Che as minister: the promotion of science and technology for Cuba’s socialist development

Following the Revolution of 1959, the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America sent an advisory mission to Cuba to promote its import substitution industrialisation (ISI) strategy for bolstering national (capitalist) development.² Guided by this ISI approach, the Cuban trade mission to the socialist bloc which Guevara headed in October 1960, purchased factories according to a list of finished products needed in Cuba, with the intention of replacing imports. Within a year and a half Guevara complained this had been the wrong criteria:

We worked with our vision fixed on the substitution of imports of finished goods, without seeing clearly that we can’t produce those articles without having the raw materials they need … We continue to be largely dependent on foreign trade to resolve our problems. (Guevara, 1962a, p. 103)

He listed factories for brushes, screws, pickaxes and shovels, electric solders, barbed wire, among others, which Cuba had purchased because the finished product was needed, but which relied on imported materials to manufacture. This was a costly mistake; the US blockade was cutting off imports from the capitalist world.

In August 1961, the National Production Conference confirmed that the revolutionary state would maintain the sugar industry’s historic role as Cuba’s principal export, to secure vital imports, serving as the basis of accumulation for longer-term investments in industry and social welfare. Guevara concurred, but advocated an industrialisation strategy using endogenous resources, including sugar cane and its derivatives, and pursuing a diversified chain of production with both horizontal and vertical integration: ‘ … We have to develop cotton together with the textile factory; to develop iron together with the factories that will consume iron … From sugar everything should be extracted … sugar [could] serve as a primary material’ (Guevara, 1962b, p. 286). He pointed to the use of pork to produce lard in the United States as an example.

As the US government pressured other capitalist countries not to trade with Cuba, the revolutionary state was obliged to import equipment from the socialist bloc, which was sometimes two decades behind that existing in advanced sectors of Cuban industry in 1958. Edison Velázquez, director of the Consolidated Enterprise (Empresa Consolidada, or EC) of Nickel in MININD explained:

Many factories turned out to be inefficient, because we depended on what the Russians and the socialist camp had achieved, and they were behind. You could say these factories were obsolete. This wasn’t Che’s fault. The Yankees wouldn’t sell us factories … we had to make more effort, it was more work for the country. (Velázquez, 2006)

Nonetheless, Guevara acknowledged the essential support received from the socialist countries, which provided credit, advisors, technicians, and other specialists (Guevara, 1962a, p. 100). All MININD’s vice ministers and directors were assisted by specialists from throughout the socialist bloc or Latin American communists and sympathisers. Guevara asserted that ‘all the socialist countries with the capacity to do so have contributed, and contribute day after day to our Revolution, with identical enthusiasm’ (Guevara, 1964, p. 139). By the end of 1964 there were 640 foreign technicians working in MININD, 492 of them from socialist countries (MININD, 1965, p. 78). Most trained Cubans to operate new plants and technologies or worked in research and development institutes. From 1964 to 1965, some 2000 Cubans received onsite training for plants under construction (Sáenz, 2005b, p. 206).

Meanwhile, thousands of Cubans went to the Soviet bloc. On 31 December 1964, MININD had 1271 Cubans abroad studying at universities, receiving technician training or other ‘worker qualifications’ (MININD, 1965, p. 78). This assistance, Guevara said, would create Cuban technicians who would construct Cuban factories built with machines designed by Cubans, using domestic raw materials, processed with Cuban technology (Guevara, 1964, p. 139). In the short term, however, he acknowledged the advantage enjoyed through socialist bloc assistance in mitigating US sanctions and consolidating the Revolution.

The Soviet Union did this alone; without friends, without credit, surrounded by ferocious adversaries, in the middle of a bitter struggle, even within its own territory. We do this in far superior conditions than those of the Peoples’ Republic of China, and those of the peoples’ republics of Europe, which came out of destructive war. (Guevara, 1962a, p. 118)

Guevara did not criticise the Soviets for the relative backwardness of their technology per se but for the disparity between the high level of research and development applied to military technology and low investment channelled to improving civilian production. In addition, he opposed ideological resistance to transferring the most advanced technology from the capitalist world. This ‘error’, he said ‘has cost them in terms of development and in terms of competition in the world market’ (Guevara, 1962b, p. 289). For example, Guevara criticised the Soviet’s rejection of cybernetics on ideological grounds, ‘cybernetics is a branch of science that exists and that should be used by man’ (Guevara, 1962c, pp. 318–319).

