Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
A stamp for Che? Guevara ignored economics and human nature
A stamp for Che? Guevara ignored economics and human nature
Apr 4, 2025 10:25 PM

At a minimum, one may see the West’s disconnect from economics reflected in Che Guevara’s immortalized visage, which adorns everything from college dorm rooms to a new stamp issued by the Republic of Ireland. (You can see a picture of the honor here.) The most familiar image of Guevara, who was born in Argentina to a father of part-Irish ancestry, entered the public canon through the hand of Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick. The Irish post office chose to fete Guevara, it said, because he represents the “quintessential left-wing revolutionary.”

What has not penetrated the West are the revolutionary’s crimes, from sham trials and executions to his pervasive racism (although Irish senator Neale Richmond did protest that Guevara is “a barbaric interrogator, jailer and executioner of hundreds of supposed ‘class enemies’”). Among them is his economic record during his years in Cuban government, before he made the fateful decision to spread the revolution in Bolivia.

Ed West reviews some of this record in a new essay forReligion & Liberty Transatlantic:

Aside from his armed struggle, this bourgeois Argentine brought ruin upon ordinary Cubans, implementing economic policies that had already proved destructive in other countries and installing a dreadfully oppressive regime. …

As Cuba’s Finance Minister and President of the National Bank, Che was in a position to implement his own socialist economic program. Guevara thought capitalist self-interest was evil, but his plan to use “moral incentives” to encourage workers led to widespread absenteeism and a fall in productivity. He expressed no interest in economics, other than the Marxism he believed to be scientific but which was, paradoxically, a faith. One mented that “’in a sense he was, like some early saint, taking refuge in the desert. Only there could the purity of the faith be safeguarded from the unregenerate revisionism of human nature.”

Guevara spearheaded an effort to diversify the Cuban economy from petitive advantage, sugar production, to a form of autarky that floundered badly.Che later admitted, mitted in our conception of the development of industry and agriculture … we evolved a plan based on the hope of ing self-sufficient in a whole series of consumer products and of medium industry which, however, could easily have been obtained in friendly countries.”

Guevara saw Cuba’s reliance on the sugar industry as an imperialist design. Even after Castro was forced to return to sugar as a staple, the yields did not meet expectations.

As a result of policies Che pioneered and Castro modified, Cubans saw much of Latin America surpass their living standards. “In 1959, when Castro took power, GDP per capita for Cuba was some $2,067 a year,” writes Tim Worstall in Forbes. “By 1999, 40 years later, Cuba had advanced hardly at all, to $2,307.”

This is to say nothing of the far worse forms of state repression. Thirty years ago, R.J. Rummel calculated the number of Cubans executed by Castro at 35,000 to 141,000. “Even today,” West writes at forReligion & Liberty Transatlantic, “Freedom House still rates Cuba’s political rights and civil liberties among the worst on earth.”

A mystic who placed his faith in a false religion, Guevara believed Cuba would imbue human nature with a munist consciousness,” creating a new world where “what we call ‘material disincentives’ will be unnecessary, [and] that every worker will feel the urgent need to support the revolution and will thus experience work as a pleasure.” No one has yet succeeded in this task, and the human beings subjected to Marxism’s grip experienced more severe “disincentives.”

Marxism’s primary problem is not economics but anthropology. “If we then inquire as to the source of this mistaken concept of the nature of the person … we must reply that its first cause is atheism,” wrote Pope John Paul II in Centesimus Annus. “Not only is it wrong from the ethical point of view to disregard human nature, which is made for freedom, but in practice it is impossible to do so. Where society is so organized as to reduce arbitrarily or even suppress the sphere in which freedom is legitimately exercised, the result is that the life of society es progressively disorganized and goes into decline.”

Yet Che continues his march as a modern idol. West writes, “Che sells because he is, more than anything, a rebel figure, but he is also a pseudo-religious one for a secular age, a fake saint.” His essay is a warning that societies losing their grounding in the Western patrimony, and inclining toward atheism, often lionize the authors of societal decline before following their downward-sloping footsteps.

