 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, you know, 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 by 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 of 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 involving 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 yeah, 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 organisations in Cuba to create what today is the Union of Young Communists. It was first rebel youth organisation and he was involved in the talks to forge together the free armed revolutionary organisations 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 with 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 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 travelled 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 Villaseca and he said to Villaseca during the trip when we get back you must teach maths. Villaseca 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 Villaseca 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 Villaseca 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 so 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 Orobo who was a great person who I interviewed extensively spoke to extensively for my research Orlando Orobo was left at the ministry of industries while Che was in the national bank and they were in those key positions when the nationalizations 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 hands 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 Chávez Arbenz 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 and 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 the adult rules of capitalism and he was he had a vision as I said a holistic vision of what socialism meant and he said you know communism socialism is not just an economic fact it's not just a question of announcing that workers are in control 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 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 and I you know wanted to find out what did he do because there were some great books already like Carlos Tavladas both on the economic and political transformation and in Cuba but there was much less detail about how he actually went about about this endeavor and also you know I read the the big fat John B. Anderson biography that came out along with many other books on the first year panoramasia of Chay staff in 1997 and you know had great detail about Chay and his escapades and his adventures as a child and teenager of his travels in Latin America and then subsequently as a guerrilla fighter in Africa and Bolivia but when it came to the section about what Chay was doing as a member of the Cuban government for six years there was almost nothing I mean there were comments like you know Chay's light was seen on at four in the morning but I wanted to know what was Chay 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 as an enterprise they tend to buy his producer flour and at two o'clock in the morning he had a knock at the door and he was told that Chay 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 Chay standing there leaning on the corner of a metal cabinet which he'd pulled out and he said to Chay but why are you standing in this uncomfortable position remember it was four in the morning and Chay 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 Chay the source 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 tomorrow no question no question Helen that it's a story of of a lot of people not only Chay but Chay leading them I mean you're right that John Lee Anderson and others emphasize parts of Chay which is the legendary Chay in fact even the motorcycle diaries is a misnamed book because the motorcycle collapsed in Chile and it didn't actually go by motorcycle you know up to Colombia and then eventually he flies to the United States which is you know fascinating stuff but the motorcycle was only the first leg from you know Rosario out to across the end you know they finally get it's hardly defines every but Chay is the legend there's something that you raise which Chay struggles with which very briefly if you could talk a little bit you 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 and Chay I found in your book and reading Chay 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 etc etc material incentive how to change to model incentive or to a socialist incentive so could you talk a little bit about Chay'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 Chay's promotion of the new man and woman or Chay'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 Marxist analysis of the commodification of labor so you know if 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 and which they are the you know collective owners of so is it that's the the combination between consciousness and and social relations and 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 for the hardest work imaginable under the searing Caribbean sun working with machetes in the sugarcane harvest and the harvest lasts for about four months of the year and then after that is known as a diem from word book 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 the things that force them into these what she called slave like conditions and in fact you know slavery was traditionally in cube operated by sorry the sugar plantations were traditionally operated by slavery until later the 19th century so when they do that and 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 a in a counterproductive way and so on but um actually it was um a man called Orlando Borrego who was one of the people I again repeatedly interviewed um who was the first person to implement the idea he it is said in his own uh in the enterprise which he administered and um 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 their very much a way of keeping in touch with uh the 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 and in workplaces and so on um and they developed you know the the administrators were given quite a bit of freedom to develop in different incentives um so they might have uh sort of newsletter with worker of the week and so on like looking for non-material incentives and they also might have um you know to to discourage in discipline absentee of the week where they would say this person misrived shifts but they wouldn't say the name and everyone would gather around and and work out if Steve 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 um you know best improvements the best output and so on so they experimented a lot and Che was not dogmatic there's a there's a lot of material I was fortunate enough to get access to the internal manuscript sorry internal transcript of their um management meetings their bimonthly meetings of the industry where all the directors and administrators were and there was some 400 people and it was Che very much free talking with them you see Che in every discipline sort of expression of himself so there's there's Che sort of bribing and complaining and why is it always up to me why do I have to solve these problems you lot should be going out get to the reason and then there's Che sort of inspiring you know valuing mobilizing and falling and so you know and everything in between and just discussions and I had access to that material and and you can see that you know Che 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 Che developed within the budget within the ministry of industries even in the um you know his 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 Che the institutional and political space that he needed to experiment so yeah I mean there were some fascinating um 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 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 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 you know when you teach on Latin America the CIA's role and I'm saying that in America but globally you know 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 is 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 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 thank you