Dude, I love this one interview where the interviewer say something like:
Russia is pouring a great deal of money to the Cuban economy each day. Now what would happen to the economy of the island if that aid suddenly stop?
And Che Guevara just take a puff of his cigar, sighs like if he were really tired of people calling the USSR Russia. Consequently, he responds using the right term by saying this:
These statements of daily quantities do indeed correspond to the Northamerican way of thinking, and the concept of investment may respond somewhat to the idea that Northamericans have of what aid is. Northamerican aid to the South American states is then reverted to those states. In our case there has been, what can be called; aid. The forgiveness of certain commercial debts and loans of an absolutely commercial type. The rest is natural trade between the two countries. Cuba has ceased to have the United States as its first import and export customer and is now the Soviet Union. If when you ask what would happen if Soviet aid ceased, you mean the exchange as a whole, then I can answer that the life of the country would be paralyzed because, for example, oil all comes from the Soviet Union. There are almost 4 million tons, but that is not aid, that is commercial exchange in terms of absolute equality and we pay for it with our sugar and other products. The aid has had to be carried out in these years of bad harvests in a super habit, of an excess of exports from the Soviet Union with respect to our imports, these years with the increase in the price of sugar, it has decreased a lot. Currently our terms of trade are relatively equal, although the Soviet Union always gives us a trade imbalance, and then there is the aid in investments that are very large and that if they ceased, our industrial development would stop. That is why it must be made clear that the term aid is not the most correct for our relations with the Soviet Union. That what we maintain is a relationship of equality between socialist countries, carrying out an exchange of mutual benefit.
I really like how he correct the interviewer in a subtle way. It has always bothered me that people use the term Russia for the Soviet Union, since the USSR, as its name says, is the Union of many Soviet socialist republics, not just Russia.
I also find it very shocking what Che Guevara says in this answer is basically what happened to Cuba after the fall of the Soviet Union. It's impressive how many people have such a misconception of why Cuba is the way it is today. As el Che says here, when this exchange ceased, the industrial development of the country stopped since they didn't had any other country that supported them commercially as much as the Soviet Union did after the Embargo made by the United States since 1958 and that still happen today.
Cuba is not like this because of communism, it is like this because of the United States.
