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Urooba Jamal Correspondent
Few revolutionaries are as well known as the late and great Ernesto “Che” Guevara. In fact, in what is the most ironic bastardisation of his legacy, the communist leader’s iconic image is plastered on to T-shirts, posters and other mass-produced memorabilia and sold worldwide.

“There have been lots of attempts to commodify him,” said Helen Yaffe, author of “Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution” and a professor at the London School of Economics, in an interview with teleSUR.

Speaking to the fact that people who may take in the consumer culture that surrounds him even if they haven’t delved into his works, she added: “Those who consume that (commodification), though, have an idea that he represents rebellion against the established order.”

But what are the actual economic ideas and philosophies behind this much-romanticised figure?

Today’s caricature of Guevara largely overlooks his contribution to Cuba’s economic development and contributions to socialist thought. But the man whose image has survived the collapse of the Soviet Union and the changes to Cuban communism, continues to have a profound impact on leftists around the world.

“He was someone who was political, someone you looked up to,” Eren Cervantes-Altamirano, an Indigenous Latina writer and community organiser told teleSUR. Now a resident of Ottawa, Canada, she added: “I grew up in Mexico. I grew up with a particular idea of Che and his revolution.”

Talking about her Latin American identity, Cervantes-Altamirano said that the Argentine-born leader was highly symbolic for her growing up.

“I hold very dear those images (of Che) and the Cuban Revolution,” she said.

Guevara, however, was not born a revolutionary. He grew up in a middle-class Argentine family and trained to be a doctor, preparing to live a privileged life. But his eyes were famously opened to the harsh reality of capitalism when, as a medical student in his early 20s, he hopped on a motorcycle and went on a tour of South America. He found disease, destitution and illiteracy and from that point on, he laboured to uplift the working class from Cuba to Guatemala to the Congo.

He later met Fidel Castro in Mexico City and worked alongside him to overthrow the US-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista, in what was known as the Cuban Revolution, which took place from 1956 to 1959. After its victory, however, the revolution led to a broader based social and economic movement, where agrarian reform was one of its main tenets, and where Guevara was arguably one of its most profoundly influential orchestrators.

In the coming years, Guevara took posts as the director of the industrialisation programme of the National Agrarian Reform Institute, INRA, head of the National Bank of Cuba, and later when the INRA became the Ministry of Industry, Guevara was appointed its minister. It was in these roles, Yaffe explained, that the guerrilla-leader-turned-economist carried out his Marxist policies, writing extensively about them, and leading by example in these actions.

“If you’re in a position of power, what practical policies can you develop that will affect how people think about their role in society?” said Yaffe, of Guevara’s central focus, which was getting the working class to develop a consciousness such that people worked for the benefit of society and from that received their reward, as opposed to working for a material gain.

Yaffe explained Guevara was constantly looking for solutions to stop the alienation workers felt from their labour. And it seems that this idea still reverberates in Cuba, and those in solidarity with the island today.

As a teenager in the mid 1990s, the LSE professor participated in what was the first brigade of the solidarity campaign, “Rock Around the Blockade” to Cuba from London, where she met other young people volunteering their labour in agriculture camps. When she probed as to why they were participating, the young Cubans told her: “Our country needs us. We need to defend the revolution and socialism.”

The brigades continue today, with different groups organising different brigades ever since the first years of the revolution. Drew Garvie, secretary-general of the Young Communist League, YCL, in Canada, who participated in one such brigade last year, told teleSUR how the movement has captured Che’s legacy.

“It was an idea of Che, in the early days of the revolution, to organise volunteer work. Engaging in selfless labour was meant to help construct a new socialist spirit and a sense of solidarity in people. Che participated in this work on the front lines performing volunteer labour and leading by example,” Garvie explained. “On the brigade today, (participants) work alongside Cubans, usually doing agricultural work for a few mornings during the tour in order to show solidarity and build friendships between the brigade and Cuban workers. So in this sense the legacy of Che Guevara lives on in the brigade.”

Yaffe explained that another focus of Guevara’s was taking the most advanced, high-tech industries and fitting them into a Marxist framework. As the INRA leader, he did this by coordinating activities among the nation’s industries, which had been nationalised. Later, as a part of the Ministry of Industry, this included centralised planning of the finances of Cuba’s economy, which after agrarian reforms, were central tenets of the post-revolution communist nation.

“His budgetary finance system was very imaginative, creative and successful,” Yaffe said.

As the living standards of Cubans from before to after the revolution rose, the US blockade on the country in the wake of the Cold War posed a significant challenge.

“He never blamed the blockade,” Yaffe pressed, stating that his endeavour to stray from being dependent on the Soviet Union during this era was certainly frustrated by the blockade, but perhaps helped Guevara’s aims instead. “The blockade probably pushed him to develop a planned economy much quicker.”

Not afraid to be openly critical of the Soviet Union, as indicative in his 1967 Message to the Tricontinentalnt, he was not of the opinion that Cuba should just copy the Soviet system.

It was also his commitment to internationalism that inspires many today. – Pambazuka News