Below is an extract from a review of Che Guevara: the economics of revolution by Helen Yaffe and Fidel & Che: A Revolutionary Friendship, by Simon Reid-Henry, written by Richard Gott for the London Review of Books. They did not publish Gott's review.

Fidel & Che: A Revolutionary Friendship, by Simon Reid-Henry, 467 pp., Sceptre, £20.

Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution, by Helen Yaffe, 368 pp., Palgrave, £17.99. 

 

Reviewed by Richard Gott

Revolutions always throw up intriguing leaders. Extraordinary figures emerged in France in the 1790s: Robespierre, Danton, St Just, Napoleon; a breathtaking array of talent. The Russian Revolution was dominated by a galaxy of originality and enterprise: Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Bukharin. Democratic politics in any given decade, by contrast, have little comparable to offer. Leftist historians were once hostile to the idea that the past was peopled by “great men” (and they are usually men), yet in recent years the likes of David Starkey have revived this conservative notion with some commercial success. While it remains true that revolutions are lavish in their production of revolutionaries - when one falls there is always another to take their place - you have to be singularly unromantic not to acknowledge that history might have had a different flavour if, say, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara had both died on a Cuban beach in December 1956 when they landed from the good ship Granma. Doubtless the downfall of Batista was made inevitable by the collapse in the sugar price, but Cuba as a global phenomenon would never have acquired its glamorous sparkle without the photogenic and charismatic characteristics of the early leaders of its revolution.

  Entering well-trodden paths, Simon Reid-Henry has had the bright idea of writing a dual biography of these two men during the decade that they spent together. It is such a clever and obvious thought that it is surprising that no one has tried it before. Bertram Wolfe did it with his “Three Who Made The Revolution”, published in 1948, a riveting account of the Russian Revolution seen through the activities of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, but no one had previously used the same technique with the more limited caste of Castro and Guevara. The result is a persuasive revisionist interpretation of the Cuban revolution, that is both scholarly and accessible. Based on his familiarity with the existing published sources in several languages, and a smattering of additional material from various archives, Reid-Henry enters boldly into the minds of his two protagonists with a high degree of probability…

  Castro grew uncertain whether he really understood or approved of Che’s economic strategy, conducted from the ministry of industries yet increasingly challenged by other government institutions with economic responsibilities. The problems that arose, sometimes referred to as “the great debate”, concerned several different issues: the relative importance accorded to industry over agriculture, the question of moral over material incentives, and the suitability of the imported Soviet economic model.

  A full account of this important but abstruse conflict is contained in a book by Helen Yaffe, Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). This hitherto unknown story, based on wide research in the archives and interviews with dozens of Guevara’s surviving collaborators, is a genuinely original contribution to our knowledge of the internal workings of the Cuban revolution. Guevara perceived the Soviet model of economic development, doubtless useful in the 1920s when it was first formulated, to be unsuitable for the 1960s. He was more interested in the organisation of contemporary American capitalist concerns, of which Cuba already had some experience, indeed rather more than the Soviet Union had had. If the future of socialism lay with state capitalism, Guevara argued, then maybe more could be learned from America than from Russia…

  Fidel and Che got on well together, they saw eye to eye on many important issues, their different talents complemented each other. Yet they were very different. Yaffe has a revealing anecdote about their relationship. In October 1961, Che noted Fidel’s “wonderful ability” to get close to people and to establish direct contact with the masses. In comparison, he told a meeting of his workforce at the ministry of industries, “I do not know a single cabaret, or a cinema, or a beach... practically never have I been in a family home in Havana, I don’t know how the Cuban people live, I only know statistics, numbers or summaries...” The bleak austerity of Che’s revolutionary outlook and practice places him rather closer to Robespierre than to Danton.

  Reid-Henry’s book tells its story more briefly than most of the mammoth biographies that have appeared of both Fidel and Che, and for that we should be grateful. But it has its weaknesses. It follows previous histories in concentrating on the early period of guerrilla warfare (it takes 200 pages, half the book, to get to 1959), and then is obliged to pass through the early years of the revolutionary project, both interesting and conflictive, at quite a gallop. He writes with the psychological insight of a novelist, yet some may cavil at the purple passages where he allows his imagination to run beyond the available documentation. He is often negligent with dates, and he can be cavalier when introducing and abandoning some crucial characters.

  From our present-day perspective he somewhat underplays the role of Fidel’s brother, now Cuba’s president. Raúl Castro, notably uncharismatic, was always a leading player, not least in his close military collaboration with the Soviet Union over thirty years. Yet he never sought or attracted the limelight, and he remains as shadowy in this book as in earlier biographies of his brother and of Guevara. Eventually he became the man in charge. For a book about Cuba, “Three who Made the Revolution” might also have been a good title.