Now, I get that things were different back then. Che was one of the most, if not the only well known leftist guerrilla figures in the West, a truly romanticized ideal for university students and academics to idolize and see themselves in. But I’m sure that even back then, with just a little research, they could have realized that his military theory was half-baked. It was written specifically within the super specific context of Batista’s Cuba and when applied outside those unique conditions, it failed.
In fact, I feel it’s much more important to look at those failures and what they reveal. Che in the Congo is a good example of how Third Worldism simply does not work. Che brought specifically Afro-Cuban veterans of the Cuban Revolution with him, partly to avoid appearing as an imperialist. But in the Congo that distinction was irrelevant. The Latin American context of race and religion was simply alien to the Congo, where tribal and religious identities mattered much more. Congolese fighters wouldn’t work with one another if they belonged to different religions or had tensions with another tribe. And even when you found two groups that had no religious differences or negative opinions of each other, they could literally be unable to work together because they didn’t speak the same language. There was also a general spiritualism that the Congolese fighters couldn’t simply let go of. They refused to fight in trenches because they believed it was bad luck and that they would become sick and die if they were in them. Che encountered this kind of refusal again and again.
Then there was his adventure in Bolivia. Bolivia appeared to fit Che’s ideal model, a poorer country under a military dictatorship. So by his own theory, it should have been fertile ground for successful guerrilla warfare. Instead the campaign failed because the dictatorship had implemented modest land reforms. Those limited reforms were enough to reduce rural support for an insurgency, leaving Che’s forces without the local backing and logistical assistance they needed.
I think that if Che had survived, he might have learned from those failures, refined his ideas and produced a more realistic and pragmatic theory of revolutionary warfare. But he died and became an icon for millions. Still, I feel like contemporary leftists should have looked at these failures and seen them as a fairly obvious reason to rethink his theory, rather than turning it into an inviolable princip
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