In a 1992 interview with Nicaragua’s Tomás Borge, published in the book Face to Face with Fidel Castro (Ocean Press, 1993), Fidel Castro was asked why there had been a revival of interest in Che’s writing in Cuba. The Cuban leader observed:
We have always paid a lot of attention to Che’s thinking in Cuba. I myself have kept his thinking increasingly in mind, ever since we began our process of rectification, long before all those problems arose in the socialist camp and perestroika appeared on the horizon. I remember that we were observing an anniversary of Che’s death—I think it was the 20th anniversary—and I spoke at length about Che and all these matters.
My admiration and fellow feeling for Che have grown as I have seen what has happened in the socialist camp, because he was categorically opposed to the use of capitalist methods for the construction of socialism. One of our comrades, an economist, gathered together all of the ideas Che set forth in this regard in his writings and speeches, and he compiled and arranged them. They are of enormous value and should be studied, because I think that the use of those capitalist methods and concepts had an alienating influence in the socialist countries.
You were asking about what caused the failure of socialism in those countries.
I think that Che had a prophetic vision when, as early as the first few years of the 1960s, he foresaw all of the drawbacks and consequences of the method that was being used to construct socialism in Eastern Europe.
He said there was no need to resort to those methods and to that capitalist philosophy. At one time, we began to use economic planning and management methods that were copied from the European socialist experience. Those concepts began to prevail because of the enormous prestige the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries had in Cuba and because of the ideological mistakes we made in the first few years of the revolution. This created a culture favorable to the appearance and application in Cuba of the methods for the construction of socialism that were being applied in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries.
I have always made a distinction between the Soviet Union and the other countries, because socialism wasn’t built exclusively with those methods in the Soviet Union. I’m referring mainly to the smaller countries in the socialist camp, because the development programs in the Soviet Union were very powerful, and the main decisions that made the Soviet Union’s great economic growth possible weren’t associated with income-yield capacity in the capitalist sense or any other such concepts.
That philosophy was applied in our country. After 10 or 11 years, while we were waiting to see its results, so many deformations and deviations occurred that I had to stop and think and constantly remember Che and his premonition, his rejection of those methods for socialist construction. I think that what has happened in the socialist camp makes Che’s economic thinking on the construction of socialism more timely than ever.
When the process of rectification was begun, I encouraged the printing of those books on Che and spread Che’s economic thinking—but not for use as a manual, as something infallible, because you shouldn’t take any school of political thought or the thinking of any theoretician or politician as something inflexible, as something dogmatic.
All my life, I’ve been the enemy of dogma. We should keep the thinking of the most illustrious politicians and of the most outstanding revolutionaries from becoming dogma, for all thinking corresponds to a given moment, circumstances, the amount of available information, or experience. Thus, things that Lenin may have viewed at one time as correct formulas for dealing with a given circumstance may not be applicable in other, different circumstances or in different times.
The ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Che aren’t dogma—they are brilliant samples of talent and of political, social, and revolutionary vision created at a certain time. They are always applicable as long as you don’t consider them immutable dogma; to do so would be to take them out of the scientific, political, revolutionary context and make them a matter of religion.
I tried to spread Che’s ideas widely when we saw that the Soviet Union and the rest of the socialist camp were taking a different path, that led them farther and farther away from Che’s thinking, when they were heading toward ever greater use of the systems and mechanisms of capitalism. In their efforts to improve socialism, they were using larger and larger amounts of the poison that was killing socialism. That’s one of the causes of what happened in the socialist camp.