Jump to content
 







Main menu
   


Navigation  



Main page
Contents
Current events
Random article
About Wikipedia
Contact us
Donate
 




Contribute  



Help
Learn to edit
Community portal
Recent changes
Upload file
 








Search  

































Create account

Log in
 









Create account
 Log in
 




Pages for logged out editors learn more  



Contributions
Talk
 



















Contents

   



(Top)
 


1 Overview  





2 Details  



2.1  Guerrilla warfare  





2.2  The new man  







3 Criticism  





4 See also  





5 Notes  














Guevarism






العربية
Azərbaycanca
Беларуская
Български
Cymraeg
Español
فارسی
Français
Galego

Bahasa Indonesia
Italiano
Kurdî
Nederlands
Polski
Português
Русский
Shqip
کوردی
Tagalog
Türkçe
Українська
Vèneto

 

Edit links
 









Article
Talk
 

















Read
Edit
View history
 








Tools
   


Actions  



Read
Edit
View history
 




General  



What links here
Related changes
Upload file
Special pages
Permanent link
Page information
Cite this page
Get shortened URL
Download QR code
Wikidata item
 




Print/export  



Download as PDF
Printable version
 
















Appearance
   

 






From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 


Ernesto "Che" Guevara smoking a cigar in Havana, Cuba, 1963.

Guevarism is a theory of communist revolution and a military strategyofguerrilla warfare associated with Marxist–Leninist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, a leading figure of the Cuban Revolution who believed in the idea of Marxism–Leninism and embraced its principles.[1]

Overview[edit]

After the 1959 triumph of the Cuban Revolution led by a militant foco under Fidel Castro, his Argentine-born, cosmopolitan and Marxist 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 socialism in general.

His ideology promotes exporting revolution to any country whose leader is supported by the empire (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, namely 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.[2]

Guevara had a particularly keen interest in guerrilla warfare, with a dedication to foco techniques, also known as focalism (orfoquismo in Spanish), which is 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—Guevara took great inspiration from the Maoist notion of a "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 Vietnams".[3]

In Guevara's final years, after leaving Cuba he advised communist paramilitary movements in Africa and Latin America, including a young Laurent-Désiré Kabila, future ruler of Zaire/Democratic Republic of the Congo. Finally, while leading a small focalist band of guerrilla cadres in Bolivia, 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 focalism.

The emerging communist movements and other fellow traveler radicalism of the time 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 Union in general, as well as Castro's Cuba 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.

Details[edit]

Che Guevara developed a series of ideas and concepts that has become known as "Guevarism". His thinking took Marxism–Leninism and anti-imperialism as a basic element, adding reflections on how to carry out a revolution and create a socialist society that gave him its own identity.

Rifles of Camilo Cienfuegos and Che Guevara in the Museum of the Revolution, Havana.

Guerrilla warfare[edit]

Che Guevara gave a fundamental role to the armed struggle. From his own experience he developed a whole theory about the guerrilla warfare which has been defined as foco. For him, when there were "objective conditions" for a revolution in a country, a small "focus" guerrilla as a vanguard could create the "subjective conditions" and unleash a general population uprising.[4] 

He argued that there was a close link between the guerrillas, the peasants and the land reform. This position differentiated his thinking from purely labor-industrial socialism and brought him closer to Maoist ideas.

His book Guerilla Warfare is a manual where tactics and strategies used in Cuban guerrilla warfare are discussed.

However, Che claimed that in certain contexts the armed struggle had no place so it was necessary to use peaceful mechanisms such as participation within representative democracy. Although Che stated that this line should be peaceful but "very combative, very brave" and that it could only be abandoned if its orientation in favor of representative democracy was undermined within the population.[5]

The new man[edit]

The fundamental axis on which he guided his political-theoretical-military action was the beginning of Marxist humanism. In other words, Che suggests that it is essential to distinguish between Marx's humanism and bourgeois humanism, traditional Christian, philanthropic, etc. Against all abstract humanism that claims to be "above class" (and which is, in the last analysis, bourgeois), Che's, like the liberation of the man of Marx's, is explicitly engaged in a proletarian class perspective. Thus radically opposing "bad humanism" he declares that: and the realization of their potentialities can only be realized by the revolution of the workers, peasants and other exploited classes that eliminates the exploitation of man by man and establishes rational domination and collective of men (proletarians) on their process of social life.[citation needed]

Criticism[edit]

Guevarism has been criticized from a revolutionary anarchist perspective by Abraham Guillén, 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).[6]

See also[edit]

  • Carlos Marighella
  • Cuban Revolution
  • July 26 Movement
  • Foco theory
  • Guerrilla warfare
  • Protracted people's war
  • Urban guerrilla warfare
  • Wars of national liberation
  • Notes[edit]

    1. ^ Hansing, Katrin (2002). Rasta, Race and Revolution: The Emergence and Development of the Rastafari Movement in Socialist Cuba. LIT Verlag Münster. pp. 41–42. ISBN 3-8258-9600-5.
  • ^ Guevara, Ernesto (1998) [1961]. Guerrilla Warfare. New York: Monthly Review Press. p. 8. ISBN 978-0-8032-7075-6.
  • ^ Gott, Richard (11 August 2005). "Rough Draft of History: 'All Right, Let's Get the @#!*% Out of Here'". Archived from the original on 26 November 2005.
  • ^ Guevara, Che (1965). "El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba" [Socialism and man in Cuba]. www.marxists.org (in Spanish). Retrieved 27 August 2020.
  • ^ "Domingo Alberto Rangel: Ingobernable". YouTube.
  • ^ Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America: A Comparative Study of Insurgents and Regimes since 1956. Princeton University Press. 1992. ISBN 9780691078854.

  • Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Guevarism&oldid=1229655296"

    Categories: 
    Che Guevara
    Communist theory
    Cuban Revolution
    Guerrilla warfare
    MarxismLeninism
    Stalinism
    Maoism
    Anti-revisionism
    Marxist theory
    Eponymous political ideologies
    Types of socialism
    Anti-imperialism
    Decolonization
    Hidden categories: 
    CS1 Spanish-language sources (es)
    Articles with short description
    Short description is different from Wikidata
    Articles needing additional references from January 2016
    All articles needing additional references
    All articles with unsourced statements
    Articles with unsourced statements from October 2023
     



    This page was last edited on 18 June 2024, at 00:35 (UTC).

    Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 4.0; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.



    Privacy policy

    About Wikipedia

    Disclaimers

    Contact Wikipedia

    Code of Conduct

    Developers

    Statistics

    Cookie statement

    Mobile view



    Wikimedia Foundation
    Powered by MediaWiki