Letter to Mr. Robert Starkie
Havana
June 12, 1961
Year of Education
Mr. Robert Starkie
Rocamora Bros., Ltd.
35 Wingold
Toronto 19, Ontario, Canada
Dear Sir,
This is in response to your letter of May 19, which I received a few days ago.
Two aspects of your offer are of interest to us. You offer to install factories for producing insecticides: for veterinary use; for use in agriculture, especially for fruit; fungicides; and fumigators for land and for stored products. We are interested in installing all of those factories in Cuba, but, in our country, the exploitation of human beings by others has been ended and there are no possibilities for establishing new privately owned factories, so we cannot accept the establishment of factories that are dependent on a foreign company.
If you are interested in selling us machinery with a long-term contract for supplying the raw materials that we cannot obtain here and with a payment formula that is acceptable to the country—which lacks convertible currency right now—we would be very interested in holding discussions in this regard.
Sincerely,
Commander Ernesto Che Guevara