Guevarism
Encyclopedia
Guevarism is a theory of communist revolution
and a military strategy
of guerrilla warfare
associated with Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara
, one of the leading figures of the Cuban Revolution
. During the Cold War
, the United States
and Soviet Union
clashed in a series of proxy war
s, especially in the developing nations of the Third World
, including many decolonization
struggles.
" under Fidel Castro
, his Argentina
-born, cosmopolitan and Marxist-Leninist colleague Guevara parlayed his ideology
and experiences into a model for emulation (and at times, direct military intervention) around the globe. While exporting one such "focalist" revolution to Bolivia
, leading an armed vanguard party
there in October 1967, Guevara was captured and executed, becoming a martyr to both the World Communist Movement and the New Left
.
His ideology promotes exporting revolution to any country whose leader is supported by the United States and has fallen out of favor with its citizens. Guevara talks about how constant guerrilla warfare taking place in non-urban areas can overcome leaders. He introduces three points that are representative of his ideology as a whole: that the people can win with proper organization against a nation's army; that the conditions that make a revolution possible can be put in place by the popular forces; and that the popular forces always have an advantage in a non urban setting.
Guevara had a particularly keen interest in guerrilla warfare, with a dedication to foco techniques, also known as "focalism" (or "foquismo" in Spanish): vanguardism
by small armed units, frequently in place of established communist parties, initially launching attacks from rural areas to mobilize unrest into a popular front
against a sitting regime. Despite differences in approach--emphasizing guerrilla leadership and audacious raids that engender general uprising, rather than consolidating political power in military strongholds before expanding to new ones--Che Guevara took great inspiration from the Maoist notion of "protracted people's war" and sympathized with Mao Zedong
's People's Republic of China
in the Sino-Soviet split
. This controversy may partly explain his departure from Castro's pro-Soviet Cuba in the mid-1960s. Guevara also drew direct parallels with his contemporary communist comrades in the Viet Cong, exhorting a multi-front guerrilla strategy to create "two, three, many Vietnam
s."
In Guevara's final years, after leaving Cuba, he advised communist paramilitary
movements in Africa
and Latin America
, including a young Laurent Kabila, future ruler of Zaire
/DR Congo. Finally, while leading a small foco band of guerrilla cadres in Bolivia, Che Guevara was captured and killed. His death, and the short-term failure of his Guevarist tactics, may have interrupted the component guerrilla wars within the larger Cold War for a time, and even temporarily discouraged Soviet and Cuban sponsorship for foquismo.
The emerging communist movements and other fellow traveler radicalism of the time, however, either switched to urban guerrilla warfare
before the end of the 1960s, and/or soon revived the rural-based strategies of both Maoism and Guevarism, tendencies that escalated worldwide throughout the 1970s, by and large with the support from the communist states and the Soviet empire
in general and Cuba's Castro regime in particular.
Another proponent of Guevarism was the French
intellectual Régis Debray
, who could be seen as attempting to establish a coherent, unitary theoretical framework on these grounds. Debray has since broken with this.
, one of the leading tacticians of urban guerrilla warfare
in Uruguay
and Brazil
. Guillen claimed that cities are a better ground for the guerrilla than the countryside (Guillen was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War
). He criticized Guevarist movements of national liberation (like the Uruguayan Tupamaros
, one of the many groups that he helped as a military advisor) for trying to impose a dictatorship
instead of self-management.
Communist revolution
A communist revolution is a proletarian revolution inspired by the ideas of Marxism that aims to replace capitalism with communism, typically with socialism as an intermediate stage...
and a military strategy
Military strategy
Military strategy is a set of ideas implemented by military organizations to pursue desired strategic goals. Derived from the Greek strategos, strategy when it appeared in use during the 18th century, was seen in its narrow sense as the "art of the general", 'the art of arrangement' of troops...
of guerrilla warfare
Guerrilla warfare
Guerrilla warfare is a form of irregular warfare and refers to conflicts in which a small group of combatants including, but not limited to, armed civilians use military tactics, such as ambushes, sabotage, raids, the element of surprise, and extraordinary mobility to harass a larger and...
associated with Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara
Che Guevara
Ernesto "Che" Guevara , commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat and military theorist...
, one of the leading figures of the Cuban Revolution
Cuban Revolution
The Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement against the regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista between 1953 and 1959. Batista was finally ousted on 1 January 1959, and was replaced by a revolutionary government led by Castro...
