Goldenberg's remark remains true despite the fact that the background of most Latin American guerrilla leaders was remarkably similar. They all hailed from middle- or upper-class families, they were young, had received higher education and, if they were not city-born, they had lived in towns before joining the armed struggle. The biographies of Castro and Guevara are of course common knowledge. Castro was not quite thirty when Granma landed in Cuba, Guevara was two years younger. The former came from a wealthy landowning family and had studied law; Guevara was a physician by training and had specialized in allergy. Debray was twenty-six years of age when he wrote Revolution in the Revolution, he came from an upper-class French family, was a normalien and had taught philosophy for a short time before he arrived in Latin America.
Of the other major guerrilla leaders, Douglas Bravo who came from a Venezuelan landowning family was also a lawyer by training; Camilo Torres, a priest and professor of sociology, hailed from one of Bogota's leading families and was thirty-six when he joined the guerrillas; Hugo Blanco, the son of a Cuzco lawyer, had studied agriculture and was in his late twenties when he became a peasant leader; Yon Sosa, son of a Chinese father, was an army lieutenant and like his comrade and rival, Lieutenant Turcios Lima, had undergone antiguerrilla training in the Guatemalan army; Raul Sendic, leader of the Tupamaros, had almost completed his legal studies when he began his revolutionary career — he too came from a landowning family; the Peruvian Hector Bejar was a poet, painter and engraver, aged about twenty-five at the time of his guerrilla exploits; Javier Heraud, the poet, was only twenty-one when he was killed; Cesar Monies, leader of the guerrillas in Guatemala, was also in his early twenties; the Brazilian Leonel Brizola was an older man, once a professional politician (and bon vivant), who served for a period as governor of Rio Grande do Sul; Carlos Lamarca, the Brazilian urban guerrilla leader, was an army captain when he joined the insurgents and he too had been trained in antisubversive warfare. The only two men who were considerably older were the engineer Carlos Marighela, the author of the Minimanual, a mulatto, who became a guerrilla fighter at the ripe age of fifty-seven after more than three decades as a Communist party official, and Abraham Guillen, who provided the Philosophy of an Urban Guerrilla, a native of Spain, had fought in the Spanish Civil War and was fifty-three when his book was published. But unlike Marighela, he was a noncombatant in the guerrilla movement.
The bourgeois background of most, if not all Latin American guerrilla leaders is not in doubt, but this does not mean, as their orthodox-Communist rivals sometimes argued, that their mentality was "petty bourgeois," or that the revolution they aimed at was bourgeois in character. There are limits to the usefulness of class analysis; throughout history revolutionaries have failed to act in accordance with "class interest." They were spostati by choice.
The theory of the Castroist revolution was formulated only in part by the Maximo Lider who was primarily a man of action (and speeches). It was given its fullest and most systematic expression by Guevara and subsequently by Regis Debray.2 During the war Castro was mainly preoccupied with the tactics of fighting, and it is interesting to note that he changed his approach more than once as he gained experience. When he first landed in Cuba, he did not assume that his small band could possibly defeat Batista's army, but he did anticipate that his initiative would trigger off a general strike in the cities that would, in turn, lead to the overthrow of the regime. There was no such strike but, as subsequent events demonstrated, the regime proved far weaker than he imagined. Once the guerrilla war was launched, Castro announced that he would burn Cuba's entire sugar crop ("including my own family's large sugar-cane farm in Oriente") as a previous generation of Cuban guerrillas had done.3 But he later changed his mind and found more effective means of weakening the regime than a scorched-earth policy. After he came to power he would proclaim the basic lesson: "El deber de todo revolucionario es hacer la revolución; the duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution ... it is not for revolutionaries to sit in the doorways of their houses waiting for the corpse of imperialism to pass by. The role of Job doesn't suit a revolutionary."4 There were other such pronouncements but for a comprehensive exposition of Castroism-Guevaraism, we must turn to Guevara's handbook La Guerra de Guerrillas published first in April 1959 and to some of his subsequent articles, the most important of which was Guerra de Guerillas: un Método.5
Guevara
The essence, the three fundamental lessons of the Cuban revolution as Guevara saw it, are boldly stated at the very beginning of his handbook:
Popular forces can win a war against the army.
It is not necessary to wait until all conditions for making revolution exist; the insurrection can create them.
In underdeveloped America the countryside is the basic area for armed fighting.
At the time he conceded that not all the conditions for a revolution could be created through the impulse of guerrilla activity:
Where a government has come into power through some form of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality, the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities for peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted.
Three years later in his article he withdrew this reservation: the conditions for armed struggle existed everywhere in Latin America. Imperialism and the bourgeoisie tried to keep in power without using ostensible violence. But the revolutionaries had to compel them to remove their mask, to expose them in their real Gestalt as a violent dictatorship of the ruling classes, thereby intensifying the revolutionary struggle. In other words, a democratically elected, constitutional government had to be compelled by provocative guerrilla attacks into using its inherently dictatorial powers.
