Below are remarks given by Mary-Alice Waters Feb. 21 during the 2025 Havana International Book Fair at a presentation of Pathfinder’s new edition of Che Guevara on Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism by Carlos Tablada. The other panelists at the event were Arleen Rodríguez Derivet, Elier Ramírez Cañedo, and Tablada, who also was the chair (see accompanying news article).
Waters is a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee and president of Pathfinder Press. She is the book’s editor and author of its preface and editor’s note. Copyright © 2025 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
Gracias, Carlos. And gracias to our gracious hosts here at the Centro Cultural Dulce María Loynaz.
Carlos and I have known each other since 1990, at least, when we sat on the Escalinata [steps to the University of Havana] until the early hours of the morning planning a speaking tour in the United States to promote the first English edition of the book we’re presenting the fourth edition of today.
I first heard Arleen’s name in 1994 when the Union of Young Communists selected her to lead a “Cuban Youth Tour” of the United States that had been organized by the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance. Unfortunately, the U.S. State Department denied Arleen a visa on the grounds she was a journalist writing for Juventud Rebelde, and the tour had to go ahead without her. So it was only some years later that we actually met.
And I’ve had the pleasure of working with Elier for more than a decade now. He has already joined Pathfinder twice to present multiple books about the class struggle in the United States, including Socialism on Trial by James P. Cannon and Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? by Jack Barnes.
It’s an honor to participate with all of you in today’s joint presentation by Pathfinder Press and Ruth Casa Editorial of this new edition in Spanish and English of Che Guevara on Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism by Carlos Tablada.
It’s a book that includes two very important additions to earlier editions. For the first time, the author has been able to put quotation marks around all the words of Che rather than being restricted to citing them indirectly.
And for the first time, the text also includes the passages from the Soviet economics manual that Che is polemicizing against. With these citations appearing as footnotes on the same pages, it is easier to understand the points Che is making and the broader stakes of the debate.
I’m proud to say that Pathfinder’s record in promoting this communist work internationally goes back more than 35 years.
The leadership of the Socialist Workers Party, like the rest of the world, learned of Tablada’s book when Fidel talked about it during his historic speech in October 1987, on the 20th anniversary of Che’s fall in combat in Bolivia. Fidel urged that the book be read, studied, and translated into other languages. Only later did we come to learn much more about how controversial it was in Cuba. I appreciated the comments Arleen made about this in her remarks here in Havana last October, when she spoke at the presentation of the e-book version.
As soon as we knew Tablada’s work existed, Pathfinder was determined to translate and publish it as rapidly as possible. Our first edition in English came off the press in 1989, barely two years after the first Cuban edition. Our first Spanish and French editions came several years later. And I’m glad to announce that our new French edition — thanks to the translation work of María Elena Silva, who is with us here this morning — will be ready this year.
Che, Fidel, and Rectification
I’d like to say a few words about Che, Fidel, and the Rectification Process, which Fidel talks about so forcefully in the October 1987 speech that is included in both the e-book and printed editions we’re discussing today.
The last half of the 1980s, when this book first began circulating, was a time of great hope in Cuba. Fidel was leading what he called the Process of Rectifying Errors and Negative Tendencies. He was referring to the negative consequences of the Cuban leadership’s adoption a decade and a half earlier of a version of the economic and political management policies that had long prevailed in the Soviet Union.
During the five or six years of the Rectification Process, Fidel worked tirelessly to reverse the political marginalization and demobilization of the working class. To organize and lead working people to bring their weight to bear, by showing how they could meet the burning needs of everyday life through their own efforts. In leading this process, he referred often to Che’s example and his ideas.
In less than a year, thousands of workers were recruited for volunteer work brigades. In Havana alone, they built not one, but more than 50 child care centers in a single year, plus family doctors’ homes and clinics, hospitals, schools, recreational centers, and much more.
This enormous social movement was intertwined with the victorious culmination of Cuba’s internationalist mission in Angola. That feat, as we know, came to a conclusion with the victory at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale, followed by the liberation of Namibia, and the accelerated drive by the people of South Africa to overthrow the apartheid regime. Moments of history that are a central theme of the Havana book fair program this year.
