Upstream - Cuba Pt. 3: Che Guevara and the Building of Socialism w/ Helen Yaffe

Episode Date: March 24, 2026

In this episode, part 3 of our ongoing series on Cuba, we're joined by Helen Yaffe for a conversation exploring Cuba's transition to socialism after the revolution through Che Guevara's contributions. Helen Yaffe is a professor of Latin American political economy at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of We Are Cuba! How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World, and Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution. She is also the cohost of the Cuba Analysis podcast and the documentary  Cuba's Life Task: combatting climate change. The episode begins with a brief introduction to Che Guevara—providing an overview of Che's life and biography. We then discuss what the Cuban revolutionaries inherited in terms of Cuba's semi-colonial economic and political state—unemployment, poverty, inequality, underdevelopment, and dependency. We talk about how socialism became the guiding light of revolutionary Cuba and how the revolutionary government became more radical in response to the United States' attempts to sabotage it. We discuss Che Guevara's role in developing the productive capacities of Cuba and his many roles ranging from President of the National Bank of Cuba to Head of Ministry of Industries (MININD). We also discuss his unique approach to laying the foundations of socialism in Cuba which put just as much emphasis on developing consciousness as developing materially. We contrast this with the Soviet system, which Che was critical of.  We then explore the role of intellectual, political, and training education in the emerging socialist state of Cuba, which had experienced a mass emigration of managers and business owners after the revolution and had a working class which was accustomed to viewing labor as an exploitative endeavor and not as means of liberation. Finally, we explore Che's legacy and tie it into present day Cuba, which is still under siege by the imperialists.  Further resources: We Are Cuba! How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution Let Cuba Liva: Donate Support the Nuestra América Flotilla to Cuba Related episodes: Listen to our ongoing series on Cuba Listen to our ongoing series on China Intermission music: "Señor Martí" by El Guajiro Upstream is entirely listener funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants—just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and for Upstream stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support you'll be helping us keep Upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going—socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund so thank you in advance for the crucial support. patreon.com/upstreampodcast For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Instagram and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

There was this period of like six years of Che Guevara's life where he is a member of the Cuban government and he's working in the government in this incredibly important and challenging process of the transition to socialism, right, in conditions of underdevelopment, in conditions of attack by the US, blockade, economic warfare, military warfare. You have the invasion, the Bay of Pigs, the threat of the, nuclear annihilation under the Cuban missile crisis. And there is Che Guevara. And, you know, most of these biographies just sort of say something like, you know, Che was in these positions. He was president of the National Bank, head of the Department of Industrialization, and then Minister of Industries. And they just said, you know, his light was seen in his office at 4 in the morning.

So I was like, well, what was he doing in his office at 4 in the morning? And that's how my own investigation began. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. Sadly, the transition from capitalism to socialism is a process that has not been experienced too often in this world.

There are just a handful of examples of societies that have successfully bucked off the yoke of empire and attempted to lay the foundations for socialism. And Cuba is one of these rare cases. So taking the Cuban example, what does the transition to socialism look like, especially in an underdeveloped and dependent state, just 90 miles off the coast of the imperialist enemy? In this episode, part three of our ongoing series on Cuba, we're joined by Helen Gaffey for a conversation exploring Cuba's transition to socialism after the revolution.

Helen Gaffey is a professor of Latin America. American political economy at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of We Are Cuba, How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World, and Che Guevara, The Economics of Revolution. She's also the co-host of the Cuba Analysis Podcast and the documentary Cuba's Life Task, Combating Climate Change. And before we get started, Upstream is entirely listener-funded.

No ads, no promotions, no grant. just Patreon, subscriptions, and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and our lively online discussion forum, and for stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support, you'll be helping us keep upstream sustainable

and helping to keep this whole project going. Post-capitalist political education podcasts are not even, to fund, so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now, here's Robert in conversation with Helen Gaffey. All right, Helen, it's a pleasure to have you on. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for the invitation. To start, I'd love it if you could maybe just introduce yourself for us and talk a little bit about the work that you do. And tell us a little bit too about your connection to Cuba. Okay, so my formal title is I'm a professor of Latin American political economy at the University of Glasgow. I'm in a subject group called Economic and Social History in the School of

Social and Political Studies. And I specialize in Cuba and Latin American development. My relationship with Cuba is over 30 years long. I first lived in Cuba in 1995 when I was a teenager, 18, and I just went with my older sister. It was not quite, but almost the worst year of what's known as the special period in Cuba, so the economic crisis that occurs after the collapse of the Soviet bloc when Cuba lost 80 years. 86, 87% of trade and investment. It lost, you know, 90% of its fuel of its oil that was being imported mainly from Russia and so on. So a severe economic crisis and that was when we decided to go and live in Cuba and find out for ourselves firsthand, you know, what it was like to live in a socialist

country. Of course, adding an underdeveloped socialist country in the global south, a small island nation and so on. So since 1995, I've been active in solidarity and scholarship on Cuba. So I then helped to organize solidarity brigades from Britain with young people. And then I went on to do a PhD, a doctoral thesis, on the economic ideas of Che Guevara and his work in Cuba. So I finished my doctorate in 2007 and it was published in 2009 by Paugrave McMillan as Che Guevara, The Economics of Revolution, which is the book we'll be discussing. I have subsequently published another soul-authored book on Cuba, which was published in 2020, just as the COVID pandemic was taking off. And that was called We Are Cuba, How a Revolutionary People

have survived in a post-Soviet world. what I wanted to do with that is to examine and try and explain some of the extraordinary developments that have taken place in Cuba as a scientist, a specialist from the United States, said to me, under the radar, you know, these extraordinary developments that occasionally come to light, come to international attention. For example, in West Africa with the Ebola epidemic, suddenly, you know, the press is saying, well, actually, the largest brigade is Cuban. What are they doing there? How do they have such an important role? Or during COVID-19, when Cuba are the only nation in Latin America and the Caribbean to develop its own COVID-19 vaccine,

and people say, well, how was that possible? So, you know, my book has a whole chapter on what I call the curious case of Cuba's biotech revolution and how it was that they invested, you know, it was a state investment in the Cuban biotech system, for example. example is very distinct from the way, the shape and the form of biotechnology sectors globally. So that was what I set out to investigate and to explain. And the book is based on many interviews and documents from Cuba. So Voices of Cuba, hence the title, which the publisher chose, we are Cuba, because it was about, you know, what's really happening with Cuban people beyond dogma

and sort of seeing all the Cubans as an indoctrinated personification of, you know, the Castro dictatorship, which is the way they're often perceived even in US academia, Western academia and so on. So that's quite a long introduction. I hope that was okay. That was great. Yeah. Thank you so much. And we're going to invite you back on to discuss that book.

