Critique of the Soviet Manual of Political Economy

Abstract

Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara arrived in Cuba as a revolutionary medic. Within nine years he had become a military commander, a political leader, an industrialist, a banker, a minister, an economist, a diplomat and a national hero in a foreign land. As a member of the Cuban government for five years, Guevara had helped to construct the scaffolding of a new society. Despite the ostensible and public break from the Cuban Revolution with his departure in 1965, he remained intimately tied to both the Revolution and the theoretical challenge it embodied.¹ Between 1965 and 1966, he made his most important contribution to socialist theory with his critical notes on the Soviet Manual of Political Economy.² The notes were smuggled back into Cuba by Aleida March, Guevara’s wife who went on a clandestine visit to see him overseas and who passed them on to Orlando Borrego Díaz, Guevara’s young deputy since La Cabana in January 1959. For 40 years Borrego kept them under lock and key, out of sight of scholars, political leaders, historians and companeros alike. What was it about these notes which made them so contentious or controversial that it was necessary to deprive the world of their contents for four decades?