Technology has no ideology per se, he insisted: ‘a tractor has a function: to plough … why are we going to take the technology of a socialist tractor in place of a capitalist one, if the capitalist one is better?’ (Guevara, 1963a, p. 422). He cited Polish economist Oscar Lange’s prediction back in 1953 that new countries entering socialism would adapt the modern capitalist technology they inherited, speeding up the construction of socialism (Guevara, 1963a, p. 421). The origin of the BFS lay in the capitalist corporations of pre-Revolution Cuba, and it was, therefore, more progressive than the Soviet Auto-Financing System (AFS), which developed out of 1920s pre-monopoly Russian capitalism, he concluded.

Technological incompatibility was also a problem, as explained by Tirso Sáenz, named director of the nationalised petroleum industry in 1961.

Refineries are designed according to the type of oil they are going to process. Soviet petroleum was different from the Venezuelan oil that we received before – it had a higher content of salts and sulphur. The corrosion problems were terrible. The crude was eating away the pipes and equipment and we had the blockade so we couldn’t get spare parts from anywhere. (Sáenz, 2005)

Guevara advocated a long-term development strategy of fostering industrialisation based on endogenous resources with investments in science and technology to overcome trade dependency. While the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA) were responsible for developing the food industry and other agricultural derivatives, Guevara announced in 1962 that MININD would: ‘orientate ourselves towards four lines of development: metallurgy, naval construction, electronics and sucroquímica [chemical derivatives from sugar]’ (Guevara, 1962a, p. 105).³ The prerequisites were the rational exploitation of natural resources, creation of a mechanics base and training at all levels.

To address the lack of adequate training and infrastructure in the existing academic institutions, Guevara set up nine research and development institutions within MININD, focussing on sugar cane derivatives, minerals and metals, the chemical industry, agricultural by-products, the mechanical industry and technological innovation and automation. This institutional framework would initiate experimentation at both ends of the production chain, raw materials and manufacturing simultaneously. Not all these projects could possibly come to fruition in the short term, however, more significant than the productive achievements was the methodology introduced, the application of science and technology to production. The following discussion about nine research and development institutes set up within MININD is informed by archive documents and interviews with those involved.

In 1964, these research institutes accounted for 53.2% of MININD’s total costs, reflecting their prioritisation. They were located outside the ministry building but integrated under the organisational and financial structure of the BFS, receiving a planned budget for investments and salaries, and operating with some independence.

For the purpose of analysis, the research apparatus has been divided into three categories: first, those concerned with the sugar industry; second, those involving the extraction and exploitation of natural resources (excluding sugar); and third, naval construction, electronics, and automation.

The pre-revolutionary Cuban economy was dominated by the sugar industry; 75% of arable land was controlled by sugar companies, half of which they left fallow. They employed 25% of the Cuban labour force, but only 25,000 workers full time, with up to half a million workers hired for the labour-intensive harvest lasting two to four months, and afterwards dismissed for the tiempo muerto (dead season). Underemployment was integral to the sugar industry and plantation workers constituted a rural proletariat with a history of class-conscious militancy. Cuba was the world’s largest exporter of sugar in the 1950s; sugar and its by-products accounted for 86% of exports.

The sugar industry was dominated by US interests. In 1955 US investors controlled 40% of raw sugar production (US Department of Commerce, 1956, p. 37). The United States received 80% of Cuban sugar exports while US imports flooded Cuba’s internal market. The US-imposed a quota for sugar imports, which disincentivised investment, contributing to the industry’s stagnation and serving as an instrument of political-economic control over the Cuban government. No new sugar mills had been founded since 1926 and by 1951 the World Bank warned: ‘Cuba’s standard of living … depends mainly on an industry which stopped growing many years ago’ (IBRD, 1951, p. 5).

For most Cubans, the sugar industry was associated with slavery, racism, poverty, unemployment, underdevelopment and imperialism.⁴ The first instinct of many in the revolutionary government was to replace sugar with diversified agricultural production, manufacturing and heavy industry (Boorstein, 1968, p. 205). However, as Cuba shifted to trade with the socialist countries, the government fell back on a development strategy where sugar exports were the mainstay of capital accumulation. In 1963, Guevara acknowledged:

The entire economic history of Cuba has demonstrated that no other agricultural activity would give such returns as those yielded by the cultivation of the sugar cane. At the outset of the Revolution many of us were not aware of this basic economic fact, because a fetishistic idea connected sugar with our dependence on imperialism and with the misery in the rural areas, without analysing the real causes: the relation to the unequal balance of trade. (Cited by Pollit, 2004, p. 323, fn 6)

Given favourable trade deals with the socialist bloc, the revolutionary government believed it had redressed the unequal balance of trade.⁵ While sugar production remained pivotal to Cuban economic development, Guevara sought to mechanise its cultivation and develop a secondary manufacturing industry on the back of it.

