 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. Today, October 9th is the anniversary of the assassination of Che Guevara. Che Guevara was in Bolivia where he was killed on 9th of October 1967. On this day, almost 20 publishing houses from Bharati Putakalam in Tamil Nadu, India to express our popular in Brazil, are releasing two texts of Che Guevara, his letter to the tricontinental and socialism and man in Cuba. They will come free as e-books in about 20 languages. As part of the launch of this book, People's Dispatch is very happy to be joined by Professor Helen Yaffe from the University of Glasgow. Helen, welcome to People's Dispatch. Thank you. Thanks for the advice. Well, I thought immediately that we must talk to you because the first book you wrote Helen, which is called Che Guevara, The Economics of the Revolution, is perhaps the most significant book that introduces us to Che Guevara as the institution builder, as the communist who built a revolution and not just the legend of Albert Corda's photograph. So Helen, could you walk us through a little bit of Che, the communist, Che, the institution builder? Yeah, sure. I mean, Che was an incredibly multifaceted person. He had a concept, a certain approach to analyzing the world and his surroundings, which arguably could be formed by his training as a medic. So not seeing the separate parts distinctly, but seeing the sort of metabolism as a whole. And it's very interesting how early Che Guevara was thinking about the process of transition that the revolutionaries would have to go through after they had seized power, well before Batista was defeated. So when Che's column arrived at the Escambre Mountains in 1958, he sent a message to try the PSP, the Socialist Party of Cuba, known as the Communist Party, that he required books about the Cuban economy. He was already thinking about that transition process. And then it's probably better known that when he arrived with his troops, Victoria, Batista had fled, they arrived at La Cavana, military fortress in early January 1959. He immediately set up workshops in La Cavana, convinced the young rebel army soldiers, many of them from very poor peasant backgrounds, many of them illiterate. He convinced some of the necessity of enrolling in education and learning basic literacy in order to be able to learn education for production, political education and education as culture. And he did what he could to convince them that actually, although the revolution was one, the real battle for control of Cuba was just beginning. So Che was involved in all sorts of aspects of the transition process, particularly in the very tumultuous years between 1959 and 1961 before Cuba is declared by Fidel Castro to be building socialism. He was involved in military campaigns, in establishing the intelligence services and in promoting overseas revolution. Some of that is better known about, but he was also involved on the political level with trying to bring together youth organizations in Cuba to create what today is the Union of Young Communists. It was first a rebel youth organization, and he was involved in the talks to forge together the free armed revolutionary organizations that had taken part in the struggle in the 1950s to create one United Party. And that's on the political and military aspect. On the economic aspect, I've already mentioned he was interested in how this transition should take place, and he immediately began to talk about the people who were revolutionaries who knew all about the sugar industry, because of course the whole of Cuban economy and Cuban life, politics, social, socioeconomic situation was dominated by the sugar industry, but also Che was very clear that this was an expression of US imperialism in Cuba. And so he was immediately thinking about how they could tackle this situation. And Che went quite early on. He first of all, he went to 1959. In summer, he went on a what was called a goodwill mission to numerous countries in the, which later became known as the non-aligned country. So he traveled around countries in Egypt and actually Yugoslavia, which was part of that sector, India and elsewhere. And he came back convinced of the importance of building domestic industry with Cuba. And during the trip, one of the people who was with him was a maths professor, Salvador Vilaseca, and he said to Vilaseca during the trip, when we get back, you must teach maths. Vilaseca said, you know, I thought he was joking with the amount of work that would face him and his role in government. But a few days shortly after arriving back in Cuba, he contacted Vilaseca and said, right, I will be waiting for you at seven in the morning for my maths class. And Che ended up proceeding from maths to higher maths and all sorts of complex maths until Vilaseca said, I can teach you no more. And the same situation happened when Che realised the importance of automation and computing and set himself the task of learning cybernetics. He was reading a cybernetics book one week ahead of his peers and he was sitting down and giving them a lesson. So he saw that computing was something that would be very important in the future. So Che came back from that trip and began a job as a minister of industry. The first ever minister of industries in Cuba, a country which was dominated, as I said, by the sugar industry. And Che was almost simultaneously named as the President of the National Bank. So he left his deputy, Orlando Borrego, who was a great person who I interviewed extensively, spoke to extensively for my research. Orlando Borrego was left at the Ministry of Industries while Che was in the National Bank and they were in those key positions when the nationalisations took place and basically the shift from what you could call a free enterprise semi-colonial economy to an economy under a state plan where 85% of industry was in the state plans and the state ends up with a monopoly on financial institutions, banks and so on. So Che was really key in that process of transition. He had a very clear vision of the direction that Cuba needed to go into. He was very clear and remember he had his experience of being in Guatemala during the coup against Chacrobar Benz that it was necessary to dismantle the old state and build a new one. And he also developed, as you know, a critique of the economic management system operated in the Soviet Union at that time, a critique of the Soviet or socialist political economy