HAVANA — “This book is necessary reading, not only in Cuba but around the world, especially in the face of today’s conditions,” said Elier Ramírez Cañedo, deputy director of the Fidel Castro Center here. He was speaking as part of a panel presenting the new Pathfinder edition of Che Guevara on Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism by Carlos Tablada.
The book, Ramírez said, makes available the words of revolutionary leader Ernesto Che Guevara on the fight by working people to overturn capitalist exploitation and “not only create a new society — the opposite of capitalism — but create different human beings.”
Joining Ramírez on the panel were Arleen Rodríguez Derivet, a well-known Cuban journalist; Mary-Alice Waters, editor of the book and president of Pathfinder Press; and Tablada, who also chaired the event.
The Feb. 21 presentation, part of this year’s Havana International Book Fair, was a joint effort by Pathfinder Press and Ruth Casa Editorial. It launched the Pathfinder editions of the book in both Spanish and English, as well as Ruth’s e-book editions in both languages. María Elena Silva, the translator for Pathfinder’s French-language edition, to be released later this year, was introduced in the audience.
Among those present was Antonio Guerrero, widely known as one of the Five Cuban Heroes. He and the other four revolutionaries spent up to a decade and a half in U.S. prisons on trumped-up charges for their work to thwart plans by Florida-based counterrevolutionaries to launch violent attacks on Cuba.
The audience of more than 30 was larger than at many of the presentations during this year’s book fair. The acute shortage of fuel and sharply reduced bus service made transportation in Havana extremely difficult — a consequence of the intensified U.S. economic war against the Cuban people.
‘Che was a Marxist’
“Che was a genuine Marxist,” said Ramírez, author of the foreword to the Ruth edition of the book. Guevara, he noted, disagreed with those who argued that socialism could be built simply by “gradually increasing the distribution of consumer goods” while ignoring “the development of consciousness” through the active participation of working people in the transformation of society.
“Che placed human beings at the center of his conception of socialism — as conscious actors in history,” Ramírez said. “It’s impossible to explain the Cuban Revolution without that.”
Ramírez told the story of his grandfather, Luis Cañedo, who, as a young man living in the U.S., joined Fidel Castro’s July 26 Movement, which was leading the revolutionary struggle against the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship. That struggle became known worldwide on July 26, 1953, with attacks on the U.S.-backed regime’s Moncada army barracks in Santiago de Cuba and on the garrison in Bayamo. In 1955 Castro traveled to several U.S. cities to recruit Cuban emigres to the revolutionary movement, and Cañedo hosted a meeting for him in his Miami home.
“My grandmother called her husband into the kitchen and asked him, ‘How can you join up with that crazy guy who launched an attack on the second-largest army garrison in Cuba with just a few rifles? You think those people will overthrow Batista?’ My grandfather replied, ‘Yes, I’m convinced they will.’ And he was right.
“A little more than three years later, on Jan. 1, 1959, a powerful popular revolutionary movement led by the Rebel Army and July 26 Movement took power in Cuba,” Ramírez said. The revolution showed the capacity of masses of ordinary men and women to transform society and themselves.
Fidel led ‘Rectification Process’
Arleen Rodríguez noted that when Tablada’s book was first published in Cuba in 1987, under the title The Economic Thought of Ernesto Che Guevara, Castro was leading what he called the Process of Rectifying Errors and Negative Tendencies.
Rectification, as it became known, was a political battle, launched by Fidel in 1986 to organize working people to address pressing social needs. It was a decisive turn away from the growing reliance in Cuba, over more than a decade and a half, on bureaucratic Soviet policies in planning and management — methods that Castro sharply criticized for resorting to what he explained were “the mechanisms and categories of capitalism.” In the course of that battle, Castro often pointed to Guevara’s ideas and example.
“Tablada’s book was controversial at the time,” Rodríguez said. She referred to a 2019 interview she conducted with Tablada for the online journal CubaDebate that explained how the book initially met with strong opposition from a layer of government and Communist Party officials in Cuba. Those officials supported the Soviet Union’s anti-working-class economic management policies that Che had argued against, and it took Castro’s direct political intervention to get the book published and distributed widely.
Rodríguez said a valuable part of Che Guevara on Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism is the inclusion of Castro’s Oct. 8, 1987, speech, which marked the 20th anniversary of Guevara’s death in combat. In that speech the Cuban leader urged that Tablada’s work be read and studied because it clearly presented Che’s economic and political perspectives — in his own words.
The importance Castro gave to Guevara’s perspectives, Rodríguez said, is described more fully “in the preface by Mary-Alice Waters, which is a real contribution to this new edition of the book.”
Important changes in new edition
“I’m proud to say that Pathfinder’s record in promoting this communist work internationally goes back more than 35 years,” said Waters. Che Guevara on Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism was first published in English in 1989 — just two years after Castro brought international attention to the first Cuban edition. Editions in Spanish and French followed several years later.
Waters added to comments made by Ramírez and Rodríguez on the place of Guevara, Castro, and the Rectification Process in the Cuban Revolution. “Fidel worked tirelessly to reverse the political marginalization and demobilization of the working class,” she said. “To organize and lead working people to bring their weight to bear, by showing how they could meet the burning needs of everyday life.”
For example, she said, thousands of workers in Cuba joined volunteer work brigades. In just one year these brigades built more than 50 child care centers in Havana alone, meeting a vital need for women and their families.
“This enormous social movement was intertwined with the victorious culmination of Cuba’s internationalist mission in Angola,” which also greatly strengthened the Cuban Revolution, Waters said. Over 16 years, some 425,000 Cuban volunteers served in Angola, helping defeat multiple invasions by South Africa’s white-supremacist regime and hastening the end of the apartheid regime itself.
Waters noted that the title of the Pathfinder edition, Che Guevara on Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism, is different from the title of Cuban editions, The Economic Thought of Ernesto Che Guevara. Especially for readers outside Cuba, she said, it helps “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.”
Tablada elaborated on what Waters had said about how his collaboration with Pathfinder began. He recalled the 1990 speaking tour that the Socialist Workers Party in the United States organized for him to promote the first Pathfinder edition of his book in English. He spoke on dozens of university campuses in 33 U.S. cities and met with farmworkers, Eastern Airlines strikers, and garment and rail workers interested in learning about Cuba’s socialist revolution.
He described how he began working on his book in 1969. Luis Álvarez Rom and Orlando Borrego — former ministers of finance and of the sugar ministry, respectively, both of whom had worked closely with Guevara — gave him copies of Che’s unpublished writings and urged him to pursue his research.
In the mid-1970s, Tablada said, he gave an early draft of his manuscript to Haydée Santamaría, one of the two women who took part in the 1953 Moncada attack and founding president of the Cuban cultural institution Casa de las Américas. At a time when Soviet political and economic policies were becoming increasingly prevalent in Cuba, “Haydée told me, ‘You’re going to run into many obstacles. Some people will attack you for the ideas in this book. But you must promise me that you will finish it.’” With the solid support of Fidel Castro, he did so. In 1987 his manuscript won the Casa de las Américas special prize and was first published by that institution.
The meeting ended with words of thanks to the panelists by Tomasa González, director of the Dulce María Loynaz Cultural Center, where the event was held, followed by informal discussion and the sale of the book.