Four Year Plan (Cuba)

1 To The People Of Cuba, published in August 8, 1955, the manifesto urged for industrialization, demanding: Immediate industrialization of the country by means of a vast plan made and promoted by the state, which will have to decisively mobilize all the human and economic resources of the nation in the supreme effort to free the country from the moral and material prostration in which it finds itself.

Within a month after the success of the revolution, on 27 January 1959, Guevara made one of his most significant speeches where he talked about "the social ideas of the rebel army".

[12] Guevara also made comments on crop diversification, stating: When we plan out the agrarian reform and observe the new revolutionary laws to complement it and make it viable and immediate, we are aiming at social justice.

This means the redistribution of land and also the creation of a vast internal market and crop diversification, two cardinal objectives of the revolutionary government that are inseparable and that cannot be postponed since they involve the people's interest.

[13]A few months later, 17 May 1959, the agrarian reform law, crafted by Guevara, went into effect, limiting the size of all farms to 1,000 acres (400 ha).

[15] A few months after, rebel leader Fidel Castro began an 11-day visit to the United States, starting on April 15, 1959, at the invitation of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

[17] A month later, 17 May 1959, the agrarian reform law, crafted by Guevara, went into effect, limiting the size of all farms to 1,000 acres (400 ha).

In August the United States announced a total economic embargo on Cuba and threatened other Latin American and European nations with reprisals if they did not do the same.

[23] On 13 October 1960, the US government prohibited the majority of exports to Cuba – the exceptions being medicines and certain foodstuffs – marking the start of an economic embargo.

[25] In 1961, Guevara proposed a four year plan for rapid industrialization that would create a 15% annual growth rate, and a tenfold increase in the production of fruits.

Regino Boti, the head of JUCEPLAN, announced in August 1961, that the country would soon have a 10% rate of economic growth, and the highest living standard in Latin America in 10 years.

[31] Historian Jorge I. Domínguez claims that throughout 1960 to 1962, there was no discussion within the Cuban government about altering the economic plan for accelerated industrialization.

[33] Luis Fernando Ayerbe has claimed that the crisis was caused by a combination of falling sugar profits and expanding social services.

[32] Samuel Farber has added that the crisis was caused by the earlier flight of educated professionals, a general lack of raw materials causing slow downs in factories, political loyalists being promoted as factory managers, and a highly centralized economy with planners who were disconnected and ignorant of the general Cuban economy.

[35] On August 29, 1962, the Labor Ministry of Cuba drafted Resolution 5798 which gave wage cuts to highly absent and tardy workers.

One proposition proposed by Che Guevara was that Cuba could bypass any capitalist then "socialist" transition period and immediately become an industrialized "communist" society if "subjective conditions" like public consciousness and vanguard action are perfected.

[34] As Cuban economic planning began to return to sugar production in 1963, all males ages 18 to 40 were conscripted into the military by 1963, and used as forced labor.

[44] After the failure of the industrialization plan, Guevara published an article in 1964, titled The Cuban Economy: Its Past, and Its Present Importance, which analyzed Cuba's economic decline.

Specifically on the move away from sugar, Guevara states: The entire economic history of Cuba had demonstrated that no other agricultural activity would give such returns as those yielded by the cultivation of the sugarcane.

At the outset of the Revolution many of us were not aware of this basic economic fact, because a fetishistic idea connected sugar with our dependence on imperialism and with the misery in the rural areas, without analysing the real causes: the relation to the uneven trade balance.

In his essay published that year, Socialism and the New Man in Cuba, Guevara continued to advocate for an economy based on a moral enthusiasm for self-sacrifice.

When Guevara returned to Cuba from world travel in March 1964, he was greeted at the Rancho Boyeros airport by Fidel Castro, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado, and his wife.