Boti, the Cuban economist and founder of CEPAL

July 9 will mark 23 years since the death of Regino Boti León, the economist from the province of Guantánamo who on January 20, 1959 was appointed "minister in charge of the National Council of Economy" in the first cabinet of the Revolutionary Government of Cuba.

That merit would be enough to justify these lines, but the son of the famous poet of the same name has other feathers in his cap, as he was one of the founders of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), the first regional forum of economists free from the tutelage of the United States.

Boti studied Law at the University of Havana to please his father, who in return paid for the boy’s master's degree at Harvard, where he enrolled first in Law and then in Economy, becoming a pupil of a faculty that included Professor Wassily Leontief, author of the theory of intersectoral relations known as the Input-Output Table, and the Austrian Joseph Schumpeter, Nobel Prize in Economics 1973.

He was only 20 years old when he was in the same Harvard class as James Tobin and Robert Solow. Tobin advised U.S. President John F. Kennedy between 1961 and 1962 and was the creator of the Financial Transaction Tax, whereas Solow was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Boti, who graduated with a master's degree in Economics and brilliant qualifications, rejected an offer from the International Monetary Fund and accepted instead that of the Argentine Raúl Prébisch, who was involved in the founding of ECLAC.

In 1956, Boti León returned to his homeland to organize the first Cuban school of economics at the University of Oriente, which he directed for only 12 months before the tyrant Fulgencio Batista closed down all high schools and universities.

His trip to Mexico and a meeting with Fidel to convey the support of a group of university professors to the future expeditionary force of the yacht Granma forced him to go into exile, and ECLAC assigned him another important task in Chile.

Back in Cuba in the early 1959, Boti was appointed Minister of Economy and, in September 1960, he led the Cuban delegation to the 3rd Conference of the 21 (economic forum of the OAS) in Bogota, Colombia, where the aggressive stance of the U.S. and the servile attitude of Latin American diplomats clashed with the angry response of the Cubans, “a group of upright men reluctant to condone the falsification".

In the second session, Regino Boti stated Cuba’s position: “The U.S. plans for the social development program is an invented instrument to dash the hopes raised by the Cuban Revolution among the peoples of Latin America,” were his words, which one of the members of the Colombian delegation described as “some of the most honest I have ever heard”.

Then, in statements to the press, Boti remarked that the Agrarian Reform in Latin America, "as postulated in the prefabricated act of Bogota, will only be enjoyed by our great-great-grandchildren".

This anecdote reveals the sound progressive nature of this Cuban who served the Revolution for 40 years.

In his eulogy, then-member of the Political Bureau and Minister of Culture and today President of Casa de las Americas, Abel Prieto Jimenez, said: "Cuba has lost Regino Boti Leon, a brilliant and honest man who was beloved by all those who knew him".