We Are Cuba. Hopefully you'll accept the invitation and we'll be able to have you come on again and discuss that. But to start today, we asked you to come on the show because we wanted to get an idea of the Cuban attempts at implementing socialism in the first decade or so after the revolution. And so in doing so, we're going to be focusing very much on Che Guevara's contributions, which are outlined in a lot of really great detail in the book that you mentioned on Che's economic contributions that grew out of your thesis. So essentially, I think Che will serve as a kind of anchor around which will tell this sort of story about the first decade or so of laying the foundations for socialism in Cuba, period of roughly the 1960s, which is where we ended our last episode with Manolo Delos Santos. So yeah, maybe just to start, though, before we get into the political and economic conditions,

which were inherited by the revolution and which for that decade, the foundations of socialism were being laid onto, I guess you could put it. Maybe just give us a sense of who Che Guevara was because we'll be getting into this other side of him that's not as much known, but we haven't actually done any kind of episodes on

Che specifically except for kind of mentioning his role in the revolution. But give us some context. Like who was Che? What was he best known for? So Che Guevara was Argentinian. That's the first things. He's an Argentinian national hero of Cuba. But he's also an international hero.

He was Argentinian from a sort of lower middle class, quite liberal politically family in Argentina. So he had diverse and rich upbringing, and thinking about ideas and debates and surrounded by intellectuals and artists. And then he famously goes on various, several travels around Latin America. And this is captured in his own diary, which was then published and then dramatized in a film called the motorcycle diary. So he goes off with his friend Alberto Granal, who was one of the people I interviewed actually for the book, age then 90, I think, in living in Havana.

And he goes off on this journey around Latin America and he witnesses the immense poverty and inequality and really, really important exploitation that he sees, including and particularly of indigenous peoples in the Americas at the hands of mainly US corporations, but not entirely just US corporations. And, you know, he resolved. that Latin Americans must take up arms against this to liberate themselves. So during this trip, he ends up in Guatemala, where a socialist president has been elected for democratic elections and is facing the prospect of a coup, a military coup, supported by the United

States. And then this transpasses and Fidel Castro is there. And he believes that the correct response is that the army, the Guatemalan army, should arm the people to be able to defend their revolution. This doesn't happen. He has to escape, you know, and seek asylum, and he goes to Mexico. Now, also kind of in asylum in Mexico, or having escaped in some senses from a revolutionary battle, are the Cuban revolutionaries who have already carried out the attack on the Moncada barracks. they've been imprisoned and under the Batista presidency, the Batista dictatorship, they have been given amnesty and they are released and as long as they can leave the country, they go to Mexico too.

Now that Moncardo Barrex attack is in protest, is a revolutionary insurrection or an attempt to spark a revolutionary insurrection against another US-supported regime and this time for Batista. So Fidel Castro is the leader of the Cuban insurrectionists or revolutionaries, and he meets with Che Guevara. Actually, first Che meets another Cuban Nicol Lopez, who introduces him to Raul Castro, who introduces him to Fidel Castro. And they sit down, they have this famously, they have this meeting, you know,

long into the night, into the small hours. And by the end of the meeting, Fidel Castro has signed up to join the Cuban expedition. This is because Fidel Castro has announced that by the end of the year, they will return to Cuba and they will fight or die trying. So Che Guevara signs up to the expedition. He is initially there as the group's doctor, because I should have mentioned that he is medically trained. He's, you know, he's got his medical degree. And he goes along with a medical bag. And then, you know, they land and they've been ratted out.

the forces are waiting, the Batista forces are waiting for them. There's a terrible battle. Most of them are killed very early on. Che Guevara survives as does Raul Castro, Fidel Castro, although they're all dissipated and separated and in hiding until they meet. And then in the early months of this nascent guerrilla struggle, Che Guevara famously said, you know, he has to make a decision. He has to flee from an area and he can either take his medical bag or he can take rifles.

So at that moment he says, I decided, you know, I was a soldier above all else. So he picks up a rifle and then becomes a commandante in the rebel army, which was obviously a big honour of him not even being Cuban. And there he was fighting for the liberation of Cuba from the Batista dictatorship, which was very much seen as fighting for independence from US imperialism because of the dependence of the Batista regime. on US imperialism and he was there representing US interests. So this is, you know, where most of the world sort of take off with Che Guevara.

He's a guerrilla fighter, he's an anti-imperialist, and he's a man of action. And, you know, certainly when I started to read about Che Guevara, I remember reading in 1997, it was the 30th anniversary of his death. I was at university. and my friends for my birthday bought me a big fat biography of Che by John Lee Anderson. There were some that came out in Spanish,

Pablo Taibo's the second had a big biography, but there was a few around that time. And I read this biography, and it's all about his childhood, his struggle with asthma, his travels around Latin America, his dalliances with women. There was a lot of focus on that,

you know, as if it was very important. And then his guerrilla struggle. But then there was this period of like six years of Che Guevara's life where he is a member of the Cuban government and he's working in the government in this incredibly important and challenging process of the transition to socialism, right? In conditions of underdevelopment, in conditions of attack by the US, blockade, economic warfare, military warfare. you have the invasion, the Bay of Pigs, the threat of nuclear annihilation under the Cuban missile crisis. And there is Che Guevara. And, you know, most of these biographies just sort of say something like, you know, Che was in these positions. He was president of the National Bank, head of the Department of Industrialization, and then Minister of Industries. And they just said, you know, his light was seen in his office at 4 in the morning.

So I was like, well, what was he doing in his office at 4 in the morning? And that's how my own investigation, began. Now, we had a very valuable contribution to answering that from Carlos Tablada, who's a Cuban economist who had written around the same time for the 30th anniversary of Che Guevara's death about his political and economic ideas. But, you know, it's one thing to have ideas, right? And, you know, we can point to certain critique that he had of socialist political economy in the Soviet Union, right? But it's one thing to say, well, I think, that they're not emphasising consciousness enough. But how can you, in a policy-making position, actually implement policy or formulate policies that can contribute towards changing people's

consciousness, right? So this is what whenever I said to people, I'm doing a PhD on this economic Che Guevara's economic ideas, people would say, he didn't have any, did he? Oh, I didn't know he had any economic ideas. I thought he was just a guerrilla fighter. But in fact, you know, arguably his contribution to socialist political economy debates and to the practical work of developing an economic management system for the transition to socialism in conditions of underdevelopment was more important than his role as a guerrilla fighter, arguably. And I'm happy to argue that with anyone who wants to. But Yeah, this is, so this is Che Guevara. Again, he then leaves Cuba in 1965 and he goes to fight in the Congo.

That's not actually known about until the 1990s. That information is not made public. He's just considered to have disappeared. And then it's made clear that he's in Bolivia, training guerrillas from other countries and fighting the Bolivians, and then he is surrounded, shot and executed in Bolivia. So, yeah, I mean, this is what he's known as. Many people probably wear a t-shirt with his image or have posters on the wall

without having a real understanding of who he was or what he represented, but just some sort of sense that he represented rebellion against the existing order and maybe rebellion against imperialism in some sort of abstract way. Yeah, thank you so much for that. There's so much to be said about Chase. so I think it takes a lot of skill to be able to encapsulate it in a short, single response like that. So like you said, like one of the driving questions of this period for Che and that becomes obvious in your book, too, is how can you actually contribute to enacting policies and ideas, right? And this is a central question to the building of socialism in general and particularly in states and societies that are sort of,

of reeling from decades, if not centuries of imperialist plunder. And as we know in studying all of the different examples of socialist state building that we have in our anti-imperialism series, socialism doesn't emerge in a vacuum, right? It's built out of capitalism and typically out of hostile and underdeveloped conditions. So before we talk about the attempts to build socialism in Cuba, can you talk a little bit about what the Cuban revolutionaries inherited in terms of the poverty, the structural underdevelopment present in Cuba immediately after the revolution? Like, what was the economic condition of the state that they inherited? And how was that state oriented?

