Great Debate (Cuba)
쿠바 대논쟁
A public debate over socialist economic policy in Cuba from 1962 to 1965. After the failure of the Four-Year Plan for rapid industrialization, Fidel Castro invited Marxist economists from around the world to debate Cuba's path to socialism. Che Guevara argued that moral incentives and a centralized budget-finance system could bypass the capitalist stage by perfecting 'subjective conditions'; Carlos Rafael Rodríguez of the Popular Socialist Party advocated a Soviet-style self-financing system with material incentives and gradual transition. Charles Bettelheim opposed Guevara's line in favor of decentralized market elements, while Ernest Mandel sided with Guevara. Castro adopted a compromise: moral incentives over material ones, but industrialization was abandoned for a focus on sugar, leading to the 1968 Revolutionary Offensive and the failed 1970 ten-million-ton zafra campaign.
In depth
A debate in revolutionary Cuba over accounting, finance and incentives in a socialist economy. It addressed the law of value, enterprise self-financing, budgetary investment and the relationship between material and moral incentives.
As industry minister, Che Guevara defended a Budgetary Finance System integrating state enterprises into a common production structure. He feared that enterprise profitability could undermine socialist cooperation, without rejecting cost accounting, technology or productivity improvements.
Participants included Alberto Mora, Charles Bettelheim and Ernest Mandel. The dispute concerned combinations of enterprise autonomy, social investment and work incentives during transition, rather than a simple choice between planning and markets.
Related people
Related historical events
Sources
- Wikipedia (EN) overview of the Great Debate, its two main positions (Guevara vs. Rodríguez), and aftermath
- es.wikipedia.org Spanish Wikipedia article with details on the debate's origins, participants, and the Revolutionary Offensive
- cadtm.org Ernest Mandel's role in the debate and the positions of Guevara, Bettelheim, and Mora
- Marxists Internet Archive
- Marxists Internet Archive
- etheses.lse.ac.uk