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Cuba is using the “best application” of the ideas of Che
Guevara in its program of economic and political res-
tructuring, the person who wrote the book on Che’s

* economic and political theories asserts.

Cuban economist and author Carlos Tablada said the
first country in the Americas to turn socialist is following
a restructuring program uninterrupted since it was insti-
tuted in 1984 — well before the current reforms in the
Soviet Union and other socialist countries were under-
taken.

Cuba’s reforms reflect “a return to thinking with our
own heads and to no longer copy economic models in
(other) socialist countries,” Tablada told the Tribune in
Vancouver during a Canadian tour.

The author of the book, Che Guevara: Economics and
Politics in the Transition to Socialism, said in a recent
interview that Cuba is using methods of management
borrowed from capitalist powers like the United States
and Japan — but not, he emphasized, their methods of
ownership or distribution.

A professor at two institutes, Tablada declined to
compare Cuba’s reforms with those in other socialist
countries, which include adopting limited forms of mar-
ket economies and encouraging individual enter-
prises. His book, however, notes Che’s belief in central

Che’s vision mirrored in Cuban reforms

economic planning and the need to simultaneously —

develop a socialist consciousness in people.

“We call for more general participation by the masses
in all levels of power,” he said, speaking through transla-
tor Michael Baumann of Pathfinder Press, the publisher
of the English language version of Tablada’s book and
organizer of the tour.

The first stage of the reforms
lasted from 1984 to 1986, when
Cuban president Fidel Castro
“called on the masses to partici-
pate directly in massive numbers
to carry these changes forward.
Each step (since then) represents
a deepening of the process of rec-
tification,” Tablada stated.

In terms of production, that
means ensuring that projects are
completed on schedule, overhaul-
ing food production and distribu-
tion, and insisting that workers produce that for Res
they are paid, he related.

“Tn the past, we would pay workers for produgne, for
example, 10 tables even if they only produced eight. We
demand now that they do indeed produce those 10
tables.”

TABLADA

But this is coupled with “genuine participation by the
workers in management,” Tablada said.

Tablada acknowledged that when he began his
research in 1968, he knew little of the economic and
political theories of Ernesto Che Guevara, Cuba’s most
revered revolutionary hero. Since the publication of the
Spanish edition of his book in 1984, there have been
350,000 copies printed in three languages, and editions in
more than eight other languages are in production.

Che’s theories are the blueprint for the current eco-
nomic reforms, which stress “greater use of spirituality |
and individual characteristics” of Cuba’s citizens, said
Tablada.

Broader reforms include better social services,
increases in pensions and the minimum wage, a decrease
in infant mortality anda reduction i in the bureaucracy, he
related.

Cuba is not afraid to borrow “the most modern tech-
niques of management.” But, “we have one foot on the
ground and we do not use capitalist methods for the
organization and motivation of people, inside or outside
the process of production,” Tablada stressed.

“People have moral values and dignity, and these also
have to be reflected in the ways production is organized,”
he said.

Walking for peace amid EI Salvador’s agony |

Peace and
Friendship
among all
people.

Canadian-Cuban

Friendship Association
P.O. Box 69482, Stn. ‘K’, Van., B.C. V5K 4W6.

You can’t work without tools.

These
Nicaraguan

musicians

have
lots

of

talent...

Nicaragua needs music, to build the
revolution within its own borders and to
bring its spirit to the rest of the world.
But years of the
U.S. blockade and
contra aggression
have taken their toll.

Talented young
musicians like
those in B Cuadro
are often unable to
work or practise.
They can't get
instruments. They
have to share a few old instruments with
other musicians.

Music for Nicaragua and the

nrear aa UA

...WUut no musical instruments

Slim Evans label have produced B
Cuadro’'s 8 song cassette “Fiesta en e/
Barrio” to raise funds for instruments
and equipment.
Give a gift of
solidarity. “Fiesta en
el Barrio.”