So the Cuban economy and political system were completely shaped by something called the Platt Amendment. The Platt Amendment was this piece of legislation that was passed in the United States in 2001, and it was quite a smart mechanism for giving the United States almost colonial control over Cuba without appearing to, right? And it couldn't appear to because a few years earlier you'd had something called the Teller Amendment, which was a declaration against the idea that the United States should formally colonize Cuba. So the Platt Amendment, it's an incredibly short document, is just, you know, like seven stipulations with the eighth,

is that these must be embedded into the constitution of the new independent Republic of Cuba. So this is the period where Cuba is being reborn as an independent republic, right, after the final war of independence against the Spanish. So the Platt Amendment gives the United States, under the guise of sort of protecting Cuba, it gives the United States, as one of the Cuban revolutionaries who fought in the War of Independence said, it's like giving the keys of Cuba's house to the United States to enter as it wants. And it gave it territorial control as well.

So we all know about Guantanamo Naval Base, which is, as we regard it, illegally, illegal occupation by the United States, I should say, of Cuban territory, because the Cubans rejected the Cuban Revolutionary Government since 1959, but it also had a base in Escambore as well and more central Cuba. So it had these two actual, you know, territorial occupations, but also the US ambassador was considered to be the most powerful person in Cuba. They intervened overtly and directly in Cuba's political system in its elections. They picked the winners. They picked their puppet representatives basically. And they also militarily returned to occupy Cuba three times before the 1920s, right? So, I mean, all of this, I have to sometimes bring this stuff up

when I'm talking to people about Cuba's response today to Trump, you know, and will they give in and will they submit and will they do a deal? Will they negotiate and so on? Because, you know, the Cubans have an acute sense of history. They have a very strong sense of history. And they did not except being occupied by US Marines in these earlier periods. And the rejection of those Cuban leaders, those heads of state, who signed the Platt Amendment, who permitted this sort of scenario of what was called a pseudo-republic and the Cubans regard as semi-colonial status for Cuba. So that said, how did this manifest in terms of the economy?

Well, the US initially in the 1920s investments, US investments flooded into Cuba. It's worth saying, though, before while Cuba was still a colony of Spain, US investments had already flooded into Cuba. And there was a massive presence of a US business sector in Cuba and control over the sugar industry. And this increases in the 1920s. You have something called the dance of the millions because so much money is going in. and the moving sugar becomes profitable. And of course, the US buys up in the end, something like two thirds of sugar, production, sugar mills.

But then you have the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression. So this money is retracted, and it totally deflates the Cuban economy. And you have severe political crisis, as well as economic crisis in the early 1930s, which lead to the 1930s, which many people aren't aware of. but this is a period where sugar workers set up Soviets all around the country in the sugar mills and so on.

And then there was a revolutionary government led by coalition of soldiers and students and workers. And it's known as the 100-day government because that's basically how long it lasted. Before the US came back in, maneuvered with Batista, who had participated in this endeavor and to get Batesya. and to get Batisa to sort of betray that and put an end to it and make himself the strong man of Cuba, which is what he became from that period. There was a brief return to, well, let's say, liberal democratic elections,

with multi-party elections, which is what US legislation insists Cuba must return to. If you look at legislation from the 1990s from the United States, it says the US blockade will not be lifted until Cuba restored. a multi-party system, but also a capitalist market economy. So the two things have been completely conflated as far as the US is concerned. And the embargo, as they say, blockade as the rest of the world experiences, it will not be lifted until those conditions are met.

So the point is that the Cuban people had experience of a liberal democratic system, a parliamentary democracy, capitalist democracy, whatever you want to call it. and it wasn't good for them. There was obscene corruption and patronage. Communists and socialists and anarchists within the trade unions were violently purged, assassinated and so on. Gangsterism arose the incredible corruption from the government. So, you know, the Cubans, we should give them the benefit of being able to decide. Within a hundred-year period, they've known, they had known Spanish colonial rules.

semi-colonisation under US imperialism. They'd known capitalist democracy, dictatorship, and then revolutionary states. So I think people who are from outside telling the Cubans which system is best for them are really quite condescending because I think the Cubans have, as I said, a strong sense of history

and they are entitled to make their own decisions. That's the importance of self-determination. Anyway, so the point is that, you know, you had people nowadays, it's not just nowadays, part of the ideological battle against Cuban socialism today. We understand that the economic warfare seeks to impoverish Cuba so that there are shortages and then people have this narrative that in the 1950s Cuba was so prosperous, right? And they have statistics. It was the third highest recipient of US investment. Wonderful. But where was all this going because, you know, it had the whatever ranking of GDP, but this meant nothing for the

vast majority of the population, right? So even if in the centre of Havana consumption of, you know, cars and brothels and casinos and consumer goods was very high, actually a massive proportion of the Cuban population were in rural areas. Nine percent of Cubans in rural areas had access to electricity. Three percent could eat meat, so four percent own the land that they were. So what you had is really kind of like two tubas, right? You had the prosperity of Havana where there were U.S. tourists and investors and it was a sort of, you can see the depiction in the US press of your Cuba is this sort of offshore gambling brothel-type place. And you had then a mass of misery in the rural areas.

You had something like 40% of the children running around barefoot with parasites in their bellies. So this was the reality. It's very similar to the reality that Che Guevara had seen traveling through Latin America. And the economy that was there was completely dependent on this relationship with the United States, right? So even anything that wasn't sugar production, I mean, it's worth saying like 80% of Cuban exports were sugar production, 80% of that went to the United States.

But other industry was built up around sugar production. And the other particular and peculiar specific characteristic of sugar production is that it consumes a mass of your labor force, right, but only for at that time, three to four months of the year. So half a million workers are going into the field, really low wages, really tough manual labor, but then after the sugar harvest, they have nothing. There's no alternative for most of them. And the period between sugar harvests is actually known in Cuba's El Tiempo Muedo,

the dead season. And, you know, really, it was a period where Cuban struggled to survive because there is no kind of medical care or health insurance or social benefits and so on. So, you know, what there was of the Cuban economy was dependent on this relationship this sort of imperialist control over Cuba. And the other really important aspect is that the Cuban elite didn't have its own independent

existence. It didn't have a productive base of its own. It was entirely dependent on the relationship with the United States. And that is really key to understanding the attitude which they have taken since in exile and the role that Marco Rubio is playing today as Secretary of State, who is like spearheading this attack on Cuba and is determined to see the regime collapse, as he sees it, not just the removal of the head of state.

I want to pull out some figures from the book, which you touched on, but I think there's a few more that I want to pull out that might give a little bit more of just a sense of the life for the average Cuban in like a rural area. So you write in your book, only 3% of rural Cubans own the land they worked and the average annual income of the largely rural population was $91, one eighth of that in Mississippi,

which was the U.S.'s poorest state. Inevitably, given mass employment, which was another huge part of this, low salaries and little access to land, only 4% of Cubans in rural areas ate meat, Only 1% ate fish, 3% ate bread, 11% had milk after weaning, and less than 20% ate eggs. More than 75% of rural dwellings were wood in huts, and only 2% of rural Cubans had running water, and 9% had electricity. Some 24% of the population was illiterate.

