ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Che Guevara’s theory of guerrilla warfare against the empirical evidence furnished in his diaries to the Cuban and Bolivian campaigns. It suggests that it would be more appropriate to talk about a doctrine and its application rather than of a theory and its empirical substantation. The chapter shows that Guevara was basically in agreement with most theories of revolution that certain objective and subjective preconditions are to be present before a revolutionary situation can emerge. According to Guevara, life in the guerrilla foco gives the fighter both an opportunity to become a revolutionary, and to become a man. The emergence of a revolutionary foco represents an open challenge both to the legitimacy of the government and to its exclusive right to use force to maintain stability, which in turn tends to generate legitimacy. The chapter argues that in the Bolivian experiment Guevara was seeking both the implementation of a doctrine and the verification of some theoretical generalizations.