that prevailed at that time. He was very concerned about the impact of the clamour for opening up more spaces to market mechanisms and to use more tools of capitalism. He had a vision, as I said, a holistic vision of what socialism meant. He said, you know, communism socialism is not just an economic fact. It's not just a question of announcing that workers have been controlled of the factory instead of a private owner. It is a question of a transfer or of real power to the working class, but also a change in consciousness and a change in values and social relations. And as the minister of industries, and this is the focus of my book, which you just held up there, he set himself the task of answering this very tricky question. It's very simple to pass a policy. It's one thing to say we must now have a different consciousness and we are now the owners of production. But what actual mechanisms can you use to change the way that people think, to change their social relations and to make workers actually feel or know that they are in control of production and that they change their concept having worked for years by selling their labour power as a commodity. How do workers then come to a place where work is seen as a social duty and they identify their individual effort with social development. So these were some of the very complex tasks which he set himself. I wanted to find out what did he do because there were some great books already, like Carlos Tavlada's book on the economic and political transformation in Cuba, but there was much less detail about how he actually went about this endeavor. And also, I read the big fat John D. Anderson biography that came out along with many other books on the 30th anniversary of Ché's death in 1997. I had great detail about Ché and his escapades and his adventures as a child and teenager, his travels in Latin America and then subsequently as a guerrilla fighter in Africa and the Bolivia. But when it came to the section about what Ché was doing as a member of the Cuban government for six years, there was almost nothing. I mean, there were comments like, you know, Ché's light was seen on at four in the morning, but I wanted to know what was Ché doing at four in the morning. And I found out I had some really fantastic stories. So one of them, I was interviewing someone who had been a young man and he was in charge of accounts at a enterprise. They tend to buy his produced flower. And at two o'clock in the morning, he had a knock at the door and he was told that Ché would like to see him. There was obviously an issue for some of the accounts he submitted. It wanted to see him in his office at four in the morning. He got there at four in the morning and he found Ché standing there, leaning on the corner of a metal cabinet which he'd pulled out. And he said to Ché, Comandante, but why are you standing in this uncomfortable position? I remember it was four in the morning and Ché said to him, because if I don't make myself uncomfortable, I'll fall asleep. And I have these reports to read before the council, the management council meeting at seven in the morning. So yeah, it was incredible to see the multifaceted elements of this man and also to hear the very sort of rich human stories of the people, the men and women who worked very closely with Ché, the sorts of unsung heroes of the revolution. And I feel that in a way my book turned out to be as much their history as it was Ché's. No question, Helen, that it's a story of a lot of people, not only Ché, but Ché leading them. I mean, you're right that John Lee Anderson and others emphasize parts of Ché, which is the legendary Ché. In fact, even the motorcycle diaries is a misnamed book because the motorcycle collapsed in Chile and it didn't actually go by motorcycle up to Colombia and then eventually he flies to the United States, which is fascinating stuff. But the motorcycle was only the first leg from Rosario out to across the end. You know, they finally get, it's hardly defines every, but Ché is the legend. There's something that you raise, which Ché struggles with, which very briefly, if you could talk a little bit, you indicated it just now. This is the question of incentives. One of the things that a socialist society is often attacked for is the question of incentive. And Ché, I found in your book and reading Ché himself, he was very sensitive about how to move from material incentives, as you say, selling your labor power and then earning a wage and then trying to earn a better wage, et cetera, et cetera, material incentive, how to change to moral incentive or to a socialist incentive. So could you talk a little bit about Ché's experiments with different forms of incentives for a society? So yeah, I mean, this is a key question because a lot of people, including on the left, have totally mischaracterized Ché's promotion of the new man and woman or Ché's promotion of voluntary labor, as if it was just a sort of mechanism for getting people out to work harder. In fact, it was very much integral to his analysis or his appreciation for Marx's analysis of the commodification of labor. So how do you undermine the commodification of labor? Well, people have to be in a situation where they give their labor willingly as part of the social product, which they are the collective owners of. So is it that the combination between consciousness and social relations? The voluntary labor thing is interesting because it starts with a sort of national campaign over the sugar harvest. And that is a result of very rapid changes that are implemented. So pre-revolution, you have something like 400,000 Cubans paid very low wages hardest work imaginable under the searing Caribbean sun working with Ché's in the sugarcane harvest. And the harvest lasts for about four months of the year. And then after that is known as a time for the dead season because literally people were left with very little alternative means of living. So what happens is the revolution guarantees people jobs. It puts them in education. It builds them homes. And so it takes away the things that force them into these what's called slave-like conditions. And in fact, you know, slavery was traditionally in Cuba operated by sorry, the sugar plantations were traditionally operated by slavery until later the 19th century. So when they do that, there's an exodus away from the sugar plantations and they have a labor scarcity. So voluntary labor becomes a