Life expectancy was 59 years, and infant mortality was 60 per 1,000. live births. So just a sense of like the staggering inequality and impoverishment in the rural countryside of Cuba, which was inherited, right, by the revolution. Another aspect I wanted to pull out too, which I think is really important to consider, when we talk about the struggles and the challenges that the revolutionaries had in building the foundations for socialism, they inherited depleted financial reserves, eluded treasury, and out of control debt

from what you write in the book, it's clear that there are all of these issues with Batista's corrupt wheelings and dealings. And then on top of that, you have capital flight. You have a lot of the people who are sort of managing the economy and managing businesses and in these sort of managerial positions

and business people simply leaving after the revolution. And just incidentally, it reminds me a lot of what happened after the Bolsheviks took power and how the state apparatus was essentially sabotaged and destroyed by the Tsar loyalists in sort of like a capital strike, right? So Cuba's finances were left completely depleted and its economic conditions for the people and also the economic sort of robustness of the state itself was all extremely shaky and in a very difficult position. So let's talk about some of the first initial movements towards reversing this,

right? And I think nationalization of industry and business management were things that became very clear in your book were priorities in the early revolutionary period. So I'm wondering if you can tell us why exactly nationalization was crucial, what the main challenges were in this process of nationalization and how Che and others contended with these challenges. Yeah, great. So, I mean, I think it's worth reminding our readers that the Cuban revolution, you know, seizes state power on the 1st of January, 1959, but it is not declared to be a socialist revolution until April 1961. So you have this period of not quite two and a half years of uncertainty of wait and see which direction will it go in. I mean, there was clearly

an internal struggle within the people who had taken leadership of the revolutionary movement. And you had, on the one hand, you know, Fidel Castro, Che Guevar, Raul Castro, Camillos I'm Fuego, until his very early death. And then you had the other people who were the old representatives of the bourgeoisie and the elite and who wanted it to be much more reformist. because this was the choice that they faced, right? Either they're going to make reforms, tweak things, remove Batista and the most brutal sort of elements of his regime, the torturers and so on,

and keep it within the confines of respectability for Washington, for the US, for imperialism, and basically sustain the same dependent economy and same dependent structures. Or you're going to try, try and tackle those kind of socio-economic inequalities and the misery that stems from those structural conditions. But in order to do so, you're going to have to come up against the Cuban elite, which means coming up against US imperialism, because as we explained, they were dependent,

they were allied to them. So, you know, you have this battle, and that's that long period where it's not certain which direction it will go in. So it's very easy for us to say, it was a socialist revolution. It wasn't. It was a revolution against dictatorship. But all of the revolutionary forces, not the bourgeois forces, there were the student, unarmed student movement, and then the Communist Party joined in the final year. They all came together and coordinated. Those revolutionary forces prioritized two key aspects, and that was sovereignty and social justice. So why nationalisations? Well, To have sovereignty, they understood very quickly because of that economic domination by the US,

that political sovereignty, political independence as a label, means nothing unless you have control, real genuine control over your resources, right, population, environment, resources and so on. So it was certainly not the case that the revolution came to power and passed a motion to say, we're going to nationalise everything. It definitely didn't happen like that. So we have to be clear and guided by the historical facts. However, very early on, I think possibly January itself of 1959, they set up the revolutionary government,

still with the bourgeois forces within it. They set up a ministry for misappropriated properties and goods, right? And this was to take the property and goods confiscated from people, who fled along with Batista because they were Batista allies or they were part of the police state, you know, that had left, we should say, 20,000 Cubans killed in the most brutal way, you know, bodies found at the side of the road with holes drilled in their skull and so on. So these people left and the government had set up a ministry to take over those goods. Now, for my research, when I was talking to Orlando Borrego, who was a wonderful,

man, he was Che Guevara's deputy. He joined Chee during the rebel army, during the guerrilla warfare. He was a teenager. And because he'd had some training in night school in accounting, Che Guevara very quickly put him in charge of accounts at La Cabagna, the military fortress, which they took over in Havana. And they were, you know, even under the rebel army, Che Guevara was thinking about the importance of production and they had workshops producing their own bombs, but also their own goods to try and also avoid taking food and other goods from the local peasants and so on. So they were producing their own stuff.

They had their own newspaper, radio they were doing as well. Anyway, so Orlando Borrego tells me that they had just set up the Department of Industrialization. And this is a country that had never had a ministry or an institution dedicated to industrialization, unlike much of Latin America, which had had the sort of populist experiences of Peron, Cardenas in Mexico, and so on. So the Cubans, they didn't have that sort of structure. Che Guevara was put in charge of this department of industrialization. And Borrego says that a few owners of businesses came to them and said, look, conditions have changed. We can't run this business. Or we want to contribute. it to the revolutionary state. And so the first nationalizations, as it were, were in these

sort of strange circumstances. Now, after that, as Borrego said, we were a department of industrialisation, but we had no industry, just these small little workshops that had been handed over. But then it's in the context of the tit for tatas. It's called retaliations between the United States and Cuba that the major nationalizations take place. So this starts when the United States says, because we should explain that annually the US set a sugar quota to the countries that supplied it with sugar. And it would say to Cuba, for example, right, this year you can provide us with four million tons of sugar. Now, logically, you can see how this becomes an instrument of control. Because if the US administration is not happy with something being done by the head of state in Cuba,

or some politics in Cuba, they'll just say, right, well, if you don't behave, we'll cut your sugar quota. And that's, you know, the way that one of the leverage is that they use to control Cuba. So after the Cuban Revolution, we know about the famous visit when Fidel Castro goes to the United States and the president won't see him and so on. And they decide he's a communist and there is document, CIA documents, the document from 6th of April, 1960, Lisa Malory, which is the foundation of U.S. policy against Cuba that talks about the influence of communists in the government. I mean, Fidel Castro hasn't yet come out and said these are communists. But the point is that they then say to Cuba, we're not going to buy the rest of the sugar in the

quota. Yeah, we're going to drop that sugar. So what happens as the Soviet Union steps in and says, well, we'll buy the sugar that's unsold, right? So they save Cuba from the disaster that we're would have happened. And so then the US takes another measure. There's oil refinery. I mean, the theme of oil, the question of oil is a question of sovereignty for Cuba. The question of power is often played out in Cuba in relation to oil, but the Cubans have oil refineries owned by US and British corporations, S.O. and Texaco. And they are refining Venezuelan oil. and the Cubans start to import oil from the Soviet Union, the US government instructs these refineries not to refine the Soviet oil,

and they refuse. So, of course, the Cubans take it over, right? So this is the kind of thing that happens. There was a wonderful story, which I was told by one of the people I interviewed, which explains this kind of dynamic, right? And what it shows you is how the revolution is forced, to radicalise in order to defend itself from imperialist attack, to defend this agenda of real sovereignty and social justice.

