Che Guevara
AKA: Ernesto Guevara · Ernesto "Che" Guevara · Guevara
The Record
Guevara matters to this record for his doctrine, not his biography. Orthodox communists held that conditions must ripen before anyone attempted a revolution. He held that a small armed nucleus could create those conditions by acting. To him, waiting was itself a political choice in favour of the existing order.
His message to the Tricontinental Conference, written in 1966 and published in 1967, called for the creation of two, three, many Vietnams. Wars in many places at once, more than the imperial power could fight, would bleed it. American students could raise no peasant army. They took from the message the idea that they could open a front where they stood.
Guevara took the strategy to Bolivia, a country where it did not work. The Bolivian army shot him there in October 1967, and the failure did not slow the doctrine’s spread in the United States. That survival is itself a finding about how movement literature travels.
Relationship Ledger
Che Guevara’s message to the Tricontinental called for two, three, many Vietnams: opening simultaneous fronts to exhaust the United States rather than defeating it in any one place. Source: Nixon's War at Home: The FBI, Leftist Guerrillas, and the Origins of Counterterrorism
Debray's Revolution in the Revolution? (1967) generalised the Cuban experience into foco theory: a small armed nucleus could substitute for a party. Source: Nixon's War at Home: The FBI, Leftist Guerrillas, and the Origins of Counterterrorism
Referenced in
Records whose text names Che Guevara. The list is rebuilt from the published prose and checked for drift.
- Marcuse and Repressive Toleranceis mentioned in
- The SDS split, Weatherman and RYM IIis mentioned in
- Régis Debrayis mentioned in