. During the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
, the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
clashed in a series of proxy war
Proxy war
A proxy war or proxy warfare is a war that results when opposing powers use third parties as substitutes for fighting each other directly. While powers have sometimes used governments as proxies, violent non-state actors, mercenaries, or other third parties are more often employed...
s, especially in the developing nations of the Third World
Third World
The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either capitalism and NATO , or communism and the Soviet Union...
, including many decolonization
Decolonization
Decolonization refers to the undoing of colonialism, the unequal relation of polities whereby one people or nation establishes and maintains dependent Territory over another...
struggles.
Overview
After the 1959 triumph of the Cuban insurrection led by a militant "focoFoco
The foco theory of revolution by way of guerrilla warfare, also known as focalism , was inspired by Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, based upon his experiences surrounding the rebel army's victory in the 1959 Cuban Revolution, and formalized as such by Régis Debray.Its central principle...
" under Fidel Castro
Fidel Castro
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz is a Cuban revolutionary and politician, having held the position of Prime Minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976, and then President from 1976 to 2008. He also served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from the party's foundation in 1961 until 2011...
, his Argentina
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
-born, cosmopolitan and Marxist-Leninist colleague Guevara parlayed his ideology
Ideology
An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...
and experiences into a model for emulation (and at times, direct military intervention) around the globe. While exporting one such "focalist" revolution to Bolivia
Bolivia
Bolivia officially known as Plurinational State of Bolivia , is a landlocked country in central South America. It is the poorest country in South America...
, leading an armed vanguard party
Vanguard party
A vanguard party is a political party at the forefront of a mass action, movement, or revolution. The idea of a vanguard party has its origins in the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels...
there in October 1967, Guevara was captured and executed, becoming a martyr to both the World Communist Movement and the New Left
New Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
.
His ideology promotes exporting revolution to any country whose leader is supported by the United States and has fallen out of favor with its citizens. Guevara talks about how constant guerrilla warfare taking place in non-urban areas can overcome leaders. He introduces three points that are representative of his ideology as a whole: that the people can win with proper organization against a nation's army; that the conditions that make a revolution possible can be put in place by the popular forces; and that the popular forces always have an advantage in a non urban setting.
Guevara had a particularly keen interest in guerrilla warfare, with a dedication to foco techniques, also known as "focalism" (or "foquismo" in Spanish): vanguardism
Vanguardism
In the context of revolutionary struggle, vanguardism is a strategy whereby an organization attempts to place itself at the center of the movement, and steer it in a direction consistent with its ideology....
by small armed units, frequently in place of established communist parties, initially launching attacks from rural areas to mobilize unrest into a popular front
Popular front
A popular front is a broad coalition of different political groupings, often made up of leftists and centrists. Being very broad, they can sometimes include centrist and liberal forces as well as socialist and communist groups...
against a sitting regime. Despite differences in approach--emphasizing guerrilla leadership and audacious raids that engender general uprising, rather than consolidating political power in military strongholds before expanding to new ones--Che Guevara took great inspiration from the Maoist notion of "protracted people's war" and sympathized with Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...
's People's Republic of China
People's Republic of China
China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...
in the Sino-Soviet split
Sino-Soviet split
In political science, the term Sino–Soviet split denotes the worsening of political and ideologic relations between the People's Republic of China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics during the Cold War...
. This controversy may partly explain his departure from Castro's pro-Soviet Cuba in the mid-1960s. Guevara also drew direct parallels with his contemporary communist comrades in the Viet Cong, exhorting a multi-front guerrilla strategy to create "two, three, many Vietnam
Vietnam
Vietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...
s."
In Guevara's final years, after leaving Cuba, he advised communist paramilitary
Paramilitary
A paramilitary is a force whose function and organization are similar to those of a professional military, but which is not considered part of a state's formal armed forces....
movements in Africa
Africa
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...
and Latin America
Latin America
Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...
, including a young Laurent Kabila, future ruler of Zaire
Zaire
The Republic of Zaire was the name of the present Democratic Republic of the Congo between 27 October 1971 and 17 May 1997. The name of Zaire derives from the , itself an adaptation of the Kongo word nzere or nzadi, or "the river that swallows all rivers".-Self-proclaimed Father of the Nation:In...
/DR Congo. Finally, while leading a small foco band of guerrilla cadres in Bolivia, Che Guevara was captured and killed. His death, and the short-term failure of his Guevarist tactics, may have interrupted the component guerrilla wars within the larger Cold War for a time, and even temporarily discouraged Soviet and Cuban sponsorship for foquismo.