So this guy, he's a chief architect, and he is finishing off a construction, which was originally going to be the Central Bank of Cuba. And anyone who goes to Havana walks along the Malacom will know that this famous, it's got turned into a hospital, the Almejahara Hospital, on, near the Malacom is a huge, grandiose building. And he was put in charge as an architect for finishing construction.

So he also was very close, worked very closely with Che Guevara. And he goes to see Che Guevara one morning. And he says, Commandante, I need to talk to you about the situation with belaying pins, right? Little metal pins that you need for construction. And Che says, I can't talk to you. I'm going to the Council of Ministers. meeting and he hands him this Jorge Ruiz hands in one sheet of paper and he says this is for the council of ministers meeting and what it says on this sheets of paper it says how many belangpings

we have how many we need and how many the company are not producing because there's private companies and they just claim they don't have any and they're not producing them right and it's the kind of sabotage i have to say that we've seen for years in venezuela obviously at a later day i I saw it myself. That's almost saw that example replicated. But anyway, I'll try and kiss it with this story. So he goes back to work. And the next morning, because he sleeps in the bank, right?

These guys work so hard, such long hours. He just, you know, dropped and slept in the vault in the central bank. And he's woken up in the morning by someone throwing him a copy of the daily newspaper. And when he picks it up and looks at it, it says, nationalized. Cuban steel industry. So, you know, this was the problem. They faced opposition from private interests and their response was to get real sovereignty by seizing the entire industry. And that's the kind of process behind how it happened. I think it's very important. You know, the Cubans have been for a process of reforms recently. I know we're sticking to this early period, but they've been for

process of reforms. They've opened up space for market mechanisms for a bit of private ownership, but they have still retained very key tenants of a state planned and controlled economy, like the monopoly over foreign trade, like the national control over the key industries and sectors in Cuba. It's so interesting that the radicalization of the revolution was sort of forced upon them, you know, that that the domination and recalcitrance of the United States and US corporations was so radical that it invoked this deeper radicalization of the revolution and the revolutionaries. And it kind of goes against the common narrative, you know, of like the nationalization and the what I believe it was Trump or one of his cronies was saying something about in the context of

Venezuela, how they stole millions and millions of dollars of our oil. and all this stuff. And it's, it really flips that narrative on its head where it's like, no, this was required in order for us to have some modicum of control over our very own resources, as we had to take these more extreme steps. Talking about that narrative, just to say, because this came up in conversation, and I looked at a review I'd written a few years ago, of a book by Samuel Farber, the origins of the Cuban Revolution we considered.

And he's someone that, I guess, what you'd call the Trotskis left lean on for information about Cuba. And, you know, his narrative is that Fidel Castro turned to communism just because it was the best mechanism for him to stay in power. You know, it was all a sort of personal psychological motivation. He had no ideological or political commitments. I mean, it's just an absurd argument that's very difficult to sustain. And yet it's become very popularized among sections of the left.

in imperialist countries in particular. You're listening to an upstream conversation with Helen Yaffe. We'll be right back. That was Mr. Martin To what I saw what I Mr. Martin,

that was Mr. Martin That was me, Ninio, Minio, by El Wachirme, by El Wachiro. Now back to our conversation with Helen Yeffi. Let's bring the conversation back more specifically to Che for a little bit. As we know and as you outlined earlier on, his role as a guerrilla tactician in revolutionary fighter is perhaps what he is most well known for. I don't think it's very well known that he was a really central figure managing the economy of revolutionary Cuba.

He wasn't just, I mean, some people know that he was like the head of the bank and stuff like that, but it goes so much deeper than that. And I think we'll get a little bit more into that as we move on. But one quote I wanted to pull from the book, and then I'll expand on it and ask you to reflect, is you write about Che's quote, profound perception of socialism as a transitional stage in which the qualitative tasks of preparing human consciousness and social relations, and social relations for communist society were as important as the quantitative tasks

of developing the forces of production. And this is a very interesting question because we do talk a lot and we've done a lot of episodes about developing the forces of production as being such a central characteristic of laying the foundations for socialism in states that are underdeveloped, de-developed, dependent on the United States

and the imperialist block that it leads, like how do you build a state, and we've talked about this a lot with China, how they went about this process. And I think a lot of the time the Western left treats socialism as this sort of flicking on or off of a light switch.

And many examples of actually existing socialism from China to Cuba are discarded somewhat because say the workers don't immediately own the means of production. But as we know, transition from a capitalist state to a socialist one isn't something that happens overnight, right? And this is very, very clear in your book, and you outline this in lots of detail, this process of transitioning a state.

And we know that socialism has to be built, of course, out of whatever exists before it, right? And in a reality, what generally exists are these underdeveloped and highly unequal societies, which need to quickly develop some means of meeting people's material needs. And so there's this balance, right? And it's something that was continually weighed and experimented with in revolutionary Cuba, this balance of building like a material foundation, but also transitioning consciousness and the social relations of production into something more socialist.

So I'm wondering, you can tell us a little bit about Che's unique orientation in regards to this to socialist state building in Cuba. and maybe compare and contrast it to some different examples of socialist state building. Okay, so I'm going to answer with reference to two points. So if I lose my way, remind me these two points that I wanted to make. The first is about how Che Guevara, through the process of nationalizations in Cuba, learned from and set out to emulate some of the managerial and technological efficiencies of capitalism. That's quite distinct.

The second point is about his understanding of socialism as a transition stage, as I say, but of their sort of psychological or value consciousness element of what that transition means, right? So going back and reading the economic and philosophical manuscripts by Marx, where he talks about human beings finding their true nature through being emancipated from the need to sell themselves as commodities and so on, and being at one with nature. So it's very interesting, Che Guevara in Argentina was very into philosophy. He was reading French philosophy in French.

and he was interested in the human condition. So that element really contributes to his concept of socialism being not just a question of production, not just a technological question, but also being a question of human relations of consciousness, right? What is consciousness? In Spanish, Consciencia, you know, you can understand, if we translate it into English,

we can even understand it as consciousness being aware of or consciousness, like having a conscience, right? So it kind of combines those two aspects. And for Guevara, the height of consciousness was international solidarity, where you put yourself on the line, you fought for people who, you know, in a disinterested way, you could be on the other side of the planet. And we saw that. I mean, he died fighting in Bolivia after fighting in the Congo.

But, you know, this has become such an embedded approach in Cuban foreign policy, right? It's military and then medical internationalism. It's so embedded, so deeply ingrained in Cuban psyche. And it's not, you know, it's not like magic dust. It's because it's in children's textbooks when they first go to primary school, right? children, every morning, they say at the start of primary school, Serremo como el-Che, we will be like Che. And their experts say, what does it mean to be like Che?

