Cuba Pt. 3: Che Guevara and the Building of Socialism w/ Helen Yaffe

Upstream

Politics, News, Society & Culture

4.9 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 24 March 2026

⏱️ 92 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, part 3 of our ongoing series on Cuba, we're joined by Helen Yaffe for a conversation exploring Cuba's transition to socialism after the revolution through Che Guevara's contributions. Helen Yaffe is a professor of Latin American political economy at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of We Are Cuba! How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World, and Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution. She is also the cohost of the Cuba Analysis podcast and the documentary Cuba's Life Task: combatting climate change.

The episode begins with a brief introduction to Che Guevara—providing an overview of Che's life and biography. We then discuss what the Cuban revolutionaries inherited in terms of Cuba's semi-colonial economic and political state—unemployment, poverty, inequality, underdevelopment, and dependency. We talk about how socialism became the guiding light of revolutionary Cuba and how the revolutionary government became more radical in response to the United States' attempts to sabotage it.

We discuss Che Guevara's role in developing the productive capacities of Cuba and his many roles ranging from President of the National Bank of Cuba to Head of Ministry of Industries (MININD). We also discuss his unique approach to laying the foundations of socialism in Cuba which put just as much emphasis on developing consciousness as developing materially. We contrast this with the Soviet system, which Che was critical of.

We then explore the role of intellectual, political, and training education in the emerging socialist state of Cuba, which had experienced a mass emigration of managers and business owners after the revolution and had a working class which was accustomed to viewing labor as an exploitative endeavor and not as means of liberation. Finally, we explore Che's legacy and tie it into present day Cuba, which is still under siege by the imperialists.

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Intermission music: "Señor Martí" by El Guajiro

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Transcript

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0:00.0	There was this period of like six years of Che Guevara's life where he is a member of the Cuban government
0:28.2	and he's working in the government in this incredibly important and challenging process of
0:35.9	the transition to socialism, right, in conditions of underdevelopment,
0:41.0	in conditions of attack by the US, blockade, economic warfare, military warfare.
0:47.3	You have the invasion, the Bay of Pigs, the threat of nuclear annihilation under the Cuban
0:51.8	missile crisis.
0:53.0	And there is Che Guevara.
0:54.1	And, you know,
0:54.8	most of these biographies just sort of say something like, you know, Che was in these positions.
1:00.2	He was president of the National Bank, head of the Department of Industrialization, and then
1:04.8	Minister of Industries. And they just said, you know, his light was seen in his office at 4 in the
1:09.6	morning. So I was like, well, what was he doing in his office at 4 in the morning?
1:14.3	And that's how my own investigation began.
1:18.0	You're listening to Upstream.
1:20.2	Upstream.
1:21.2	Upstream.
1:22.1	Upstream.
1:23.0	A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought
1:28.3	you knew about the world around you.
1:30.8	I'm Della Duncan.
1:32.2	And I'm Robert Raymond.
1:34.0	Sadly, the transition from capitalism to socialism is a process that has not been
	...

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