment given to these questions must be integral and coherent with the political economy.[xxiv] How to involve the workers?

How to involve the workers is a question I have not been able to answer.[xxv] I consider this as my greatest obstacle or my greatest failure and it is one of the things to think about because in it is also involved the problem of the Party and the State, of the relations between the Party and the State.

Let us move on to the third of the points with which I threatened: the function of the Party and the State.

Up to now our poor Party has been a doll armed in the Soviet style and which began to walk in the Soviet style: as a good doll, it began to play tricks as soon as it ran into the porcelain and we have solved the problem by removing the rope. Now it is in a corner but we intend to reactivate that dummy and it starts to move one leg or another; I dare say that, at any moment, it will break yet another slab, because there are underlying problems which have not been properly dealt with and which prevent its development.

In my concept, the Party is an apparatus that combines in itself the double situation of being the ideological engine of the Revolution and its most efficient control system.

By ideological engine, I understand the fact that the Party and its members must take the main guiding ideas of the Government and transform them, at each level, into direct impulses on the executing organizations or on men.

By control apparatus, that the bases of the Party and its higher organizations, in successively increasing degree, are capable of presenting before the Government, the image of what really happens in everything that does not depend on statistics or economic analysis, that is to say, morale, discipline, leadership methods, the opinion of the people, etc.

To fulfill its task of ideological engine, the Party and each member of the Party, must be vanguard and, for this, they must present the closest image to what a communist should be. Their standard of living, that is, the standard of living of the members of the Party, must never exceed, neither as professional cadres, nor as cadres in production, that of their peers. The morality of a communist is his most precious prize, his true weapon, therefore, it must be taken care of, even in the most intimate aspects of his life; the practical part of this, the way in which the Party should conduct the care of individual morality, is one of the most difficult points to deal with but it is natural that neither thieves, nor opportunists, nor Pharisees…, can appear in the Party, whatever their previous merits may have been.

At this stage, the revolutionary cadre, with his moral qualities as his calling card, will have to make fundamental efforts to create consciousness in the three most important lines: training, both technical and cultural or deepening of consciousness, the defense of the country, both armed and ideological, and production in all its aspects: and, defending these three fundamental lines and promoting them with his example, he must participate in all national plans, giving hierarchy to his action to the extent that the Government gives it hierarchy. All this looking for the way to act in such a way that the struggle against the tendency to bureaucratize the Party, that is to say, to turn it into one more instrument of statistical control of the Government, or into an organ of execution, or into a parliamentary organ, with many paid characters and many runners in jeeps, meetings, etc., etc.

It is necessary to develop the cadres of the Party so that they can fulfill their task of control.

The Party, naturally, must have its own organization, separate from the State, even though today there are occasionally a series of positions in which Party and State are mixed.

As immediate tasks it is necessary to carry out the election of the middle cadres extracted from the base by methods similar to those used for the selection of the lower cadres and the restructuring of the National Leadership, adapting them to the ideas that we have at this moment on the subject.

One of the first tasks that the Party has to analyze are its relations with the Administration at all levels. What will be the relation that the Party will have with the Government? What will be the relation of the Provincial Directorates with the Provincial Governments or JUCEI [Coordination, Execution and Inspection Board] and the regional and nuclei with their corresponding ones? This is almost the fundamental task, the central point of the discussion and if we can elucidate it we will have already laid a good stone for the advancement of the whole apparatus.[xxvi] So far I have made a series of general considerations, good or bad, but which do not contribute anything to the problem. I believe that it is necessary to carry out a series of concrete tasks so that the Party can play its role. It seems to me that one of the fundamental points at this moment is to proceed to the selection of the middle cadres and the restructuring of the Secretariat of Organization,[xxvii] in such a way, that it really has a sort of executive power over all the professional cadres in all the tasks of Party organization; this can be done quickly and a system can be sought to propose it to the Secretariat, returning to production all the middle cadres who simply do not measure up. At the same time, it is necessary to consider the development of the cadres and for this it has to be developed with a central idea of the Party. If one accepts what I give as a definition of communist, it is necessary to establish rigid systems of discipline, control and self-criticism that will allow to break down all the root bushes within the Party.

The main tasks of the nation can be taken as fundamental, then the main tasks of the organizations as secondary and the Party can take under its charge the impulse of a series of these tasks. To refer to industry: vanguard groups, vanguard workers going to the most backward factories. The communists should not earn a plus salary, but their usual salary, or the average, communists of any type should be willing to move from one part of the country to another when the Party orders it. This means that a communist, an accountant in Havana, has the obligation to move to Nicaro if the Party orders him to do so, making this obligation clear as a member of the Party and not as an official.