It means to have solidarity with people around the world. It means to fight against imperialism, you know, and this is the consciousness development of young people in Cuba, of all people in Cuba. So I'm going off on a tangent, but this element of Che Guevara's understanding of the more philosophical element, the ethical element of socialism as new social relations, new values and so on, was key. Now, his criticism of the Soviet bloc is that they had

sought to sort of postpone that battle or postpone that challenge. And they said, well, we're so behind in terms of production productivity, what we need to do is revolutionise the production forces and then we'll have the capacity to meet everyone's needs and then we will work on their consciousness. And Guevara's idea was that these two elements, production, we could say technology and consciousness needed to be built in parallel. Otherwise, the tools that you use as an underdeveloped country to revolutionize the productive forces, so in the Soviet Union, obviously they were using, you know,

material incentives, competition, the profit motive. The use of those very tools to achieve task A would undermine the ability to achieve task B, which was consciousness, right? Those tools, and this is what he said. He looked at the Soviet Union. He said, well, they're using all these capitalist mechanisms, right, in order to raise the production and productivity. But this is now undermining the new consciousness, the new values and the new ethics.

So how are you then going to switch to transition to communism? And he understood communism as a phenomena of consciousness and production or technology. So that was very distinctive about him. But this other point is also really fascinating. I found it fascinating. And I think many people who, you know, didn't know about Chey and have read about his budgetary finance system also shared this fascination. So he was, as I said, head of the Department of Industrialization,

when the nationalisation process started. And he personally looked at the documents of the multinational, mainly US corporations that were being nationalised. And he noticed some key elements that made them particularly efficient. So, for example, when you have the headquarters and you have subsidiaries and they exchange goods between them, they don't charge each other to make a profit, right? It's just recorded in records as a transfer of goods.

goods. And his conception was if we regard Cuba as one, you know, has one owner, it's the working class. The Cuban people own the Cuban factory. And therefore, when goods are transferred from one factory or entity to another, we shouldn't be trying to make a profit because we can't, we're making a profit out of ourselves. It doesn't make sense. So that was a really key element. But also he had a thing about using the most advanced modern techniques of, accounting, of technology, production, and so on and so forth. And so, for example, Gavara was learning about cybernetics, and he said, look, this is a new science. We need to develop this and we need to use it in Cuba. And the Soviets had said, you know, no, this is a reactionary science. It stems

from capitalism. So therefore, you know, we can't use it. And he argued that the Soviet system of accounting was based on the economic calculus system was based on the capitalism that they had, the pre-monopoly capitalism that existed in Russia at the time of the Bolshevik revolution. And in fact, monopoly capitalism was moving towards creating better the conditions for a transition to communism, right? And therefore, it was more progressive to borrow. from capitalist monopoly, capitalism, accounting and so on technology, to be able to transition to socialism.

He viewed it as closer to socialism. And he gave some examples like the general electric, right? You could produce a mass of huge capacity for electricity production with very few workers. In other words, if that was controlled by the state under a planned system welfare-based development, then you could liberate workers from, you know, brutal conditions and so on and so forth because he had the technological capacity to do so.

So he developed the budgetary finance system. It's not something he sits down and theorizes or writes a manual about. It's developed, as they say, Sobre la macha, on the move, on the run in Cuba. So the first thing is they have all these nationalizations and they have to resolve practical problems, right? they have small artisan shoemakers or bakeries and then they have these huge big oil refineries. And somehow with shrinking funds, as you've said, they have to keep all of them working, right? Why not to make a profit, but because they have a social function. This is production for need, production for use, right?

So they have to keep all of them working. How can they do that when the managers on the whole, the managers have left the country, right? right a million people out of a population probably six million at the time a million people leave in the first few years and they are the people who manage and run you know the economy in the country and those who stay and those who fight are as part of the class character of the revolutionary movement they're undereducated they don't have the skills maybe we'll talk about the education push but it was so important because you know you needed to get a new generation of revolutionaries capable of running the country. So in the meantime, because of the scarcity of both finances and personnel, they developed the budgetary finance system, which involved centralising all of these things, centralising budgets. So you had a central budget and each entity, whether it's a small workshop or a big factory, would be given a budget that would cover their costs and they were told to put in a request for investment because they understood the importance of investment of

expanding production, not just keeping it the same, but also then a separate account for salaries so that wages were protected. And they also had this sort of cascading structure of management so that they could cope with having people with very little experience because they were organised into consolidated enterprises, which could be multiple different entities. So it was really quite smart, strategic, practical solution to real everyday problems. And at the same time, Gavara was reading more and more deeply, along with his inner circle of Marx, Marxism. So they had, the Soviet Union had sent a professor, Mancilla, to go and give Marxism classes to the new leadership of the government as they were radicalizing and becoming closer to the Soviet bloc. And Che Guevara asked

him to go into the Ministry of Industries and do these sessions with the Council of Ministers. And so I recorded my book. I spoke lots of the people, the surviving people who were there, talked about these sessions that would go on to four or five in the morning, where Che Guevara had such penetrating analysis that he would have this Soviet professor pulling his hair out because he couldn't answer these complex problems. And Che was saying things like, if the law of value is the law of capitalist law of motion is a key part of it, then why does the Soviet manual of political economy say we must use and develop the law of value in this process of revolutionising the productive forces,

increasing production and productivity? So this was his critique. He had an incredibly critical mind, but the other thing is if you think about the kind of mind and training involved in becoming a doctor, is understanding, you know, the whole metabolism and how parts, interact and affect each other. And really he applied that same approach to the economy as a whole and to the transition process, understanding the link between mind, let's say mind and body. You brought this up a couple minutes ago and I think maybe it's a good time to dive a little bit more into it, which is the education aspect. One of the most really fascinating parts of the book is when you outline how, because of this sort of flight of the sort of,

sort of managerial, more skilled, educated class. And of course, I know how loaded that sentence is to say skills, right? But just going with that, they all left Cuba, right? And so you were left with people who were very uneducated, did not have any experience managing a factory, let alone an economy. And they brought these people in and they trained them. And it's just like really beautiful story of how somebody can go from being illiterate to like managing a factory, right?

So tell us about the importance of education in revolutionary Cuba and the role that Che played in fostering political education in building a society with a revolutionary vision in this country where 60% of the population lacked education and like 40% of the population were illiterate. Well, again, another bridge between the independence struggle and the struggle for socialism post-1959 is this question of the role of education and culture in Cuba.

So Jose Marti, the National Independence Hero, said to be educated is to be free. And that was one of the core commitments or understandings of the revolutionaries of the 1930s and 1950s. So it's a key part of the Moncada program pronounced by Fidel Castro in the movement of the 26th of July, and it's a key commitment very early on for the new revolutionary government. So we can understand three different approaches to education by Che Guevara

and through the Ministry of Industries. And one is this general sense of education as culture to be a human being, to be a fully developed human being. And that's still, you know, there's a very strong sense of that in Cuba, right? In the Battle of Ideas post-2000, Fidel Castro said, we will make Cuba the most educated population on Earth, right? By massively expanding access to universities, the universalisation or municipalisation of university education.

Anyway, going back to Che. The other aspect of education was a political education, as you say, understanding Cuban history, understanding the role of Spanish colonialism and US imperialism. And that was so important in this period because they were arming with knowledge, arming the Cuban people for the inevitable conflict with the United States. And also, because this is Cuba emerging from the 1950s, right? 1959, the Cuban Revolution.

