Introduction

Helen Yaffe

Chapter 1 in Che Guevara, 2009, pp 1-11 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Popular biographies, memoirs, academic articles and political tracts have focused on Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s military commitment to revolutionary social change, the infl uence of his travels in Latin America, and his participation in guerrilla warfare in Cuba in 1956–58, the Congo in 1965 and Bolivia in 1966–67. Guevara’s written accounts of the war against Batista and the publication of Guerilla Warfare in 1961 to promote his foco theory – that a ‘vanguard’ of armed fi ghters could spark successful revolutionary movements throughout Latin America — contributed to his narrow characterisation as a rebel commander and armed internationalist. Debate over the foco theory and about the Cuban road to socialism, fuelled by attempts to apply it elsewhere, cemented Guevara’s immortalisation as an armed revolutionary. His disappearance from Cuba, his farewell letter to Fidel Castro in 1965, his message to the Tricontinental calling for ‘two, three, many Vietnams’ and fi nally his capture and execution in Bolivia where he was leading a foco group in 1967, have placed blinkers on history, blinding it to other aspects of this multifaceted man. His Argentinian nationality and his death in Bolivia Latin-Americanised the impact of this image — his contribution to the war in Cuba was reminiscent of that continent’s independence heroes, such as Venezuelan Simón Bolívar and Dominican Máximo Gómez who crossed national boundaries to liberate ‘our America’ — thus strengthening Guevara’s claims about the universality of the Cuban model.

Keywords: Cuban Model; Guerilla Warfare; Import Substitution Industrialisation; Cuban Sugar; Cuban Government (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-23387-4_1

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9780230233874

DOI: 10.1057/9780230233874_1

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().