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“I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves.”
― Ernesto “Che” Guevara
Ernesto “Che” Guevara de la Serna (June 14th, 1928 – October 9th, 1967) touted as the reason why the Cuban Revolution succeeded. Described as “iconoclastic, a dreamer, and prone to go his own way” (McCormick & Berger, 2019), Che is one of the most recognizable figures in revolutionary history. Before he was known to the world as a great initiator of change, Guevara went to the University of Buenos Aires and became a doctor. In 1953, Guevara set out on a trip around Latin America, where he made his way to Guatemala, “on the eve of the overthrow of the reformist President Jacobo Arbenz” (McCormick & Berger, 2019). This trip marks the start of his political presence and radicalization, and once he meets Fidel Castro, he adopts the Argentinian nickname “Che” and begins to use his talents in the Cuban Revolution (Guevara 2
La Guerra de Guerrillas
After the Cuban Revolution, Guevara writes Guerilla Warfare, in which he breaks down the six principles of conduct for warfare: the essence of warfare, guerilla strategy, guerrilla tactics, warfare on favorable ground, warfare on unfavorable ground, and suburban warfare (Guevara, 1961, p.47). These principles are the root of Guevara’s guerilla foco theory, which essentially states that as long as the movement has the hearts and minds of the people behind the movement, it is unnecessary to wait for the perfect conditions to make the revolution happen.
For Guevara’s first principle of guerrilla warfare, he writes three fundamental lessons essential to warfare. The first being that popular forces can win a war against the army, the second says that “it is not necessary to wait until all conditions for making revolution exist; the insurrection can create them,” and the third states that “in underdeveloped America, the countryside is the basic area for armed fighting” (Guevara, 1961, p. 47). He places great emphasis on the fact that in guerrilla warfare, the guerrilla fighter is wholly dependent on the people. The guerrilla fighter’s primary goal is to be a “social reformer, that he takes up arms responding to the angry protest of the people against their oppressors, and that he fights in order to change the social system that keeps all his unarmed brothers in ignominy and misery” (Guevara, 1960, p.50).
Guerrilla warfare is an all or nothing affair, and battles should not be engaged in without the fullest intention of winning. Guevara states that the true essence of the guerrilla fighter is his readiness to die. The guerrilla fighter does not have to come close to death in every battle that he engages in, but rather that if he should face death, he faces it not with intentions to “defend an ideal” but to “convert it into reality” (Guevara, 1960, p. 54).
In his section on guerrilla strategy, Guevara describes strategy as “the analysis of the objectives to be achieved in the light of a total military situation