Guevarism

Name and origins

Guevarism takes its name from the Argentine-born Che Guevara, who after the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 turned his experience into a model for others to follow. In Spanish the current is guevarismo and its military theory foquismo. Guevara began writing Guerrilla Warfare in January 1959 and published it in Cuba in 1961. The book generalised the two-year guerrilla war that the 82 men who landed from the Granma in December 1956 waged in the Sierra Maestra against Batista's army. In articles written just after the victory Guevara presented the rural guerrilla as the main force of the revolution, a narrative that became the founding myth of the new government.

Foco theory

Guerrilla Warfare drew three lessons from Cuba: popular forces can defeat a regular army; insurgents need not wait for all the conditions for revolution, since the insurrection can create them; and in the underdeveloped Americas the countryside is the guerrilla's basic terrain. Guevara counted not on a proletarian-led Leninist insurrection on the model of October 1917 but on popular uprisings gathering strength in rural areas, with the guerrilla vanguard bolstering morale rather than seizing the state apparatus itself. He first held that the foco suited personalist military dictatorships, and that armed struggle should begin only once peaceful and legal means were exhausted; later he extended the thesis to every Latin American country, liberal democracies included.

The new man and economics

For Guevara revolution had to change consciousness as well as structures. His 'new man' would overcome egotism and act from solidarity and self-sacrifice, formed by voluntary labour and moral incentives. As Minister of Industries he defended the budgetary finance system, in which all enterprise profits went to the state budget and the state covered losses, and he condemned reliance on the law of value and material incentives in the Soviet bloc as a road back to capitalism. This position set him against Soviet-style enterprise self-financing in the Cuban Great Debate. He called socialist realism a straitjacket on artistic expression, and in 1966 wrote that Stalin's historic crime had been to neglect communist education and institute a cult of authority.

Armed internationalism

Guevara saw Third World underdevelopment as a product of imperialism, curable only by proletarian internationalism and world revolution. In Algiers in February 1965 he accused the socialist countries of tacit complicity with Western exploitation, and soon vanished from Cuban public life. That year he trained Laurent-Désiré Kabila's rebels in the Congo in foco strategy without success, then set up a small guerrilla band in Bolivia, where he was captured and executed in October 1967. His last message, sent to the Tricontinental, is remembered for its call to create 'two, three, many Vietnams'.

Distinctions: Maoism and the orthodox parties

Foco theory drew inspiration from Mao Zedong's protracted people's war, and its stress on the peasantry and land reform brought it closer to Maoism than to worker-centred socialism. But where Mao consolidated base areas before expanding, Guevara stressed guerrilla leadership and audacious raids that would set off a general uprising; he said he had not read Mao's book on guerrilla war. Because Cuba's Popular Socialist Party had retreated from confronting Batista, Guevarism also put the foco in place of the established communist party as the vanguard. This is where it collided with the Soviet line of peaceful coexistence and with the orthodox Latin American parties.

Debray and afterwards

The French philosopher Régis Debray, then teaching at the University of Havana, tried to give foco theory a coherent, unitary framework in Revolution in the Revolution? (1967). Arrested at Muyupampa in Bolivia in April 1967 and sentenced to thirty years, he was released in 1970 after an international campaign, and later broke with the thesis. After Guevara's death Cuba dropped guerrilla war as an instrument of foreign policy and reorganised along Soviet lines. Yet many organisations of the 1960s and 1970s claimed Guevarism, among them Argentina's People's Revolutionary Army, Uruguay's Tupamaros and Nicaragua's Sandinista National Liberation Front. Advocates of urban guerrilla war such as Abraham Guillén and the Tupamaros criticised the rural foco as unrealistic, and the ERP's foco in Tucumán was crushed by the army in 1975. Cuba revived Guevara's moral incentives in the Rectification campaign of 1986–1992.