Guevara's three basic tenets are fundamentally opposed to the teachings of Marxism-Leninism and, to a certain extent, even to Maoism. For he regarded the armed insurrection not as the final, crowning phase of the political struggle but expected, on the contrary, that the armed conflict would trigger off, or at least give decisive impetus to the political campaign. In Marxist-Leninist thought, as in Maoism, the political party is the leading force and there is a heavy emphasis on ideology and indoctrination. In the Castroist-Guevaraist concept the political party does not play the central role, and there is no such emphasis on ideology and political education. True, according to Guevara the guerrilla must be a social reformer (above all an agrarian revolutionary), because this is what distinguishes him from a bandit.6 But the revolutionary spirit is somehow taken for granted, and so is support by the people.
In later years, Debray was to put it even more succinctly: a successful military operation is the best propaganda. The guerrilla force is the party in embryo. The vanguard party would not create a popular army, but it would be for the popular army to create the political vanguard.7 He based himself on Castro who declared on one famous occasion: "Who will make the revolution in Latin America? The people, the revolutionaries, with or without a party." Guevara argued that the guerrilla must triumph because of his moral superiority over the enemy and because of the mass support he enjoyed; the fact that he might be inferior to the army in firepower was of no great consequence. At the same time Guevara, like Mao, regarded guerrilla operations as the initial phase of warfare; the guerrilla army would systematically grow and develop until it acquired the characteristics of a regular army. The aim was victory, annihilation of the enemy, and this objective could be reached only by a regular army, even though its origins lay in a guerrilla band.8
The assumption that the people could defeat a regular army was not entirely new; it had been borne out, to give but one example, in Bolivia in 1952. What seemed to be new was the concept that thirty to fifty dedicated revolutionaries were sufficient to launch an armed struggle in any Latin American country. Debray was even more optimistic: ten to thirty professional revolutionaries could pave the way, preparing the masses. But was this not exactly what Blanqui had preached one hundred years
earlier? Debray argued that there were two essential differences: the revolutionaries did not aim at a lightning victory, nor did they want to seize power for themselves.9
The strategic concept of Guevara and Debray differed from that of even the most militant Communists, Trotskyites, and Maoists in that they belittled revolutionary spontaneity (such as advocated by the Trotskyites) and discounted the self-defense units of the workers and peasants (such as existed in Colombia and Peru). Debray thought that the peasant syndicats' struggle was essentially defensive in character, and did not aim at seizing political power. Even if such defense associations did manage to survive for several years (as they had in the south of Colombia), they would be defeated in the long run because they constituted a fixed target for the government forces. Furthermore, the peasants merely wanted to defend their families and their possessions whereas only total partisan warfare stood any chance of success. The Chinese Communist bases, according to Debray, could not serve as a model for Latin America: China was a far bigger country, and the enemy forces there had been relatively weak. The Latin American foci, the centers of insurrection, on the other hand, had to be military in character rather than territorial; he excepted only the universities, but these were regarded as of secondary importance, mere centers of recruiting and propaganda. By itself a foco could not overthrow the system, it was merely a detonator planted in the most exposed enemy position, timed to produce an explosion at the moment of choice. The Latin American guerrillas would not survive the early stages of the armed struggle if they were to engage in static defense; they would (as Fidel put it) have to carry their foci with them like supplies in their knapsacks. It might be possible and even desirable to establish territorial foci at the very beginning of the struggle but this ought not be a strategic aim; the Cubans only set up their first foci after seventeen months of fighting in the Sierra Maestra and they would have ceded them if this had been necessary from an operational point of view.
Castro and Guevara firmly believed in the absolute primacy of the armed struggle, and their conviction grew, if anything, in the years after the Cuban revolution. They maintained that the struggle would have to incorporate many Latin American countries, creating two, three, many Vietnams. Castro stated quite specifically that the Andean region would be the Sierra Maestra of Latin America. His call was based on the assumption that the chances of success existed almost everywhere if only there were enough revolutionary enthusiasm. On the other hand, there was the realization that, in view of the political situation, that is the growing pressure of imperialism, it would become increasingly difficult to defeat the enemy and stay in power in any single country (Guevara). The regular armies had after all learned the Cuban lessons and were psychologically and militarily much better prepared for irregular warfare than they had been at the time of the Cuban insurrection (Debray).
These theses of revolutionary strategy were based on a genuine belief that an almost unlimited revolutionary potential existed over the entire continent, though the desire to reduce the pressure on Cuba must have also been a factor. Fidel, in his second Havana declaration, provided the keynote: the conditions of each country could either hasten or impede the revolution, but sooner or later it must occur everywhere. Guevara added that it was criminal not to make use of the opportunities that offered themselves. The weakest link in the eyes of the Cubans was Venezuela and, after the struggle there had failed, Guevara chose, with disastrous results, Bolivia as the most promising area for installing his "detonator."