In presenting this book last October, both Arleen and Elier referred to the giant advances of the Rectification Process, which were abruptly ended with the harsh economic crisis that followed what Fidel called “the fall of the meringue” — the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the entire so-called socialist bloc in Europe.
Around the world enemies of the Cuban Revolution were predicting that very soon this revolution would be next.
As at Playa Girón, however, those self-anointed “wise men” were blind to the strengths of Cuba’s working people.
Leading a way out of the brutal crisis of the Special Period, Fidel followed on the same course as the Rectification Process. He challenged and led Cuba’s working people to confront the problems they faced through their own collective efforts. And they succeeded above all because of their reinforced confidence in themselves, developed during the years of the Rectification Process.
As Raúl [Castro] expressed it so well in May 1991 as he welcomed home the last contingent of Cuban volunteers from Angola, “If our people know themselves better, if all of us know much better what we are capable of achieving — veterans as well as our young people — it is thanks to Angola.”
And Fidel also expressed the same truth more than once when he noted, “One day we may have to erect a monument to the Special Period” for teaching us to take better advantage of “that invaluable treasure that is our people’s intelligence, knowledge, and preparation.”
Revolutionary course
The Rectification Process provided a powerful example of what the course Che and Fidel outline in this book could mean. Fidel pointed to it in his book-length interview with Ignacio Ramonet, published in Spanish as Cien horas [One Hundred Hours] and in English as My Life. Ramonet asked what Fidel thought about the debate in the early years of the revolution between Che and Carlos Rafael Rodríguez as well as others (in Cuba, and elsewhere). In those written exchanges, Carlos Rafael defended the economic methods used in the Soviet Union, as opposed to the course Che charts in this book.
Fidel replied, “I confess that on that subject I liked Che’s ideas about the way to build the economy best. They were very much like our guerrilla way of life in the mountains. Frankly, I liked Che’s moral appeal best. Che gave great weight to Communist consciousness, Communist awareness, the value of example.”
For these reasons and more, I’m happy this new edition includes Pathfinder’s 1997 preface, which discusses the example of the Rectification Process.
I’m sure some of you have noticed that the title of the Pathfinder editions, Che Guevara on Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism, is different from the title of other editions, including those published here in Cuba: The Economic Thought of Ernesto Che Guevara.
For readers outside Cuba, where our books circulate, we thought it important to emphasize that what Che and Fidel fought for was not only ideas — no matter how important they are — but above all, for a course of revolutionary conduct led by the working class. A course needed by working people the world over.
As the central leaders of the Cuban Revolution have so often explained, leading the transition from capitalism to socialism is a longer and far more difficult battle than taking state power out of the hands of the property-owning classes. Especially in a world still dominated by capitalism, where there have been no new victorious socialist revolutions in more than 65 years.
Giant popular transformations
To finish, in the summer of 1960, the working people of Cuba were advancing day after day with giant strides.
With leadership from Fidel and the entire revolutionary government, they were taking control of the command centers of the economy. They symbolically threw coffins representing those capitalist enterprises into sea. During those days of jubilation, almost 1,000 youth from across the Americas and world had converged on Havana for the First Latin American Youth Congress.
During days of intense activity, they learned firsthand about the course that Fidel and the cadres of the Rebel Army and July 26 Movement were leading. Many were members of Communist Parties and youth organizations around the world that, in those days, were presenting the Cuban Revolution as a bourgeois-democratic revolution, even if a very deep-going one. A socialist revolution, they were saying, required a more “communist” leadership (i.e., themselves) and would only be possible at a later stage, far down the road.
Other delegates at this congress were revolutionary-minded youth already won to the example of “the men and women of Moncada.” Day and night the delegates debated among themselves whether the Cuban Revolution was communist or not.
That was when Che Guevara addressed the opening session of the conference from the stage of Havana’s Blanquita Theater — today the Teatro Karl Marx.
In unambiguous words — and speaking for more than an hour without a single note in front of him — he explained to all those present (and I’m quoting), “If this revolution is Marxist — and listen well that I say ‘Marxist’ — it is because it discovered, by its own methods, the road pointed out by Marx.”
That is the heart of what this book presents.