Book Review – Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution by Helen Yaffe
2014.02.23. 22:24
For today, I have found you a great review about Helen Yaffe's book titled Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution.
Read it and then you will be looking forward to buying the book.
The majority of literary work focusing on Che Guevara covers either his guerilla activities in Cuba, Congo and Bolivia and the theoretical work he built based on these experiences (Focoism), or his travels through Latin America before he joined Fidel and the 26th of July Movement in Mexico City. This work, however, focuses on what I believe to be the most important role Guevara played in his life: the building of the Cuban economy after the seizure of state power from Batista and the forces of US Imperialism.
In this book, Helen Yaffe documents this period of Guevara’s life, documenting all of his initiatives and how they ultimately tied into his economic management apparatus, the Budgetary Finance System (BFS), which was developed as an alternative to, and a critique of, the Soviet bloc’s Auto-Financing System (AFS).
Far removed from the typical image of Guevara as a “romantic” revolutionary, Che as Minister of the Minstry of Industries (MININD) is depicted as an utterly pragmatic man, willing to use any administrative technique or technology, regardless of the ideology that “birthed” it (“it’s not important who invented the system. The accounting system that they apply in the Soviet Union was also invented under capitalism.”). The US Corporations that existed in Cuba before the revolution are shown to have been a major influence on Guevara’s own administrative organization in the Ministry of Industries. These corporations, Guevara thought, represented capitalism at a much more advanced stage than what existed in Russia before the October Revolution. “He was,” states Yaffe, “impressed with their management structures, the use of centralised bank accounts and budgets, determinate levels of responsibility and decision-making, and departments for organisation and inspection.”
Throughout, this book documents the mind-numbingly immense amount of work that Che did during his tenure as the first Minister of MININD (very often not sleeping for days at a time). From the early, crisis-ridden days of the revolution when he struggled to find administrators for the factories in the wake of the mass exodus of the upper echelons of Cuban society after it became apparent the revolution was aimed at building Socialism (at one point, Fidel and he even resorted to employing children from a boarding school training to become teachers as temporary administrators for 200 factories that had just been nationalized), on to the relatively more stable days of the mid-60′s when increasing productivity and lowering costs while undermining the law of value and defeating the anarchy of the market with centralized planning were his main concerns, Che is shown as a tireless revolutionary, who always sought to lead the Cuban workers by example, to show them both why they needed to build Socialism, and how they could go about it.
My only real gripe with this work is that, at times, Yaffe isn’t as critical of Che as she should be. There are times when for whatever reason, some of his initiatives failed to meet expectations. Unless Che himself was self-critical at these times (or even when he was) Yaffe seems to try to make excuses for him, to show that it really wasn’t his fault at all that such and such plan failed. While this isn’t a very big issue (she only really does it at a couple of points), it did detract from an otherwise superb work.
Overall, this is a book that I think is of vital importance to anyone who is interested in the building of an alternative economic model to Capitalism, and wants to study the historic attempts at such an endeavour, as well as anyone interested in seeing how modern Cuba came to be how it is today. Many of the interviews Yaffe conducted for this work were done with now very aged contemporaries and comrades of Che, so it is great that this work was done when it was – another decade, and a work like this might very well have been impossible.
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