national mechanism for getting people to the field at the time of the harvest and the harvest became. I mean, incidentally, they did find that sometimes it wasn't so helpful because people with no training or experience could cut the cane in an in a counterproductive way and so on. But actually it was a man called Orlando Borrego who was one of the people I again repeatedly interviewed who was the first person to implement the idea he it is said in his own in the enterprise which he administered. And that was an initiative. He came up with the workers themselves and Jay went and visited. I should say that every week all of the members of the management board of the ministry of industries had to go and visit a factory or a workshop or another productive entity and do carry out what they call the factory visit and write a full report. And this was then very much a way of keeping in touch with workers, keeping their hand on the pulse of the workers and talking to them face to face in every corner of Cuba. And Jay saw the work that this guy Amhel Arcos was doing and said this is a great idea. Why don't we try to expand it? So voluntary labor took off through the ministry of industries and construction and in workplaces and so on. And they developed, you know, the administrators were given quite a bit of freedom to develop in different incentives. So they might have sort of newsletter with worker of the week and so on like looking for non-material incentives. And they also might have, you know, to discourage indiscipline absentee of the week where they would say this person misdrive shifts but they wouldn't say the name and everyone would gather around and work out, see if they could work out. It was and no one wanted to be that person. So, you know, people stepped up and so on. And they had awards within the ministry for, you know, best improvements and best output and so on. So they experimented a lot and Jay was not dogmatic. There's a lot of material. I was fortunate enough to get access to the internal transcript of their management meetings, their five monthly meetings of the industry where all the directors and administrators were. And that was some 400 people and it was Jay very much free talking with them. You see Jay in every different sort of expression of himself. So there's this Jay sort of writing and complaining and you know, why is it always up to me? Why do I have to solve these problems? You lot should be going out, and then there's Jay sort of inspiring, you know, rallying, mobilizing, and falling. So, you know, and everything in between and just discussions. And I had access to that material and you can see that, you know, Jay said, you've got a good idea. Let's try it. If it doesn't work, we'll get rid of it. We'll try something else. And even with his budgetary finance system, which was this unique system of economic management, which Jay developed within the budget, within the Ministry of Industries, even in the, you know, his article on the budgetary finance system, he says, let's try it. Let's try something new. Let's try to carry out the construction of socialism, the transition to socialism with a different form that fits Cuba. Let's see if we can solve some of the problems that we criticize in the Soviet Union. Let's see if we can do it with more worker engagement, with a change in consciousness, you know, parallel to the change in productivity. And they experimented. And, you know, it has to be said, Vidar Castro was well aware and gave the institutional and political space that he needed to experiment. So, yeah, I mean, there were some fascinating procedures and ideas developed. You see, Helen, I have to say that generally when you have a legendary figure like Che Guevara, and, you know, who doubts the great legend of Che, when you go behind the legend, one is disappointed. One of the things that you have produced is, you know, your book actually enhances for people like me the legend of Che, because we see Che here grappling with the genuine contradictions of building a socialist society. And it's so important for us, as we, you know, try to advance an agenda, you know, to make the world a better place to learn about not, you know, the legend that inspires you abstractly, but the legend that teaches you about, you know, these meetings where you have to, on the one side, be despondent about your comrades, and why aren't you doing things? And on the other side, inspirational for your comrades, because isn't that what building a new society is about, being despondent and inspirational really at the same time. It's not enough to just be inspirational. You're a human being. I want to end here for us with a question I want to ask you, Helen. We are thinking of making October 9th, the day of the assassination of Che Guevara, the International Day to Abolish the CIA. And I wanted your reaction to this new idea of the International Day to Abolish the CIA. Well, I mean, you've picked this day because of the CIA, while Felix Rodriguez, who was a Cuban, who had participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion and subsequently was an operative for the CIA, for his role in executing Che. But quite frankly, given the history of the CIA, it's just in Latin America, I think you could probably pick any one of 365 days, because really, when you teach on Latin America, the CIA's role, and I'm saying that in America, but globally, what is shocking, I think, is that actually, after a certain amount of time, the documents are made available. And yet, you know, there is really no accountability, there was really no change in behavior. So by all means, you know, anything that highlights the CIA's role, I think that, you know, let's not forget that the role played by the British in their colonies and elsewhere. So I think, you know, every capitalist states have institutions and structures which are there to protect their interests. And clearly, the CIA represents the most powerful capitalist country. But I think we could all look at our own states. Well, thank you so much for joining us at People's Dispatch. This is, you know, been a very enlightening and important conversation. We're going to, of course, give the link to the free downloadable text, Two Essays by Che Guevara. This is all, of course, part of the International Week of Anti-Imperialist Actions. And really happy to talk to you Helen. We'll have to come back and talk about your new book. Thanks for joining us.