There were three incentives to mechanise the sugar cane harvest. First, the shortage of macheteros (cane cutters) following the post-1959 rural-urban migration as real wages rose and employment was created. The harvest in 1961 required 200,000 volunteers to be mobilised. The long-term solution was mechanisation. Second, to humanise the work so that in the near future, Guevara said, ‘those who speak of cutting by hand, loading by hand, would be considered to be proposing inhumane, bestial work, something from the past’ (Sáenz et al., 2003, p. 151). Third, to cut the costs of production and raise productivity (Guevara, 1962a, p. 108). This would be achieved by mechanisation and development of sugar derivatives; value-added products using sugar as a raw material.

Alfredo Menéndez, director of the EC of Sugar in MININD, recalled how Guevara’s experience of voluntary labor in the cane field strengthened his resolve to mechanize the harvest:

It was a hot day … already 11am and everyone was tired, but they had not finished cutting parts of the cañaveral [cane field], which means that the cane can’t be picked up. Che sat down to rest in the shade. When people saw this, they stopped working too. I explained to him why you had to finish the cañaveral. He said: ‘Damn, I am going to get up and cut cane; but this is slave’s work, this has to be mechanised!’. (Menéndez, 2005a)

Attempts pre-1959 to mechanise the sugar harvest had been resisted by macheteros who relied on this back-breaking work to survive (Cushion, 2016; US Department of Commerce, 1956, p. 34).⁶ The minor feats accomplished by Guevara’s mechanisation project were perhaps more significant in assuaging resistance to mechanisation than in productive results. Confident that the Revolution would provide alternative employment and social welfare, militant sugar workers dropped their resistance to mechanisation. ‘In the epoch of the Revolution, these machines did not mean unemployment’ explained Miguel Ángel Duque de Estrada Ramos (2005), who was head of the Office of Special Issues which set up the mechanisation task force. Young macheteros moving to cities to study and work had no wish to return to manual labour in the countryside. They stopped opposing mechanisation and machateros contributed to these efforts.

Cuba has among the world’s largest known reserves of nickel. In 1959, there were two nickel mines, both in Oriente province. The Nícaro mine was owned by the US government and the Moa mine by a private US company, the Freeport Sulphur Company. The nickel was sent to the US for processing. A 1961 report to the US President highlighted the importance of Cuban nickel for the development of the US military industry, including space exploration projects (Borrego Díaz, 2001, pp. 140–141).

Nícaro was founded in 1943 during the Second World War and expanded for military purposes in 1952 during the Korean War. By 1958 the plant was valued at $87 million and its annual production represented 11% of world supply, excluding the socialist countries (Time Magazine, 1958). The plant had its own electricity supply and employed 4000 workers in continuous production. A manganese plant in Felton, a town outside of Nicaro, had another 400 workers. Production stopped at Nícaro in 1960, after the US government refused to pay a new 25% tax imposed by the revolutionary government on exports. The plant at Moa was inaugurated in 1958 with more complex, modern technology, employing 1600 workers in continuous production, and valued at $75 million. It was abandoned the following year after the Revolution. US technicians left the island and US imports vital for production, particularly ammonia, were cut off.

‘The technological dependence of the nickel industry on the US was total’, stated Borrego Díaz (2001, p. 141). Restarting production at Moa and Nícaro were major achievements; paralysis would have been politically, as well as economically disastrous, leaving 6000 Cubans, including skilled workers, unemployed. The Revolution relied of the support of the mine workers to re-establish production, and on the expertise of Soviet specialists sent to assist. One Cuban engineer, Demetrio Presilla played an essential role at Nícaro. Presilla rejected tempting offers to work in the US because of racism in that country (Gálvez, 2006; Regueira Ortega, 2006). Initially he also refused to co-operate with the Soviet technicians, on the basis of anti-communism. According to Benigno Regueira Ortega, head of the Cuban Mining Institute (ICM) from 1960 following the nationalisation of the mines, Presilla finally he agreed to collaborate: ‘because of his respect for Che’ (Regueira Ortega, 2006).

From February 1961, responsibility for mining was transferred to the new EC of Nickel set up in MININD. Guevara also established the Cuban Institute of Mineral Resources (ICRM) to conduct research in cooperation with the EC, thereby establishing a model for collaboration between research institutions and production enterprises that is an established feature in Cuba. New mines were opened with co-ordinates provided by the ICRM. A new railroad and other facilities were built with equipment imported from the USSR and England.

