Oh my, those Economic Analysts are at it Again: The Wall Street Journal on the Legacy of Che Guevara

As a colleague recently remarked, you cannot tell the straight press from The Onion anymore.

There are many ways that the corporate media measures the impact of Ernesto Guevara's life and legacy. The treatment offered below is truly unique.

These three Wall Street Journal writers have actually come up with an estimate - based on exactly what methodology they do not say - of how much Che's legacy has cost the regional Latin American economy. According to them, $1.3 trillion per year.

It's bad enough that economics writers do not even know that Che introduced cost accounting into Cuban economic planning during the 1960s. That point alone might give cause to pause the stream of ready made banter suggesting that Che was a utopian out of touch with the realities of his times.

Nor does anyone, for that matter, take into consideration that the man was from Argentina and that this and other factors drew him away from Cuba. The prevailing imagery remains that he was somehow forced to leave the island.

At the very least, their speculations are contrived to lead them to the obvious conclusion that Che has emerged over the years as something larger than life. Yes, his legacy is there.

I for one am glad that folks like these do not "get" another, more significant point. Social and political history counts for something much greater than the power of an individual in the calculus of political will being exhibited by the social movements and electorates of Latin America.

May they continue to consult their crystal balls, and be baffled by so many things hidden in plain sight.

-- El Molestoso

Forty Years Later, Che's Shadow Still Hangs Over Latin America
Wall Street Journal
10/11/07

Ernesto "Che" Guevara was executed 40 years ago on Oct. 9 in Bolivia. The Argentine doctor was an ideologue of Third World communism. He believed in armed revolution against Western exploitation and advocated North Korea as an economic example.

Che believed in the creation of a "new man" to implement socialism. In a 1965 speech, he proposed that "the socialist countries have the moral duty of liquidating their tacit complicity with the exploiting countries of the West."

That was too much even for communist Cuba. Fidel Castro sent his revolutionary collaborator to foment revolution elsewhere. The Cuban leader preferred to integrate his economy with the Soviet Union's Comecon bloc -- the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance -- rather than try out Che's dream.

During his life, Che had little direct effect outside Cuba, but his legend has done more than sell T-shirts to disaffected rich kids. Che's economically paranoid anticapitalist doctrines have considerable appeal among Latin American electorates.

Many countries in the region have elected governments with Che sympathizers -- from Chile's Salvador Allende in 1970 to Bolivia's Evo Morales and Ecuador's Rafael Correa today. The usual result has been rapid economic disaster and electoral reaction. But the possibility of Che-ist government has made property rights thoroughly uncertain, cutting into long-term growth.

Latin American productivity growth was average by world standards when Che met his end in 1967. But it has since fallen far below that of other countries. Only Brazil and Chile have had a reasonable performance, thanks largely to substantial periods of rightist military rule during which Che-ism was suppressed.

Without the legend of Che, the Latin American annual growth rate might have been one percentage point higher. If so, this revolutionary has cost the region about $1.3 trillion of annual gross domestic product. T-shirts are cheap, but Che has been an expensive icon.

--Martin Hutchinson, John Foley and Simon Nixon