In 1960, the Polish economist Michał Kalecki (1899–1970) was well settled back in Warsaw with an international reputation as one of the pioneers of the Keynesian revolution, but his faith in that revolution was shattered. This disillusionment arose in part from his own experience of McCarthyism in the supposedly neutral diplomatic corridors of the United Nations, which he had left in 1955. It arose also because he had observed the reality of capitalist full employment based on armaments and the Cold War and on the sordid US interventions in Latin America to crush the democratic aspirations of its peoples. Already in the 1930s, he had noted the links between the Nazi Party and German big business. In perhaps his most famous article, “Political Aspects of Full Employment,” published in 1943, he had pointed out how fascism was about “securing full employment by military spending.”¹ He acknowledged that military Keynesianism and fascism raised employment. But this was at the cost of wages and the economic and political rights of workers. Kalecki’s sensitivity to the material and cultural conditions of the masses led him to support revolutions seeking to improve those conditions. But it also sharpened his criticism of revolutionary leaders who failed to deliver such improvements.

This practical approach to advancing the cause of labor inspired his criticisms of socialist economic planning. Perhaps the most striking was his reaction, from firsthand experience, to the Cuban Revolution. Kalecki was obviously sympathetic to the overthrow, in 1959, of the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, the brothel-keeper for the United States, who ruled the island with little regard for democratic niceties. Revolutionaries had an opportunity to set the island on a democratic path of development guided by social welfare, absorbing the lessons (and mistakes) of socialist planning in Eastern Europe. 

But East European economists were late on the scene. Fidel Castro and his supporters did not initially advertise themselves as communists or socialists, and they turned first to democrats in Latin America and even the United States. The Cuban Revolution did indeed attract support from all over Latin America, in particular from the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), to which the new Cuban government appealed for assistance. The choice of ECLA was significant. Its leader, the Argentine Raúl Prebisch, was advocating international cooperation in Latin America to assist economic development. Some of his followers promoted a radical development strategy based on expanding industry while using high tariffs on imports to keep out foreign competition. This import substitution model was supposed to allow for the rapid growth of the domestic market along with a corresponding increase in supply from domestic producers, unconstrained by the shortage of foreign exchange that usually hinders economic expansion in developing countries. ECLA economists threw themselves into the cause of Cuban economic development with vigor. Chief among them was the economy minister, Regino Boti, who was placed in charge of the Central Planning Board (JUCEPLAN). Other ECLA economists occupied senior positions in the National Bank of Cuba (the predecessor of today’s Central Bank of Cuba) and the key ministries of foreign trade, industry, and the economy. Excited by the prospect of at last showcasing Latin American economic development without dependence on US markets or investment, the economic radicals took their inspiration and enthusiasm from the new head of the central bank, Ernesto “Che” Guevara.²