Carlos Rafael Rodríguez

Carlos Rafael Rodríguez Rodríguez
Cuba state institutions Marxism–Leninism Cuba 1913–1997 ○ Natural causes

Cuban communist economist from the old Popular Socialist Party who headed INRA and defended Soviet-style economic calculation

Born in Cienfuegos, he became the city's mayor at twenty in 1933, joined the Communist Party in 1936 and edited its paper Hoy. He was a minister without portfolio under Batista in 1944. In July 1958 he joined the 26th of July Movement in the Sierra Maestra, the first such gesture of support by the Communist Party for the rebels. After the revolution he headed the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA) from 1962 to 1965, defending Soviet-style economic calculation against Guevara's budgetary finance system. He sat on the Politburo of the Communist Party of Cuba from 1965 and was vice-president of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers from 1976.

Also known as: Carlos Rafael Rodriguez

Activities and affiliations

1962–1965: INRA and economic calculation

In 1962 Rodríguez became president of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA) and held the post until 1965. INRA had been set up on 17 May 1959 to carry out the agrarian reform and ran the state farms and cooperatives of the countryside. The foreign press sometimes called him Cuba's "economic czar".

While Guevara, at the Ministry of Industries, pressed the budgetary finance system that ran all industry from the budget, Rodríguez defended through INRA the economic calculation system used by the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc. Its enterprise-level cost accounting and material incentives matched the theoretical position of the foreign trade minister Alberto Mora and of the French economist Charles Bettelheim.

In 1987 he granted that Che's system had been more progressive and egalitarian, but held that economic calculation had suited Cuban conditions better.