Available at better
book and record
stores. For mail
orders send $10 per
tape plus postage
and handling,
($2.50 for one and
50¢ for each additional tape) to: Slim

_  Evans/Music for Nicaragua project,
2149 Parker St., Vancouver, B.C. V5L 2L6.

rp coadro

EL SALVADOR: Testament of Terror. By
Joe Fish and Cristina Sganga. $12.50.
Olive Branch Press, New York, 1988.
Available at People’s Co-op Bookstore.

Joe Fish and Cristina Sganga were two
foreigners who participated in a demonstra-
tion in El Salvador in January, 1986, witha
group of some 500 Salvadorans who were
marching across the country to demand, as
the authors of El Salvador: Testament of
Terror, put it, “peace and dialogue in their
shattered land.”

This march was to be part of an interna-
tional peace cavalcade organized by Nor-
wegian social democrats and sponsored by
many influential world leaders. Residents of
Greater Vancouver were among the repre-
sentatives from 80 nations, and the idea was
to traverse Central America from Panama
to Mexico.

However, the governments of El Salva-
dor and Honduras refused to allow the
marchers into their countries, and so, inside
El Salvador, groups and individuals set out
on their own to cover the route originally
projected.

This march for peace became a horror
story.

In the town of San Francisco Gotery,
their first destination, the marchers found
the streets blocked by the military. Soldiers
were driving around armed with U.S.-
supplied M-16 machine guns “pointed in
every direction like porcupine spines.”

Forced to return to San Salvador, the
capital, the marchers were harassed by the
army. At one point a member was arrested
and the commander in charge denounced
the “presence of foreigners,” by stating,
“Yankee go home.” The “irony of this
statement seemed to escape him,” the
authors write. -

Fish, a photo-journalist, and the Colom-
bia born Sganga trace the history of El
Salvador’s conflict between its people and
those who attempt to suppress them.

El Salvador has had a series of military
dictatorships since the popular rebellion in
1932 and the massacre of over 30,000 pea-
sants by the army. In 1984, the civilian
government of Jose Napoleon Duarte,
backed by the United States, took power in
an effort to “stem another Sandinista revo-
lution.” The Duarte government was in the
complete control of the United States as it
still is under president Alfredo Cristiani.

They then go on to note: “The priorities

in economic policy had been delivered, not
in El Salvador, but in Washington because °
the economy is financed by Washington.”

They cite testimony from sources like the
former U.S. backed president, Jose Napo-
leon Duarte, who acknowledges: “‘Aid is
given under such conditions that its use is
really decided by the Americans. Decisions
on how many planes or helicopters they
buy, how many bullets, how many pairs of
shoes, all are decided by the one who gives
the money.”

The book, which contains several photos
depicting the misery of El Salvador’s pea-
sants, cites several references in listing the
by-now-familiar attacks on civilians. But an
interview with a self-confessed mercenary
sheds light on why these mass-scale atroci-
ties occur.

Lawrence Bailey states: “Attacking civ-
ilians is a game plan. The strategy is clear.
Kill the sympathizers and you win the war.

“By terrifying the civilians, the army is
crushing the rebellion without need to
directly confront the guerrillas.”

And on the-now-infamous tortures, the
group Americas Watch notes: “The tortur-
ers and murderers are neither sick nor mad.
They are trained, and this abuse of human
rights is not a gruesome phenomenon,
characteristic of obscure and backward
Third World countries, but rather a tactic in
a strategy that has been designed in cold
blood to ‘draw the line’ against any kind of
government change which could be at stake
in a country like El Salvador.”

A former member of the El Salvadoran
Guard confesses he belonged to a squad
trained in Panama by the Red Berets of the
United States in torture techniques.

But the armed revolutionary group, the
Farabundo Marti National Liberation
Front, fights on, with the support of the
people, the authors note, observing: ““These
civilians are not passive victims of the con-
flict which has cost them so dearly. They
will not give up in the face of personal or
collective disaster.”

And, as we know, in a just a few months
since this book was published, the people

-and the FMLN are in the middle of a raging

battle right in the capital. This war in reality
is a war against the U.S. government and
that government’s support of international
corporate power, which intends to control
and cream off the riches of the land at the
expense of the people.

— Jonnie Rankin

Pacific Tribune, December 18, 1989 « 27