You can read Ed West’s full essay here.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Business Entrepreneur Focuses on Catholic Education
Frank Hanna III, CEO of Hanna Capital, LLC, has made Catholic education a special focus. In an interview with the National Catholic Register, Hanna spoke of the challenges, changes and reasons to champion religious education: The more I looked into the issues of society, the more I became convinced that a lot of our societal failings happen much sooner; so much of the foundation of our failure was happening in our educational system. And that’s what actually got me thinking...
Does the Generosity of Black Americans Explain the Racial Wealth Gap?
One of the most astounding economic statistics is the wealth gap between black and white Americans. According to a Pew Research Center analysis of government data from 2009, the total wealth (assets minus debts) of the typical black household was $5,677 while the typical white household had $113,149. Why is the median wealth of white households 20 times that of black households? Plummeting house values were the principal cause, says Pew Research. Among white homeowners, the decline was from $115,364...
Samuel Gregg: The RJ Moeller Show and ‘Becoming Europe’
Acton’s Director of Research and author ing Europe, Samuel Gregg, was featured yesterday on The RJ Moeller Show. Gregg talked about America’s drift towards “social democracy” and other economic themes in his new book; Moeller gives more detail at this post at Values & Capitalism. Click on the audio link below to hear the show. [audio: ...
Bums, Anarchy, and Homicidal Fictions
“I’ll just walk the earth.” It may not be very pious (although there is a very memorable apocryphal quote from Ezekiel 25:17), but Pulp Fiction is perhaps my favorite movie. There’s a scene where Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson), two hit men, are in a diner discussing their future. Jules contends that he and Vincent have just experienced a miracle, and he plans to change his life accordingly. After finishing their current job, Jules says, “I’ll just...
Canons and Guns: An Eastern Orthodox Response to a HuffPo Writer
Several of my friends on Facebook pages posted a link to David Dunn’s Huffington Post essay on gun control (An Eastern Orthodox Case for Banning Assault Weapons). As Dylan Pahman posted earlier today, Dunn, an Eastern Orthodox Christian, is to mended for bringing the tradition of the Orthodox Church into conversation with contemporary issues such as gun control. As a technical matter, to say nothing for the credibility of his argument, it would be helpful if he understood the weapons...
Crisis and Constitution: Hitler’s Rise to Power
In March 1933, through various political maneuvers, Adolf Hitler successfully suppressed Communist, Socialist, and Catholic opposition to a proposed “Enabling Act,” which allowed him to introduce legislation without first going through parliament, thus by-passing constitutional review. The act would give the German executive branch unprecedented power. “Hitler’s rise to power is a sobering story of how a crisis and calls for quick solutions can tempt citizens and leaders to subvert the rule of law and ignore a country’s constitutional safeguards,”...
Dunn, Oikonomia, and Assault Weapons: Misappropriating a Principle?
Update (1/31/2013): David Dunn Responds to my post, Fr. Gregory’s post, and others: here. Original post: David J. Dunn yesterday wrote an interesting piece arguing for a ban on assault weapons from an Orthodox Christian perspective (here). First of all, I am happy to see any timely Orthodox engagement with contemporary social issues and applaud the effort. Furthermore, I respect his humility, as his bio statement reads: “his views reflect the diversity of Orthodox opinion on this issue, not any...
Obama’s Most Fowl Double Standard
In the 1880s America’s most flighty fad was fowl-bedecked fashion. “Trendy bonnets were piled high with feathers, birds, fruit, flowers, furs, even mice and small reptiles,” writes Jennifer Price, “Birds were by far the most popular accessory: Women sported egret plumes, owl heads, sparrow wings, and whole hummingbirds; a single hat could feature all that, plus four or five warblers.” The result was the killing of millions of birds, including many exotic and rare species. Reporting on the winter hat...
Subsidiarity ‘From Above’ and ‘From Below’
I have wrapped up a brief series on the principle of subsidiarity over at the blog of the journal Political Theology with a post today, “Subsidiarity ‘From Below.'” You can check out the previous post, “Subsidiarity ‘From Above,'” as well as my introductory primer on the topic as well. For those who might be interested in reading some more, you can also download some related papers: “State, Church, and the Reformational Roots of Subsidiarity” and “A Society of Mutual Aid:...
Makers, Takers, and Representation without Taxation
The American minister Jonathan Mayhew (October 8, 1720 – July 9, 1766) is credited with coining the phrase “No taxation without representation.”My review of Nicholas Eberstadt’s A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic appears in the current issue of The City(currently available in print). Eberstadt makes some important points about the sustainability of our society given current trends in our national polity. The most salient feature, contends Eberstadt, is that “the United States is at the verge of a symbolic...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved