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Orlando Borrego
Orlando Borrego was born in 1936 to a politicised peasant family in Oriente Province - today Holguin Province. His political formation came from his family’s identification with the Ortodoxo Party, a progressive, anti-corruption party led by Eduardo Chibas which split from the Authentico Party in 1947 in protest at their betrayal of the values of the Revolution of 1933. Autenticos had been in power since the elections of 1944(1). In March 1952, weeks before the general election which the Ortodoxos were expected to win on a populist programme of honest government, Batista carried out his coup d’etat with support from the US administration. Fidel Castro, a leading member of the Ortodoxos, had been set to win the election as representative for a poor area in Havana.
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| Borrego with RATB comrades at Hadrians wall in Scotland |
At the time of the coup, Orlando Borrego was a secondary school student in Holguin. The students rebelled against the dictatorship. He joined the 26th July Movement (M26J – initially just known as the Movement) very early on before Fidel and his compañeros attacked the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba on 26th July 1953 – giving the Movement its name. When Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s Rebel Army column arrived in the Escambray Mountains in central Cuba in October 1958, Borrego joined them, becoming a first lieutenant by the triumph of the Revolution when the column took over in La Cabana military fortress in Havana.
At La Cabana, as well as education and training for the mostly illiterate Rebel Army soldiers, Che set up artisan industries. He wanted the column to be as self-sufficient as possible to avoid living off the local population.
In late 1959, Che was named head of the Department of Industrialisation, which was set up within the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA) – a new institution formed with the first Agrarian Reform Law of May 1959, set up as the principle vehicle for pushing through revolutionary change in the process of dismantling old state institutions. While members of the liberal bourgeoisie officially ran the government, INRA was under control of the revolutionaries, backed by the armed force of the Rebel Army of workers and peasants, ensuring the radicalisation of the revolutionary process.
As director of the Department of Industrialisation, Che took with him only three individuals from La Cabana: Borrego, as vice-director, ex-Batista army sergeant José Manresa, who had worked as a clerk in La Cabana, as secretary, and his revolutionary wife Aleida March, as his personal assistant. The Department officially began work in October 1959, but in November 1959, Che moved again as he was named President of the National Bank. Borrego was left to run the Department of Industrialisation, which grew in importance as businesses, factories and plants were abandoned, appropriated and nationalised by the revolutionary government. Borrego had midnight meetings with Che in the bank offices to discuss all progress and measures taken.
In February 1961 the new Ministry of Industries (MININD) was inaugurated with Che as Minister and Borrego as Vice-Minister of Basic Industries. As Che’s responsibilities expanded, along with the ministry, Borrego was named First Vice Minister, dealing with most of the daily management of the Industry.
Borrego was part of Che’s inner circle of Vice-Ministers and advisors in MININD. He was one of a small team involved in weekly Capital reading seminars with Che, taught by a professor sent from Moscow who was pushed to the limits by analytical debates with Che. Borrego was central to the development of the Budgetary Finance System (BFS), an alternative economic management system for transition to socialism in the concrete conditions of 1960s Cuba. This system set out to prove that it was possible to build socialist consciousness simultaneously with the productive forces in the initial stages of transition to socialism.
In June 1964, the Consolidated Enterprise of Sugar, a huge apparatus within MININD, was split off to form the new Ministry of Sugar (MINAZ). Borrego became Cuba’s first Minister of Sugar, in a country dominated by the sugar industry. He took the BFS to MINAZ, working closely with Che to improve the system. MINAZ carried out innovative projects at a national level to assess the correlation between consciousness and production. In April 1965, Che left Cuba to fight in the Congo, leaving behind three volumes of Marx’s Capital for Borrego with a note that said:
“Borrego, this is the source, here we learnt everything together, in fits and starts, searching what is still barely intuition. Today I am off to carry out my duty and my desire and I hope that you will complete your duty, against your desire. This is evidence of my friendship which was rarely expressed in words. Thank you for your firmness and your loyalty. Let nothing separate you from the course. A hug, Che.’
The campaign in the Congo failed and Che went underground in Tanzania and Prague. During this time he wrote his critical notes of the Soviet Manual of Political Economy. His intention was to write an alternative system for transition to socialism, which would be appropriate to Cuban and, perhaps, Latin American conditions. Che sent his notes with Aleida March, who visited him in Prague, back to Borrego to guard in Cuba. In 1966, Borrego caught up with Che who had entered Cuba in secret and was preparing his group of guerrillas for the campaign in Bolivia. During this period of preparation, Borrego visited Che to discuss socialist political economy, the critique of the USSR Manual and the BFS. He also got Che’s agreement for a seven volume compilation of his work. Only 200 copies of this compilation were printed and distributed to some members of the central committee and other important revolutionaries. Much of the material has still not been published for public consumption or translated into English, particularly volume six which has transcripts of Guevara’s sparkling comments, analyses and observations made in the bi-monthly meetings of MININD, an internal meeting attended by the ministry’s directors and advisers. Borrego has contributed more than anyone else to conserving and upholding Che’s important conceptions about economic management for socialist transition.
Borrego left as Minister of Sugar in 1968, getting a university degree in economics in the Habana University in 1973. He was an advisor to the Executive Committee of the Council of Ministers of the Cuban state 1973-1980, when he also got a doctorate in economic sciences in the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, in the USSR’s Academy of Sciences (1980). Today he is advisor for the Minister of Transport. Since 2004, he has been invited to Venezuela on several occasions to lecture economists, revolutionaries and policy makers about Che’s economic management system, the BFS. He gave a presentation to the Venezuelan National Assembly and has appeared twice on ’Alo Presidente with Hugo Chavez who flagged Borrego’s book Che: El Camino del Fuego, 2001 (Che: The Path of Fire) about Che’s work as a member of the Cuban government and his ideas about socialist transition. Borrego’s book has since been published and widely circulated in Venezuela and his work is arguably a principle source of information which led Chavez to declare:
‘Che was more than just a martyr, more than just a heroic guerrilla fighter, he was also a Minister in the Cuban government and developed many ideas on how to build the new socialist society...we must study and learn from his thoughts.’ (Hugo Chávez Frías, 1st May 2005)
Since then, Borrego has written a book of anecdotes which captures the rich human experience of working with Che and another book analysing the seven different economic management systems adopted in Cuba since 1959, Rumbo al Socialismo, 2006 (Heading to Socialism). Borrego’s importance and contribution is not just in being a comrade and companion working under the leadership of two great revolutionary communists: Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. Borrego grew in theory and practice along with both Che and the Cuban Revolution. His intimacy with, and insight into, the problems, contradictions and possible solutions in socialist construction, means he has a great deal to offer and debate. He remains sternly principled yet anti-dogmatic in upholding Guevara’s approach to revolutionary socialism.
‘We know that Che was much more than a heroic guerrilla. In the last few years, I have discovered Che the thinker, the reflector, Che the critical thinker, Che the transformer of the economic system, Che of the stage of industrialisation in Cuba, Che and his reflections in Africa, Che and his criticisms of the Soviet model and the Soviet handbook, all of which [Orlando] Borrego has been elaborating upon with an expertise and loyalty to the thought of Che… So yes, I think that Che is one of the great men of our history, from every point of view. That’s why Fidel was not exaggerating in that speech when he said “if anyone wants their children to be revolutionary, humanist, they will be like Che”.’
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, October 2007, interview in Cuba during commemorations of the 40 anniversary of Che's execution in Bolivia.
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| Borrego and Jesús outside the Miners Hall in Durham |
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Jesús Pastor García Brigos
Jesús had just turned seven at the triumph of the Revolution in January 1959. He graduated with a degree in physics at the University of Havana in 1973, before carrying out research into magnetism, and marine and atmospheric physics between 1974 and 1980. He studied philosophical sciences at the Academy of Sciences in the USSR, being awarded a doctorate in 1986.
