ABSTRACT
The great upsurge of guerrilla warfare in the 1950s and 1960s was reflected in the hundreds of books and thousands of articles devoted to the strategy and tactics of wars of national liberation, foci, revolutionary warfare, the advantages of the rural over the urban guerrilla, and vice versa. Most of this new body of doctrine emanated from Latin America and was left wing in inspiration. Che 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. F. Castro, Guevara and R. Debray had admitted the existence of “national peculiarities” in principle but had paid them scant attention in practice, assuming, apparently, that the Cuban model was equally applicable to Honduras and Brazil.