There should be a continuous review of Party members in periodic assemblies to include new candidates and discard the old ones, those who have demonstrated great weaknesses, establishing in all those cases in which the faults are not serious the status of candidate to member.

Establish by the Secretariat of Organization a project of organization of the Party as a whole, but divided into two parts, one of which should cover the Provincial Directorates downwards, in such a way that, if due to the present circumstances the proposed restructuring is not admitted, serious work can begin from the Provincial Directorates downwards, that for this work a commission be formed directed by the Secretariat of Organization and with the participation of members of the provinces, either one from each province, or someone chosen from among the different provinces.

That the organization appoint a small group of comrades to work on the creation of provisional statutes of the Party, which would serve to regulate its functioning until a congress is convened in which the program will be definitively approved. The relations between the Party and the Youth should be regulated. Also, a mixed commission should be formed, either only of Party members who are also administrative or of Party members and members of the Administration who would regulate the relations between them from the Ministry downwards.

Some of these projects can be discussed in the bases previously and others directly discussed in the higher spheres.

I believe that the fundamental lines are:

To approve the concept of what a communist should be, whatever it may be or within the limits that may be specified.

To initiate the tasks of discussion of the Party-Administration relations.

To decide on the functions of the Party, whether these are those that I raise of ideological engine and control, or those that are established and to establish a method of work that allows dividing the task in two parts.

Even if the Party, in some aspects, continues with the characteristics of present acephaly, a firm base organization can be structured.

More or less this is what I have to say about the Party, little more than a call for research, it is always within the framework of my fundamental concern which is the creation of the new man.[xxviii]

About the State I have even less to say. I think it is the biggest muddle, but I also believe that we have to make systematic efforts to investigate it. That is why it seems to me that the system adopted for administrative restructuring, the fight against bureaucratism, etc., has a serious fundamental error; once again we are falling into the system of drawing man starting from the nose, without a scheme of the whole. If the Juceplan is in charge of compiling statistics and the agencies are also given this power, a regional commission should not change the centrally required models. It has not been possible to rationalize more because it collides with a series of limitations of a central bureaucratic type or of Juceplan’s requirements, or because of indiscipline. It would be better to frame the Party within this same line of action and to do an orderly work that goes from top to bottom; if they want to study at the base all that is necessary, but to then go up in their study and give a recommendation at the end, not an action at the beginning.

The idea of restructuring presented by Juceplan seems to me quite correct in a logical sense, but I cannot say if it is correct, conceptually speaking, from the point of view of what the State should be in the first period of transition, which corresponds to the question of what the communist man should be and therefore how he should be prepared, on the one hand, and of the political economy of the period and therefore how the structure based on that political economy will be on the other. We have to create a serious research base that is capable of answering very complex questions and begin to structure a new Socialist State, totally different from the present ones. But I do not know more about the subject: I leave it in that degree of vagueness.

I will try to be concrete, now, in the chapter on General Recommendations.

Economic Policy: I believe that a small group of people should devote themselves to the study of the Political Economy of this period, but we should not expect them or think that they can solve it easily. Very few people of that capacity will be in Cuba, if there is anyone,[xxix] because these are tasks that have been done by few in history and perhaps Marx was the only one who did it completely.

However, in economic policy there are a number of conceptions that can be established of urgent tasks to which attention can be drawn. The most important (almost a cry to you) is to “globalize”, in the good sense of the word, our aspirations. I believe that if we put a little reality check on our enthusiasm and make a comparative analysis with other countries, without falling back into the pretensions of 15 or 20% annual growth, we can consider what we want for the year [19]80. On this basis, it will emerge what we will have to produce, what we will have to import, how much we will have to spend in productive investments and how much in unproductive investments and the answer to the biggest question: can we do it with the current methods and with the current development of the economy, yes or no?

There are some studies made by colleagues from the Ministry that indicate that we cannot. They are preliminary, I don’t know if you want to read them. This would indicate that it is not possible to reach an adequate development in the year 80 simply with livestock and sugarcane; something else is necessary. That something else is industry.