This is the McCarthy period. And Cubans were as sort of affected by the anti-communist McCarthy, you know, witch hunt as in the United States, right? So the Communist Party was, you know, really persecuted. And a lot of the people that were part of the revolutionary vanguard, they would never have said they were communists at the beginning. And even people I interviewed. So I'd always start with the, you know, what was your position for the revolution,

what was your contribution? And people would say, I hated communists. I hated communism. But then I worked, you know, I joined the revolutionary approach. and I worked with Che or Fidel Castro and, you know, I started to realize that U.S. imperialism and so on and so forth, and Soviets were helping us and the U.S. was attacking us. And then Fidel Castro comes out with this really important speech, right, that in the Cuban Revolution dialogue between the leadership and the people have been so fundamental. And he says to a million people gathered there,

again shortly before the Bay of Pigs invasion. Do you agree with the new education, the new schools that we're implementing? Yes, we agree. Do you agree? And he goes through some of the social programs, and then he says, this is socialism, right? This is socialism. And then people say, well, you know, if Fidel and Che are socialist, then so am I. So this is not understanding socialism as a dogma or manual. This is very much understanding it through experience. So I've completely lost trailer the question about education, but I was talking about the importance of political education. The third form of education under the Ministry of Industries was training and technical education, right? And that is getting people the skills to run this machinery. In this

period, the aspiration of Che Guevara was that Cuba should industrialize, right? socialist projects were associated with industrialisation. And it was quite controversial. There was a battle over this as well. So the sugar industry dominated the economy. But the sugar industry was very much associated with colonialism, with slavery, with this incredible exploitation and really terrible manual labour and terrible unemployment, structural unemployment,

and underemployment. And many people in the revolutionary government, or many revolutionaries, wanted to get rid of the sugar industry immediately because of those associations. And Che Guevara gives us speech sometime later, and he says, you know, there was a misconception that we had about sugar.

We just thought that it represented all of these historical ills, and therefore we should just get rid of it. But we didn't appreciate that actually, we have a comparative advantage in sugar. You know, Cuba had the highest productive yields of sugar and so on. And we need to maintain and use the sugar industry in order to generate investments for the social projects that we have, but also to start industry.

Like you can't just click your fingers and magically you have an industrial base. And so a lot of the work that Che was doing was about how do you build that industrial base. and it went back to basics. So they had two geologists in the whole of Cuba. And I think one of them may have been abroad and had to be persuaded to come back. But they got these geologists to do maps of Cuba. Where do we have minerals and metals?

Where do we have natural resources that can be used? And they did these sort of geology days where they recruit members of the public to just go out and investigate their own environments and see where Cuba had these minerals and metals. And then the next question was, well, how do we develop those minerals and metals? We want to move away from this structural dependence where we have a resource and we have to send it to the United States, like sugar, you know, which we're exporting as raw sugar and we're importing as

syrups and sweets and all the rest of it. And, you know, much of what they set out to do of what Che Guevara's vision was not possible to accomplish in that period because they didn't have the capital. They didn't, like, I mean, the machinery even or the investments. They didn't have the capacity. They didn't have trained people. But what he did is really embed and ground an approach to thinking about developing, as they say, endogenous resources, right? So look at what you have in the natural environment and develop those, develop those strengths. And also, So in terms of like science and technology, they set up a system of like closed cycle production. So you would start with an idea, you'd develop it, you'd do a small experiment.

And if that worked, then you would amplify that within one productive unit. And they did do that. And, you know, it's very clear that some of those methodologies remained in Cuba and have been embedded and expanded. For example, in the biotechnology sector, Cuba's extraordinary bio, technology sector, which is completely distinct from most countries in the world. It's set up by state funding. It's completely state owned. It's completely integrated into the public education, or the only education system, which state one, and the healthcare system. And they've made some extraordinary contributions to global health, biotechnology, and so on and so forth. But they use

this closed cycle of innovation. So they develop something. They have a multi-discipline, team from the beginning and they take it through experimentation and the basic science research and then they upscale it and commercialize it all within one entity. In other countries, you'll have, you know, two people doing the basic science. They have to then sell their idea to another company that will take it to the next stage or process. And many wonderful ideas get completely lost. They're not regarded as profitable and they get dropped by the wayside. So there are certain elements of his methodology, of his approach, which I tried in each chapter to talk about kind of the legacy of those things. Che Guevara, for example, set up nine research and development

institutes. Some of those exist in exactly the same form. Some of them have been adapted, but the contribution, the idea that Cuba should have audacity in its development, it should diversify. And also diversify away from the sort of Soviet model of, you know, each country being very dependent on one thing, which for Cuba was just citrus and sugar. I mean, the Cubans did produce citrus and sugar for trade within the socialist bloc, but they also diversified into biotechnology, which was something that the Soviets did not encourage them to do at all. So before we kind of wrap up with the final question, which is I kind of want to bring us a little bit into the present.

another extremely interesting thing that you bring light to in the book is this shift of consciousness, which we've talked about a little bit, but like this idea of maybe you could call it patriotism, which, you know, it's a shitty word in the United States for us. It's been degraded and cheapened here in the United States, of course. But in Cuba, this was a real patriotism, right? A real, at least they were trying to instill a real patriotism, a real sense of ownership. a real sense of ownership and responsibility, personal responsibility for the revolution by everyday people, right? And one of the ways that this manifested was in labor, right, in the

workforce, because under capitalism, labor is exploited, and that's how surplus value is generated, right? But this was sort of shifted in terms of the way the perspective that we use to look at labor under a condition of building socialism in Cuba. So just a couple of quotes, passages rather, that I'd like to bring in that I think are really interesting. You write in the book, Guevara's vision was of Cuba Socialista as a single factory operating under what today is known

as just-in-time techniques to achieve the greatest possible efficiency via rational organization, maximum returns on investments, and a focus on quality. Unlike the capitalist corporations, however, production in Cuba would be determined by a plan democratically formulated at the production base by workers

in the interest of social need, not private profit. It would be controlled not by cutthroat competition, but by cooperation, consultation, and administrative measures. And then you go on to write a few pages later that, The plan sets worker production norms based on socially necessary labor time, but workers are urged to surpass these in order to increase economic efficiency. The challenge is to transform the value added to production by the worker above his own subsistence from surplus value as under capitalism into surplus product under socialism

and to move from production for exchange to production for use. Under capitalism, the worker's surplus is the product of exploitation because it does not belong to them. Under socialism, it's a contribution to social production. They work for themselves as part of a collective society. The surplus is distributed according to criteria determined by the plan. Workers' management is essential under socialism because it ensures workers' ownership of the means of production. The masses must participate collectively in devising the plan, establishing the norms, and in daily decisions concerning production and consumption.

End quote. So, yeah, just a lot of really interesting and important reframes, I think, because as you write, the population in Cuba at this time was very rightly so skeptical of work because the production process imposed upon them during, capitalism and imperialism was highly exploitative. So this idea of like liberating oneself through labor was definitely a foreign idea, right? And it was one that kind of had to be nurtured. So yeah, I'd love it if you could talk a little bit about the process of democratization,

a production in Cuba, maybe just a little bit before we conclude with the final question. Yeah, okay. I mean, just to clarify, right, if you look at Marx where he describes what a commodity is, I mean, and the sort of prerequisites to commodity production, private property, for example, and it's production for exchange, right? And it's production in order to make a profit, surplus value. And, you know, then you have the sort of modification of labour so that the people doing the work aren't the owners of product and don't get the surplus value. Now, you have a revolution, you seize power, and somehow you need to get the workers to re-conceptualise their role, right? They're not just working because they're paid and they need to survive. Things are very different. You've guaranteed people housing and sustenance and free education, healthcare, and so on and so forth.