This strategy was bound to lead to bitter controversies with the Marxist-Leninist parties. The two main bones of contention which led to open schism were the relationship between the military guerrillas and the political party, and the Cuban insistence that, as a matter of principle, the rural areas would have to be the main battlefield. The Cubans argued that the countryside had much more to recommend itself than the cities from a military point of view, if only because access was more difficult. Furthermore, the revolutionary potential of the peasantry had hitherto been virtually untapped. In the early days of the Cuban revolution Fidel's slogan had been "All guns, all bullets, all reserves to the Sierra," despite the fact that resistance to Batista in the towns had all along been far more intense and better organized. Ten years later he was, if possible, even more emphatic about the subject: it was absurd, even criminal, to try to lead a guerrilla movement from the city. Given the Cuban example, an urban guerrilla movement could not develop into a revolutionary force, capable of seizing power. The urban guerrilla was at best an instrument for agitation, a tool for political maneuvers, a means for political negotiation.10 The city, as Fidel put it, was the "grave of the guerrilla." In the towns, where there could be no single command and centralized leadership, the guerrillas were forced to disperse, particularly in the early phase of the struggle, weakening the insurgents far more than it hampered the government forces. This is not to say that the Cubans regarded the struggle in the mountains as a peasant war; essentially it would be a revolutionary partisan war which the peasants would support and which some would gradually join.11
There were other, equally weighty reasons in favor of waging war in the countryside; a war which would be expanded to the small cities and, in the end, be carried to the metropolitan centers. "As we know," Debray wrote, "the mountain proletarianizes the bourgeois and peasant elements, and the city can bourgeoisify the proletarians."12 The spokesmen of the Cuban revolution regarded the urban working class on the whole as a conservative element and they did not except the Communist parties. Living conditions in the towns were fundamentally different from those prevailing in the countryside; even the best comrades were corrupted in the cities, infected by alien patterns of thought. Life in town was tantamount to an "objective betrayal." The guerrilla movement was the real proletariat, with nothing to lose; the guerrilla leadership in the towns or aboard was the "guerrilla bourgeoisie." The city was the place where politics were made, the countryside the scene of revolutionary action. And the guerrillas, needless to say, wanted to get away from urban politics. Unitl about 1965 Debray believed that it might be possible to win over most Communist parties to the idea of the armed struggle and that this would lead, of necessity, to the old-guard Communist leadership of mere politicians being replaced by a younger, more dynamic leadership. Only after the setbacks in Venezuela and elsewhere was he inclined to write off the Communists as altogether hopeless. He regarded the guerrillas as representing the interests of the proletariat even if their social background was anything but proletarian.
Guevara's handbook of guerrilla warfare contains much practical combat advice: how terrain should affect an attack against an enemy convoy or position; the order of fire in battle; the establishment of a good supply system and medical service; the planning of acts of sabotage; the setting up of a war industry in the liberated zones. Special sections deal with the role of women in the struggle, with the conduct of propaganda, the establishment of an intelligence network, the civil organization of the insurrectional movement. But there is not much that is novel in these suggestions. What Castro and Guevara knew about guerrilla combat, they had learnt from Alberto Bayo, a native Cuban, who had emigrated to Spain and acquired his expertise in the war against Abdel Krim. Bayo served as an air force officer in the Spanish Civil War, later moved to Mexico where, in 1955, he gave a crash training course to the insurgents about to embark on their expedition to Cuba. His instruction manual, 150 Questions to a Guerrilla, was widely read (among the Weathermen, for instance) and contained a wealth of practical information.13 Bayo died in 1967, having attained the rank of "commandante," the highest in the Cuban army.
Guevara noted three stages in guerrilla warfare; first, the tactical defense, when the small guerrilla force would be hunted by superior enemy forces; gradually, the point of equilibrium, when the possibilities of action for both the guerrillas and the enemy become equalized. At this point, large columns would be employed by the guerrillas in a war of movement; this would not re
place the guerrilla war but would merely be guerrilla warfare on a larger scale — something akin to Mao's "mobile warfare." Finally, a popular army would crystallize, overrun the government forces and seize the big cities. The critical period, as Guevara saw it, is the very early one, and he posited three preconditions for the guerrilla's survival — constant mobility, constant vigilance and constant distrust.14 These are sensible observations but guerrilla fighters throughout the ages have instinctively known these home truths, and they were noted by many writers before Guevara,
Of greater interest are his remarks about the human, psychological factor, even though his thoughts on this subject emerge only incidentally from his writings. Emphatic stress is given to the "political will" and "decision": "Generally, guerrilla warfare starts from a well-considered act of will; some chief with prestige starts an uprising for the salvation of his people, beginning his work in difficult conditions in a foreign country." But what if there should be no great leader such as Fidel? Guevara's answer is simple but not altogether convincing. The leaders would learn the art of warfare in the practice of war itself — struggle is the greatest teacher. In short, Napoleon's on s'engage, puis on voit. Religious terminology is frequently invoked, reference is made to a "special kind of Jesuitism"; the revolutionary, clandestinely preparing for war "should be a complete ascetic." There is much preoccupation with honor, courage, vengeance, hatred and death; hatred for the enemy drives a man beyond his physical limits and transforms him into an effective, selective and cold machine for killing—"our soldiers have to be that way." Or elsewhere, "Death will be welcome to us wherever it will surprise us if only our call will be taken up by the others. . . ." Or, on another occasion, the reference is to "the people willing to sacrifice itself in a nuclear war so that its ashes might serve as the cement for a new society. . . ."15
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