Vol. 71/No. 13      April 2, 2007

BY MARY-ALICE WATERS  
The opening of the 1990s is a particularly apt moment for the appearance of this French-language edition of Che Guevara: Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism by Cuban author Carlos Tablada. World capitalism is mired in a depression marked by staggering debt, instability of the banking system, and mounting social ills such as rising unemployment, homelessness, and a resurgence of epidemic diseases. Bonapartist and ultrarightist currents rear their heads and grow. Economic and social conditions of working people in Africa and much of Latin America and Asia have declined without letup for nearly two decades. Throughout the capitalist world, class inequalities are widening, social polarization and segregation grow, democratic rights are under pressure, cop brutality is on the rise, and rival national ruling classes are intensifying conflicts with each other and pressing toward new and bloodier wars such as the onslaught against the Iraqi people in 1991.

Since late 1989, moreover, the bureaucratized regimes and Communist parties throughout Eastern Europe and then in the former Soviet Union itself have shattered in the face of irresolvable economic, social, and political crises. The methods of planning and management employed, with this or that variation, in each of these countries were for decades promoted as the only road from capitalism to socialism by the big majority of those in the world who called themselves communists.

The alternative—and irreconcilably different—course advanced by Ernesto Che Guevara during the opening years of the Cuban revolution in the early 1960s is the topic of this book.

The verdict on the so-called Soviet model has now been rendered by history: the USSR and Eastern European countries were moving away from socialism, not toward it. Well prior to the events of the last several years, revolutionaries in the government and Communist Party of Cuba had begun to seek ways to combat the accelerating corrosive consequences of the methods copied from the Soviet Union, which had been increasingly applied in Cuba since the early 1970s. In 1986 the Communist Party launched what was called the "rectification process," in response to growing evidence of political demobilization and demoralization among working people in Cuba as a result of these policies. One by-product of this "revolution within the revolution," as Fidel Castro referred to it in November 1987, was a renewed interest in learning about the theoretical and practical contributions of Che Guevara to the building of socialism in Cuba.

Having served as a Rebel Army commander in the struggle that toppled the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in January 1959, Guevara shouldered a broad range of duties over the next six years in the new revolutionary government and its political leadership. During this period the Cuban workers and farmers consolidated their political power and expropriated the domestic and foreign landlords and capitalists. The Cuban toilers and their revolutionary leadership began building a communist party capable of organizing working people to defend their revolution, to aid others in the Americas and around the world starting down the same road, and to begin the transition to socialism… .

The enduring political value of Guevara's ideas and example was discussed by Castro at some length at the October 1987 ceremony marking the twentieth anniversary of Guevara's murder at the hands of U.S.-trained troops in Bolivia. Guevara had left Cuba in April 1965 to carry out internationalist missions abroad, with the aim of extending the socialist revolution.

"What I ask for modestly at this twentieth anniversary,” Castro said in the 1987 talk, "is that Che's economic thought be made known; that it be known here, in Latin America, in the world: in the developed capitalist world, in the Third World, and in the socialist world." It is with the aim of helping in this task that Pathfinder Press in 1989 published an English translation of Carlos Tablada's book and is now publishing this first French edition. Fidel Castro's 1987 speech, which provides one of the best possible introductions to the place of Che's contributions as a part of the living political continuity of the Cuban revolution, serves as the prologue.  
 
 
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