From "material encouragement" to "food blackmail".

Abstract

Since the 1960s, the relevance of labor stimulus has been discussed in Cuba. At the beginning, there was a bet on the validity, within Marxism, of accounting autonomy, self-financing and the system of material stimuli. A staunch critic of this trend was Ernesto Guevara, who strongly discouraged the use of methods he considered inherited from the past. Instead, Guevara promoted moral encouragement, the mere satisfaction of fulfilled duty before the construction of Socialism. The ethical value of encouragement was circumscribed in the rigorous and trench atmosphere, which called for exemplarity in production, for the sake of the "decisive effort".