Havana, February 26, 1964
“Year of the Economy”
Mr. José Medero Mestre
Havana
Compañero,
Thank you for your interest and your comments. In order to convince me, you have touched a sore spot; you quote my adversaries. Unfortunately, because of the time involved I cannot continue this polemic by mail. Future issues of Nuestra Industria Económica will be carrying articles by a select number of Soviet technicians showing their concern with similar questions.
Just one statement for you to think about: counterposing socialist efficiency to capitalist inefficiency in factory management is to confuse wishes with reality. It is in distribution that socialism achieves unquestionable advantages, and it is in centralized planning that it has been able to overcome its technological and organizational disadvantages with respect to capitalism. With the break up of the old society, an attempt has been made to establish the new one with a hybrid. Man as a wolf, the society of wolves, is being replaced by another genus that no longer has the desperate urge to rob his fellow man, since the exploitation of man by man has disappeared. But he still does have some urges of that type (although quantitatively fewer), due to the fact that the lever of material interest is still the arbiter of the well-being of the individual and of the small collectivity (factories, for example). And that is where I see the root of the evil. Conquering capitalism with its own fetishes, having removed their most magical quality, profit, seems like a tricky business.
If this is very obscure (my watch says it’s past midnight), perhaps another simile will make it clearer: the lever of material interest under socialism is like Pastorita’s lottery;2 it can neither light up the eyes of the most ambitious nor budge the others’ indifference.
I don’t pretend to have exhausted this theme, much less to have given the papal “amen” to these and other contradictions. Unfortunately, in the eyes of most of our people, and in mine as well, apologetics for a system can have more impact than scientific analysis of it. This does not help us in the task of clarification, and our whole effort is aimed at inviting people to think, to treat Marxism with the seriousness this towering doctrine deserves.
Because of this, because you think, I thank you for your letter; least important is the fact that we do not agree.
If you ever have to tell me anything else, remember, I am not a teacher; I am just one of many men struggling today to build a new Cuba, but who had the good fortune to be at Fidel’s side during the most difficult moments of the Cuban Revolution and some of the most tragic and glorious moments in the history of the worldwide struggle for freedom. That is why you know who I am, while I don’t remember your name. It might have been the other way around, except that in that case I would have had to write you from some remote part of the world, wherever my wandering bones might have taken me, since I was not born here.
That is all.
A revolutionary greeting,
Patria o muerte
Venceremos
Commander Ernesto Che Guevara