From 1963, the administrator at Nícaro was Luis Gálvez, a young chemical engineering student. ‘My main role was to get a good understanding of that complex technology, to establish good relations with the workers and take a lead on the technical side’ he explained. ‘I had the factory and the mine 20 kilometres away. I practically lived in the factory’ (Gálvez, 2006). The ammonia necessary for nickel extraction arrived in weekly shipments from the USSR, which also provided credit for Cuba to purchase spare parts from the west. The credit was repaid in nickel.

Restarting production at Moa was an even greater accomplishment. The Soviet engineers sent to assist were unfamiliar with the modern technology, so Guevara tracked down and met with technicians and engineers working at the plant before the Revolution. They were now mostly reemployed in Havana and most planned to leave the country. Emphasising the vital role of the mine in Cuban development and the importance of their own contribution, he persuaded them to return to help restart the Mao mine, offering to facilitate their departure from Cuba subsequently. An Indian engineer Dr T K Roy was also tracked down abroad and agreed to travel secretly to Cuba to help rehabilitate production. Borrego described this as a defeat for the ‘yankee government’ which showed that ‘revolutionary daring could triumph with decisive and intelligent work when faced by a powerful adversary’ (Borrego Díaz, 2005, p. 144).

New mines were opened which had various metals with productive potential and economic value. Gálvez (2006) explained that Guevara and Castro envisaged moving beyond the production of nickel, which is an intermediary product, to produce stainless steels for use in the chemical and food industries. This was achieved in the 1980s, but in Guevara’s time the principal achievement was to restart nickel production and shift exports to the USSR.

MININD’s research and development institutes related to two of the four lines of development proposed by Guevara in 1962, metallurgy and sugar cane derivatives. Efforts to foster progress in the remaining two sectors, electronics and naval construction, were integrated into MININD’s main apparatus, rather than as research and development institutes, via the EC of Naval Construction, the Office for Automation and Electronics, the EC of Electrical Equipment and the EC of Electricity.

We are inaugurating an epoch in which scientific knowledge is, and will increasingly be, the main force that determines our rhythm of development and our capacity to ‘burn through stages’ in the construction of socialism. (Guevara, 1962f, p. 148)

Guevara’s promotion of science and technology within MININD was part of his theoretical understanding that communism should arise out of the highest stage of development of the productive forces. The greater the level of automation and centralisation, the greater would be the potential for conscious, political control of the economy, as market forces were replaced by planning in determining production and consumption. More concretely, however, MININD’s research and development institutes worked towards immediate goals: finding substitutes for costly imports; increasing the value added to raw material exports, particularly sugar and nickel; creating a mechanical industry to exploit Cuba’s metallurgy reserves; producing spare parts and laying foundations for the production of capital goods. Parallel to these projects was the imperative of reducing inequality by extending electrical provision and, hence, employment opportunities, to mechanise agricultural production, raise productivity and create a training infrastructure for future developments. The institutes reflected Guevara’s understanding of which sectors were leading international developments, technologically and economically, while also being grounded in Cuba’s concrete conditions and development needs. Reality imposed many obstacles, as the discussion above demonstrates. When Guevara left Cuba in 1965 the research and development institutes within MININD were neglected. ‘This lasted about two years’, according to Borrego Díaz (2005). ‘It was a mistake on our part, but luckily we realised that quickly and refocused on them.’

There is no space here to discuss Guevara’s legacy, but it would be possible to track the impact of his approach on Cuban development. One example is offered Jorge Ruiz Ferrer, a close collaborating wit Guevara in MININD, including on attempts to apply computer processing to optimise production. After the division of MININD, Ruiz became Vice Minister in the new Ministry of Minerals and Metallurgy where he applied those methods first tentatively experimented with in MININD. Through an investigation into the mining process at Moa using a computer that Guevara had imported from England they saved the country millions of dollars (Ruiz Ferrer, 2006). Ruiz was clear that although substantial results were not attained in MININD, later achievements were the direct legacy of a methodology that Guevara promoted.

While MININD’s achievements were modest, arguably Guevara’s real accomplishment was to introduce a methodology for applying science and technology to production, forcing that agenda onto the national development strategy, initiating the necessary training and research infrastructure, including investing in laboratory research, experimental areas, pilot plants and prototype workshops to create a cycle of innovation. Today, institutes operate in Cuba covering all the areas of those set up by Guevara between 1961 and 1963.