So there's a question here of labour discipline. Why would anyone work? Yeah? I mean, it's very hard to get. fired in Cuba and in this period. It's not like under capitalism, Che Guevara says to his colleagues one day in the internal meetings that I got the transcripts for.

He says, how does it work under capitalism? The capitalist doesn't have a policeman there with a rifle or truncheon on the factory floor. No, they don't need that. They use the threat of hunger against workers, right? So it disciplines workers. We can't do that. We need to find up a mechanism.

for encouraging people to work full stop and then to work harder. And why do you want them to work harder? Why do you want surplus product? Because you want to see development. Remember that socialism in conditions such as Cuba's, and in fact in all the countries where there has been an attempt to build socialism, are as much a battle against underdevelopment as they are a battle for anything else. So you cannot.

I mean, you will totally misconceive and misconstrue the Cuban Revolution. If you disentangle socialism as some sort of, you know, about workers and trade unions, if you disentangle that from the struggle against underdevelopment, right? So there is still a need to produce, to continue to producing, but production has changed its function. It's about meeting need. And it's changed the ownership. It's not production for profit.

It's a production to meet people's need. but if you produce a surplus, that means that, you know, you can contribute to the battle against underdevelopment. So I'm not sure if that answers your question. I mean, the difference between surplus value, obviously we've explained the surplus product is that you can still produce more, but it belongs to that collective. It belongs to either the factory or, as Che would like to see it, it belongs to the country. And therefore, we can call it a surplus product. But he did regard labels as very important.

And, you know, the battle to sort of rename things is part of the process of reconceptionalizing social relations was also one that he undertook. And all the work that was implemented in order to sort of, like you mentioned, this labor discipline, this idea that like we are part of one big factory, we are part of one big community and you're not working for some absentee awful boss who's exploiting your labor now. You're working for your country so that we can build the productive forces in a way that is equitable for everybody and that we can sustain this because if not, counter-revolution is always a few miles, a few dozen miles off the coast waiting to come in and take this all

away from us. On that point, he talked about, he developed this concept of the spirit of October. because, I mean, things just kept happening in October. 1962 is the Cuban missile crisis, 1963, Hurricane Flora. So in these periods of crises, it was seen that workers, you know, really accelerated. They really, you know, that was their contribution to whatever it was. They went and worked harder. So he was saying at one point, how do we recreate the spirit of October, not just in October,

but, you know, every day of the year, because we are in a battle. And, you know, he made clear as well on his conversations with the young soldiers who were guerrilla fighters with him in his column. He said, look, after they'd seize power and some of them were like, well, I'm off home now. Job done. And he was like, no, no, no, no. The hard bit has just started, yeah, building a new society, battling against both imperialism and underdevelopment. And, of course, those two things are linked and they are a product of each other. So of course we haven't talked much about the blockade, the sanctions, the invasion attempts, the assassination attempts.

That's all we're going to cover that in the future. There's only so much we can cover in a single episode. But to close, I would love it if you could sort of give us a sense of maybe just some of the most important achievements made by Che in this sort of half decade of helping to construct socialism in Cuba. like his legacy, particularly as Cuba faces perhaps one of the biggest crises imposed by the United States. Wow, there's so much to say on that. I mean, in terms of the last point about the attack from the United States, it's always worth remembering the famous quote by Che is on video. I mean, you know, it's recorded where he says,

don't trust imperialism, not even a tiny bit like that. And I'm, you know, quite sure that his position were he still alongside Raul Castro today would be the same. And, you know, if you look at the statement that just came out from Miguel Diascanal, where he says, you know, we're being attacked in different ways every day and threatened. But the one thing that's certain is that if the US try to come here, they will meet ferocious resistance, something along those lines. So, you know, that's also important. but that very much is a legacy of Fidel Castro as well. So focusing more closely on to Che's legacy, I think it's this really key contribution of understanding

that the transition to socialism and from socialism to communism requires a new consciousness, that that's not a question that can be postponed and that it requires new social relations and values. And he really battled, he developed some very innovative and creative, and creative, practical policies to deal with this question of like,

how do you say to the workers, you actually own the means of production, but not in a sort of symbolic way or a slogan, but give them agency, give them real decision-making control over production and the conditions under which they work and the way that investment is carried out and so on and so forth. So that was really important. And I think that this understanding of the importance of investing in science and technology in order to increase productivity and the technological level was also a major contribution

that Che Guevara makes. And then there's the very specific thing about his commitment to medical science. So, I mean, we haven't had time to talk about this. But one of the things that he did is he set up on one floor of the oncology hospital. he had scientists working on medicinal plants, right, developing medicine from these medicinal plants, green medicine very early on in global terms. And of course, you know, we could argue that there's,

that commitment to medical science is deeply rooted now with the biotech sector, which I've been talking about. I think possibly another very key contribution and legacy of Che Guevara, although this also comes from Fidel Castro, is the importance of critical thought and criticism and debate. So, you know, I'll give you one example where I talked about Orlando Borrego before. He was when the new Communist Party was being set up

and they were representatives were interviewing the revolutionaries to see who could qualify it to be a Cader, to be a member of the Communist Party. And Che Guevara walked in when Orlando Borrejo was having his interview. And he was told that there was concerns that he was reading Trotsky, or Trotsky's material. And he said, well, I hope you're congratulating him because it's the job of revolutionaries to read everything and debate everything. So this was, you know, also a really key point. He says it. It's in the internal meeting notes to his ministry. He says,

one of the worst things that's happened under Stalinism and the Soviet Union is the closing down of debate. And what we need is we need to enrich the theory. We need to enrich experience and we can only do that if we allow critical debate. And in fact, they had something called the Great Debate in Cuba, which we haven't mentioned. It was 1963 to 65 about which economic management system was most appropriate for Cuba's transition to socialism in Cuban conditions. it was basically Che Guevara and his allies defending the budgetary finance system in dispute with the proponents of the Soviet system or an adaptation of the Soviet system in other Cuban ministries.

And the debate took place openly, amicably, there was no one purged, no one executed, no one sent to prison for their views. And in fact, when one of his opponents in the debate left the ministry where he worked, he was invited by Che Guevara to join his own ministry. And the secretary of his council of ministers said, well, why would you invite him? He's your opponent. And he said, yes. But that is why I'm inviting him.

He has a different view. And either he's right or I'm white, but in the process of finding out, we will enrich the debate. So I think that's a really key contribution that Che Guehara made, which perhaps we can all take on. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Helen Yaffe, professor of Latin American political economy at the University of Glasgow. She's the author of We Are Cuba, How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World, and Che Guevara, the Economics of Revolution.

She's also the co-host of the Cuba Analysis podcast. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Elwha Hiro for the intermission music. The cover art for today's episode is a 1969 portrait by Alfredo Rosgard titled Che. Upstream is entirely listener funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants, just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes and our lively online discussion forum, and for stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support, you'll be helping keep Upstream

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