The emerging communist movements and other fellow traveler radicalism of the time, however, either switched to urban guerrilla warfare
Urban guerrilla warfare
Urban guerrilla redirects here. For the Hawkwind song, see Urban Guerrilla.Urban guerrilla refers to someone who fights a government using unconventional warfare in an urban environment...
before the end of the 1960s, and/or soon revived the rural-based strategies of both Maoism and Guevarism, tendencies that escalated worldwide throughout the 1970s, by and large with the support from the communist states and the Soviet empire
Soviet Empire
During the Cold War, the informal term "Soviet Empire" referred to the Soviet Union's influence over a number of smaller nations who were nominally independent but subject to direct military force if they tried to leave the Soviet system; see Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and Prague Spring.Though...
in general and Cuba's Castro regime in particular.
Another proponent of Guevarism was the French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
intellectual Régis Debray
Régis Debray
Jules Régis Debray is a French intellectual, journalist, government official and professor. He is known for his theorization of mediology, a critical theory of the long-term transmission of cultural meaning in human society; and for having fought in 1967 with Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara in...
, who could be seen as attempting to establish a coherent, unitary theoretical framework on these grounds. Debray has since broken with this.
Criticism
It was criticized from a revolutionary anarchist perspective by Abraham GuillénAbraham Guillén
Abraham Guillen , was author, economist, educator. He was a veteran of Spanish Civil War, influenced by anarchism and Marxism. One of the most prolific revolutionary writers in Latin America during the 1960s and intellectual mentor of the Uruguay's revolutionary Movement of National Liberation...
, one of the leading tacticians of urban guerrilla warfare
Urban guerrilla warfare
Urban guerrilla redirects here. For the Hawkwind song, see Urban Guerrilla.Urban guerrilla refers to someone who fights a government using unconventional warfare in an urban environment...
in Uruguay
Uruguay
Uruguay ,officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay,sometimes the Eastern Republic of Uruguay; ) is a country in the southeastern part of South America. It is home to some 3.5 million people, of whom 1.8 million live in the capital Montevideo and its metropolitan area...
and Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
. Guillen claimed that cities are a better ground for the guerrilla than the countryside (Guillen was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
). He criticized Guevarist movements of national liberation (like the Uruguayan Tupamaros
Tupamaros
Tupamaros, also known as the MLN-T , was an urban guerrilla organization in Uruguay in the 1960s and 1970s. The MLN-T is inextricably linked to its most important leader, Raúl Sendic, and his brand of social politics...
, one of the many groups that he helped as a military advisor) for trying to impose a dictatorship
Dictatorship
A dictatorship is defined as an autocratic form of government in which the government is ruled by an individual, the dictator. It has three possible meanings:...
instead of self-management.
See also
- Che GuevaraChe GuevaraErnesto "Che" Guevara , commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat and military theorist...
- Frantz FanonFrantz FanonFrantz Fanon was a Martiniquo-Algerian psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary and writer whose work is influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory and Marxism...
- Carlos MarighellaCarlos MarighellaCarlos Marighella , was a Brazilian Marxist revolutionary and writer.Marighella's most famous contribution to guerrilla literature was the Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, consisting of advice on how to disrupt and overthrow an authoritarian regime aiming a revolution. He also wrote For the...
- Cold WarCold WarThe Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
- Cuban RevolutionCuban RevolutionThe Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement against the regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista between 1953 and 1959. Batista was finally ousted on 1 January 1959, and was replaced by a revolutionary government led by Castro...
- FocoFocoThe foco theory of revolution by way of guerrilla warfare, also known as focalism , was inspired by Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, based upon his experiences surrounding the rebel army's victory in the 1959 Cuban Revolution, and formalized as such by Régis Debray.Its central principle...
- Fidel CastroFidel CastroFidel Alejandro Castro Ruz is a Cuban revolutionary and politician, having held the position of Prime Minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976, and then President from 1976 to 2008. He also served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from the party's foundation in 1961 until 2011...
- Guerrilla warfareGuerrilla warfareGuerrilla warfare is a form of irregular warfare and refers to conflicts in which a small group of combatants including, but not limited to, armed civilians use military tactics, such as ambushes, sabotage, raids, the element of surprise, and extraordinary mobility to harass a larger and...
- Protracted people's war
- Urban guerrilla warfareUrban guerrilla warfareUrban guerrilla redirects here. For the Hawkwind song, see Urban Guerrilla.Urban guerrilla refers to someone who fights a government using unconventional warfare in an urban environment...
- Wars of national liberationWars of national liberationIn Marxist terminology, wars of national liberation or national liberation revolutions are conflicts fought by oppressed nationalities against imperial powers to establish separate sovereign states for the subjugated nationality. From a Western point of view, these same wars are called insurgencies...