How much can be spent on industries, what industries, how much on services, transportation, etc.? This is not the time to be here advocating quantities, I am simply interested in advocating methods. This is a method that does not require more than one day to get an overview. It will then be possible to analyze things that are very clear, for example, that the markets derived from meat are not as abundant as it is claimed, that there are a series of protectionist laws, in agreement with the different capitalist groupings, which prevent an unlimited sale of products and a substantial increase in the prices of the different products made from cattle is not foreseen in the coming years; besides, huge investments have to be made, and investments made there are not made anywhere else.

That is to say, to make an elementary balance of our needs and our desires. If it were possible to do this once and stick to a plan of action which would not have to be extremely detailed, it would be possible to carry out internal lines of long-term development, with much more elaborate five-year plans of which the first one, this one of 1966-70, which does not exist but which is fixed by a series of contracted commitments, will have a clearly agricultural tendency and after 1970 we will have to make the great turning point. I say this with all my conviction (whatever it may be worth); if we devote ourselves to agriculture and the agricultural industry alone, we are doomed in terms of the real possibilities of having a harmonious development and of being a rich country.[xxx] We must invest in industry, within the framework of the new economic model.

We must invest in industry, and within this we must take the most modern industry; we must have a sufficiently solid mechanical base, with at least an elementary metallurgical base. It must be done. We have to dedicate ourselves to petroleum chemistry, sugar chemistry, basic chemistry, including fertilizers; we have to chemify to the maximum. We must automate, the only way to compete. We must attend to the disturbing problem of preventive maintenance.

By doing all these things, plus the basis of an adequate geological prospecting, the development of agricultural machinery within our possibilities, mechanical industries such as shipbuilding, parsimoniously and with a continuous accelerated and linked education, we will be able to go far; if nothing is done in this sense, from the year 70 Cuba will again have unemployment problems.

There are urgent tasks to be carried out. Among these tasks, one of the most important is to set the rules of the game of Juceplan definitively, definitively give Juceplan an authority, at least annually, uncontroversial.[xxxi] No one should be able to leave strict frameworks without consideration of special plans. We must gradually establish the budgetary system in agriculture; this would be ideal for composing an immense amount of problems that exist, provided that the cadres are honest and hardworking and conscious of what must be done. We have to re-examine the problems of prices and, together with prices, wages; that is going to explode at some point if we are careless. It is not that it is an explosive situation today, but discontent is accumulating in certain industrial regions where wages are frozen, seeing how wages are frozen, seeing how wages in the countryside are increasing day by day. It is necessary to follow a policy of extreme caution in investments, well thought out and unique, based on a unique plan of a unique organism, controlled by the Juceplan.

Osmany said the other day something very sensible; we paralyze works to send people to cut cane and the agency in charge of cutting the cane maintains, with its own workers, its own works under construction.[xxxii] We have to make at least another structure, a different one.

It is necessary to make at least another structuring of all the agencies on a single plan directed by the Juceplan and then to have certain general guidelines, so that a whole series of dark areas in the relations between agencies, horizontal and vertical relations, etc., can be cleaned up. It is important, as I warned before, to regulate exactly the participation of the Party: if it is not totally possible, at least its participation at certain lower levels, in a more or less constant way and throughout the country. To proceed to the education of the Party cadres with a broader sense of philosophy, even a more advanced Marxist humanism. Not definitions around the discrepancies, but participation in studies, or at least, in compilations of documents of the debates, attempt to analyze the causes that are currently known. To make the Party cadre a thinking element, not only of the realities of our country but also of the Marxist theory which is not an ornament but an extraordinary guide for action (the cadres do not know Trosky or Stalin but they qualify them as “bad” scholastically). To put an end to scholasticism and apologetics, will gird a unique discipline all the dependencies of the Party, (I am thinking of Hoy) [newspaper of the Popular Socialist Party].

To make an educational policy in accordance with all that is to be achieved, united in all its parts, congruent in its scales and congruent with what is sought.

To follow the same principle in Foreign Relations.

I believe these are the most important things; I also believe that I have not said anything new. I have a certain feeling that this is a bit of a waste of everyone’s time, because I have copies of other earlier writings of a similar tone and really little has changed since then and nothing of substance. However, today there have been a number of major administrative developments and some changes in directives can perhaps improve the apparatus and increase the confidence you have in it.

[…]

In this way, it will be possible to make a lot of progress, perhaps the mistakes will not be corrected in time, but sometimes, it is preferable to take a little more time to correct them and not to do it immediately, without thinking about the possibilities of making a new mistake.

These are criticisms that I make under the protection of old friendship and the appreciation, admiration and boundless loyalty that I have for you.