Since 1982 he had been an investigator at the Institute of Philosophy, part of the Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment. In 1986, Cuba initiated a period known as Rectification, a push to improve and deepen Cuban socialist development, pulling back from the Soviet model and returning to the essence of Che Guevara's concepts of socialist construction. Jesús was involved in studies carried out in this period to examine the state of Cuban society and development, focussing on dialectical relationship between the economy, the political sphere; the Cuban state and the development of democracy, government and popular participation. He has participated in and led several national studies by Cuban experts examining the complex interrelationships between socialism, political economy, democracy and governance. In 2005 he joined a group of researchers convened by the Cuban Communist Party to study the causes and characteristics of corruption in Cuba.
Jesús gives postgraduate courses to both Cubans and foreigners on the development of Cuban society. He is a postgraduate professor at the Cuban University of Computer Sciences. He has travelled abroad to Europe and Latin America giving courses and conferences on economics and politics in socialist development in general, and analysing the Cuban experience in particular. He cooperates closely with the revolutionary government, academics and policy-makers in Venezuela. In July 2007 he gave a course at the Venezuelan School of Planning. Back in Cuba, in September 2007 he gave a course to prepare a group of young Cubans cadre in the leadership of the Revolution.
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| Jesús at the Liverpool Universtiy Students Union |
Jesús has contributed to organising many events and conferences in Cuba. He is the Academic Coordinator of the international conference on the work of Karl Marx and the challenges of the 21st century hosted in Havana at two year intervals. His is the author of five books and dozens of articles about the Cuban economy, the state and interaction between these and the analysis of Marx, Engels and Lenin on capitalism, revolution and leadership in transition to socialism. His work has been published in the former Soviet Union, Chile, France, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, the United States and Cuba. Jesús is director of the Spanish language website Cuba Siglo XXI (Cuba 21st century). (www.nodo50.org/cubasigloXXI/)
As well as his theoretical contribution to the Cuban Revolution, Jesús is also a political activist and representative in Cuba's grass roots democratic system. At 18 years old he became an activist in the Union of Young Communists, where he had diverse responsibilities for 13 years, as well as being a trade union leader. In the 1980s he was elected by his neighbours to represent them for six consecutive years as the President of his local Committee for the Defence of the Revolution. After that, he was elected as his areas delegate to the Municipal (borough) Assembly of People's Power from 1986 to 2000, and re-elected to this position both in 2005 and recently in October 2007. Between 1989 and 1998 he has also represented his municipality on the Provincial Assembly for the City of Havana and served as the President of the People's Council in his area. His political representation has always been accompanied by participation on permanent study commissions. Like Orlando Borrego, Jesús' work is testimony to the importance of praxis, the test of theory in practice and theoretical refinement on the basis of practical experience, which has formed an essential tenet of the experience of Cuba's socialist revolution.
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| Yoselin and Jesús at the Liverpool Universtiy Students Union |
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Yoselin Rufin
Yoselín Rufín Díaz was born in 1985 and began at a teacher training university in Matanzas Province in 2000. From the first year she joined the movement of student assistants and became the general secretary of the Union of Young Communists (UJC) in the Humanities Department.
When Cuba launched a campaign to reduce class sizes to a 20 student maximum, Yoselín answered the call for emergency teachers and began practical work as an Integrated General Teacher whilst studying in her second year at one of the new micro-universities set up at municipal (borough) level, in Cardenas municipality.
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| Yoselin at the Glasgow University |
Yoselín was elected to be president of the municipal Federation of University Students (FEU) and remains president today. She has been awarded as a distinguished student and graduated with a Gold Diploma.
Since 2004, Yoselín has been a member of FEU's National Council and in 2006 she was on the national organising commission for the 7th FEU Congress. She has continued as a member of the UJC and in 2007 became one of the youngest members of the Cuban Communist Party with just 22 years of age. She is a member of the government's Permanent Commissions for Candidacy, Social Prevention, Drugs and Recreation.
Yoselín was selected as a pre-candidate delegate to the National Assembly of People's Power in the current elections.
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