I am not very sure that you will reach this page because there have already been so many.

Homeland or Death

.

Notes by Aurelio Alonso:

[i] It brings to my memory a dramatic synthesis of the country’s economic situation that I heard from Osvaldo Dorticos, towards the end of 1970, in which he ended by pointing out that “the economy is implacably mathematical and political genius can do little in the face of that”.

[ii] Here I emphasize that for him not all the weapons of capitalism come to us dented, and it is necessary to discern, step by step, is the real challenge, what must be rescued, as well as the dangers of adopting what must be critically discarded, and in the market (I think), which is such a broad category that typifies the logic of capital but which precedes it, there is both. I am convinced that the challenge lies in deciphering the nicked, which would lead to ceding “control” to it.

[iii] He had to start his economic adventure with the National Bank and he was aware of the danger of demonetization of the country’s economy.

[iv] And this was, has been or is feasible? The ruble was never accepted in the financial market as a convertible currency, as far as I remember; the euro was created when the Soviet system was beginning to crumble; the yuan was accepted about a decade ago. Is there a proposal for a sustainable alternative financial circuit? Will the yuan be given the silk road?

[v] I believe that identifying progress in the socialist transition by the extent of state socialization of property has proven to be a mistake, although he is right that neither Prague nor Moscow boasted what they boasted. Humberto Pérez quotes a text from the end of 1959 in which Che tacitly suggests a model for the Cuban economy: “a division was then established to study the main lines of the basic projects with the guiding idea of placing these projects at the service of the entire nation, with the exclusive or almost exclusive participation of the State. They are: a) energy and fuel, b) steel and metal industry in general, c) sugar cane industry and its derivatives, d) chemical industry in general, e) mining development plan and f) agricultural products industry. At this highest industrial level, the State will direct all economic policy // In industries derived from these fundamental, but not so important, private individuals and the State may or may not be associated in a series of them and, at a lower level, only private individuals will intervene in the total industrialization of the country. Neither the budgetary system supposed (nor Che considered) a completely statized economy, but socialism always supposed for him a society with a diversity of forms of property where the socialist state enterprise would predominate and rule. // Humberto rightly comments that “in the concrete historical situation of Cuba in late 1959 and early 1960, Che proposed a structure of ownership of the means of industrial production similar to that which today is proposed in the conceptualization”.

[vi] And to create it, when a quarter of a century after these appreciations, the system exploded (as he himself, and only he, foresaw that it could happen) is a more complex challenge, and also more urgent in our days.

[vii] These and other constructs continue to weigh on us.

[viii] Lenin counted on the victory of the German working class in the post-war period, frustrated by the treacherous social democracy. And with a proletarian Germany, in a probable revolutionary tide in the capitalist centers of Europe, which was cut off in blood. The NEP is not the expression of a change of paradigm but of strategies – today I would insist, of strategies rather than tactics . The option imposed by Stalin in the USSR did not follow the course of the NEP, I do not share that view – the forced contingency and other authoritarian measures that sustained the first five-year plans had nothing to do with the NEP but quite the opposite – Stalin replaced capitalist resources with a system of state control, an authoritarianism that imposed austerity and repression (seen from a historical point of view). For me the dilemma was defined as follows: neo-papist transition or repressive transition?

[ix] I would say that Che evaluates as a step backward what Lenin considered as a necessary change of strategy. Whether or not he will prove to be right in its application. A similar practical sense motivated Che himself to reason that if his budgetary financing system did not work, he would have to resort to the “beaten paths” from which he was trying to distance himself. And in the situation that followed the failure of the 10 million harvest, he would probably have done the same.

[x] Can it be said that the system of accumulation adopted by Stalin was based on the NEP? I have already said that I do not think so. This perception of Che could be linked to the Khrushchevian reforms after 1956, not to Stalinism. Besides, is it possible to attribute the emergence of the Soviet system to the mercantile involution of the economy? Personally, I would not dare to give an affirmative answer to either of my two questions today.

[xi] The USSR took on the competition with the United States in the territory that the market defined for it, and in the market field the rules favored the United States. Only now – in the 21st century – has a contender emerged that finally exhibits the potential to successfully compete for hegemony on the world economic scene: the Chinese socialist system.

[xii] I think it was in the military field that this illusion of competing in “peaceful coexistence” swallowed up the achievements of the Soviet economy, and above all the possibilities of building on previously achieved levels.

[xiii] Indeed, in the US economy, after World War II, the military industrial complex was formed and developed vertiginously: a political-economic machine that responds to a single opulent monopsony client like no other, the state power of the US empire, which pays with a military budget, inflated with a view to financing the permanence of the “Warfare State”.

[xiv] Agreed, but is this not what leads Marx to analyze in 1877, to his followers of the PSDA before meeting in their second congress, in Gotha, that it was not realistic to consider communism as an immediate purpose inspired by the “manifesto” that Engels and he drafted three decades earlier, but the need to foresee a transition period, for objective reasons (that the productive capacities can fully satisfy the needs) and subjective (to train man and the institutions for it). Transition in which the action of the law of value would act subject to new presuppositions. It was neither erased by the change in the socio-economic program nor eradicated by decree.

[xv] Agreed. Years ago it occurred to me to affirm – I realized it – that the new man would only exist when the desire for the automobile could be removed from the human head. This desire is the most complete expression of the deformation of the consumer culture spread by the modernity of the twentieth century. You will tell me that I am attributing to the “new man” a utopian dimension. Perhaps to communism as well. But I point out that no socialist project managed to escape the temptation to prioritize access to the family car, to invest it as a sign of progress, as a consumer good even before having fully resolved the satisfaction of public transportation. The absence or insufficiency of public response to this need – essential for the economy – encourages the desire and transforms it into a need for an owner: the person who alienates himself in the car. Ours less than others.

[xvi] I do not have to reiterate that I no longer conceive communism as a stage to be “entered” or “arrived at”, but as an ideal of perfection of satisfaction of needs in conditions of social justice and equity, to which our steps must approach asymptotically. And I am convinced that today Che – and Lenin, and Marx – would see it with an analogous perspective. Che rightly points out that just as Marx concludes the obligatory nature of a transition (which he called socialism), and Lenin added that of a transition towards the transition consigned by Marx, it is clear that this concept has much more meaning than that which we formally attribute to it in the theory – and practice – of economics.

[xvii] It seems that he will not need to wait that long to shake American power.

[xviii] But in any case, today, faced with the complication of human subsistence and the depletion of the natural environment, we would also have to modify the communist paradigm, and among other things resize the meaning of per capita income.

[xix] The emblematic desire for the automobile over the streetcar, bus or subway and the manifest disdain for the bicycle, which should have been incorporated into our socialist culture.

[xx] I agree with this reflection, since I think that preserving the transit of goods and services within the state sector from the effects of the market should give a legitimate advantage to state enterprises in the necessary competition with the private and cooperative sectors.

[xxi] I believe that there is still a need for research…, and experimentation.

[xxii] That gap is deeper than ever for known reasons, unlike what we might have expected half a century ago.

[xxiii] It seems to me that the two statements do not agree.

[xxiv] Of course I felt this absence of thesis, for what came to us as the political economy of socialism was a vade mecum of Soviet experience rather than a scientific attempt.

[xxv] It seems that except for localized cases this has not been a systemic achievement.

[xxvi] This point is perhaps the only one in which his analysis is based more on theory than on experience, since he had not even concluded the process of integration of the revolutionary organizations. But I confess 1) that I have felt extremely identified with his appreciation of what the party should be; 2) that I am very satisfied that he does not state at any time that “the Party leads the State”, that I also tabulate it as what the party should not be; 3) that I regret that these criteria were not within the reach of the National Assembly of People’s Power during the elaboration of the draft of the Constitution.

[xxvii] It was the second position, as it was for the Bolsheviks, structure that Stalin would make obsolete in the design of his bureaucratic apparatus of power.

[xxviii] Support of the State, not apex of political decisions…, I think.

[xxix] I would say that now there are many with capacity, but also mechanisms of rejection, accommodations in power, and other obstacles that the bureaucracy of our bumpy transition has been creating, and that operate more or less intermittently, to put a damper on the debate.

[What if we reach a point where not even our agro-industrial production can provide us with food security? Today’s panorama is more complex than the one Che had before his eyes: “harmonious development” sounds good even but “being a rich country” is beyond utopia.

[xxxi] I wonder if the system will have ever granted Juceplan, after 1965, the relevance that Che assigned to it as an organism, beyond the criticisms he makes of it, or rather, because of them.

[xxxii] !

A

Aurelio Alonso

Another relevant analysis of this letter, made by political scientist and historian María del Carmen Ariet, was published in the Cuban website Cubadebate.