Hurray For Hollywood

Che Guevara's Silly 'Foco' TheoryBy Breaker McCoy

After their successes in the Sierra Maestra Mountains of Cuba, Castro and

his Cuban revolutionaries encouraged emulation of their achievements in other

Latin American countries. Che Guevara was pimped as the grand guru of that effort

and communist Hollywood loves him.

However, Che was not a military man. He had received only a week or so

training in sketchy methods of light infantry combat. He got the rest of his

“expertise” from reading literature written by his patron saint, Lenin of the USSR.

Che had a lot of reworked, time-worn communist struggle theories, but his

only experience was the slap-dash antics of his and Castro’s communist

revolutionaries in rural Cuba. Yet Che offered a sort of blueprint for success based

upon the three 'lessons' he had drawn from the Cuban revolutionary war.

The first of these so-called lessons was that the forces of the people could

defeat the armed forces of the government, despite the fact that this had

rarely happened in previous decades.

The second lesson was that the natural arena in which to conduct the armed

struggle in an underdeveloped area like Latin America was the countryside.

The third lesson was that the insurgents did not have to wait until all the

conditions for revolution existed, because the insurgents themselves could

create revolutionary conditions.

Denying the need for a mass movement or vanguard party (and thus

contradicting both Lenin and Mao Tse-tung), Guevara argued that a small, mobile

and hard-hitting band of insurgents could act as the focus for the revolution, the

'foco insurrectional,' or 'foco', and go on to seize power. He proclaimed that if a

rag tag band of armed communist desperados appeared in a targeted third world

nation, the rural peasantry would soon flock to their standard, since communism

was “the wave of the future.”

In 1958, after taking the city of Sancti Spiritus, Guevara unsuccessfully

tried to impose a kind of sharia, regulating relations between men and women, the

use of alcohol, and informal gambling. Che enforced a Puritanism that did not

exactly characterize his own way of life. (They say that every communist fanatic is

really a Jesuit with a bandoleero.) He also ordered his men to rob banks; a decision

that he justified in a letter to Enrique Oltuski, a subordinate, in November of that

year: "The struggling masses agree to robbing banks because none of them has a

penny in them." This idea of revolution as a license to re-allocate property, as he

saw fit, led the Marxist Puritan to take over the mansion of an emigrant after the

triumph of the revolution.

The urge to dispossess others of their property and to claim ownership of

others' territory was central to Guevara's politics of raw power. In his memoirs,

the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser records that Guevara asked him how many

people had left his country because of land reform. When Nasser replied that no

one had left, Che countered in anger that the way to measure the depth of change

is by the number of people "who feel there is no place for them in the new society."

This predatory instinct reached a pinnacle in 1965, when he started talking, God-

like, about the "New Man" that he and his revolution would create. The communist

nomenklatura, like the Marxist-corporate-capitalists are just feudal bandit. The

difference are, however, marked. In communism , terror and murder is used to

control the people. In corporate-capitalist states “legal” intimidation and relentless

psychological warfare is used to control the masses. Only a leftist fool would

therefore promote communism or socialism as superior.

Shag Hozanna Baby!

That Guevara should have drawn his guerrilla war conclusions from the Cuban

experience is perhaps not surprising, given that the Cuban communist insurgents:

had defeated a government army,

had conducted their campaign in the countryside - from the Sierra

Maestra mountains the cities appeared to be the graveyard of the

insurgent - and

had achieved their victory without the help of mass movements or

political parties. Even the Communist Party did not publicly admit an

alliance with Castro until the closing stages of the conflict.

Such a victory could have happened only in postwar Cuba; a land of great

ignorance where the masses of the public responded only to armed terror. Castro’s

insurgency was not the spontaneous uprising of an oppressed peasant mass. All that

happened was about 70 armed men landed in Cuba and from the mountains began

attacking small government military patrols. At the same time they enlisted every

psychopath, adventurer, brute and lazy person they could find. They promised

them participation in ruling and controlling a communist Cuba that would be built on

the corpse of Batista’s regime. It was a brutal thug’s dream. Each small victory of

Castro’s gang was parroted loudly, and new peasants, always respecting success,

power and the gun, began to join up. The promised rewards were better than

groveling in a dusty, starving disease-ridden barrio forever.

Lucky for Castro, he was facing a weak-minded and weak-willed petty

dictator whose army was just a uniformed bureaucratic police force. It was both ill

disciplined and ideologically bereft. It was very similar to the way the American

Army will be in a few years.

Understandable or not, the conclusions arrived at by Che as “principles of

guerilla warfare” were based upon a dangerously selective view of the Cuban

experience, and careful plagarization of a number of authors. Foolish journalists,

leftists, and vacuous military officers never bothered to do a content and origin

analysis of Che’s plagiarized guerilla warfare advocacy.

Guevara's contention that insurgents could easily defeat government forces

made no allowance for the fact that the Cuban insurgents had triumphed against an

exceptionally weak government; one that had an incompetent army and had lost the

support of its main foreign backer at a crucial moment. The assumption that

circumstances would be the same anywhere else was highly questionable.

Since the 1950s, the US and other military services all over the world have

trained secret police forces, intelligence agencies and combat battalions in every

small country almost everywhere. Thus the large nations have stupidly prepared all

those backward or third world countries, that can’t even build roads or houses,

with the weapons and methods to wage merciless and savage wars. Sooner or later

such stupidity always runs backward into the face of the very fools who “nation

built” some savage backward people into a well armed and fanatic killing machine.

Back in the day, about sixty years ago, the emphasis Guevara placed upon

rural operations grossly underestimated the extent to which Castro's victory had

actually depended upon the contribution made by urban groups. The latter not only

supplied the Rebel Army with recruits and arms, but also prevented Batista from

devoting his full resources to the campaign against the Sierra-Meastra based

insurgents. The urban support structure was eager to get rid of Batista and thus

provided a little succorance to Castro.

Finally, Guevara overlooked the fact that conditions for insurgency or

terrorist uprisings already existed in Cuba before the campaign started. The

insurgents were not so much creating conditions for change, as exploiting them.

In many ways, therefore, the 'lessons' projected by Guevara and Castro

were a dangerously misleading and wrong-headed blueprint for insurgency or

terrorist uprisings in the rest of Latin America.

Che’s so-called persona or looks, seemed to be more important to would-be

revolutionaries than his brain or heart. Guevara, a handsome Irish lad pretending

to be a Latino, turned on a lot of Hispanic women who wanted more of such a macho

hombre.

The emotional and romantic strength of Guevara's doctrine, and in particular

of the 'foco' concept, were soon highlighted by domestic leftists on the Latin

American mainland, as insurgent movements influenced by events in Cuba took up

arms in the late 1960s against the incumbent regimes. The Castro experience was

so easy. Just think. If a person could round up 50-100 adventurers and arm them,

they could take over and run any of several pothole “nations.” Welcome to the

“revolution potty.”

Soon, several countries experienced insurgency or terrorist uprisings,

notably in Guatemala, Venezuela, Colombia and Bolivia. They were ripe to fall too,

and they would have if the USA had not helped them. (all it took was 50-100

desperados.)

The weakness of the 'foco' theory soon showed through in all of the

rundown countries where it was tried out. The Guevara-style revolutions never

really got beyond the early stages. Yet, psychotic leftists and Marxists are such

liars that they continued screaming out “Che- Che- Che” as a guerilla warfare

genius. America’s current African-racist, Marxist candidate for President, Barrack

Obama, who is not even a US citizen, loves Che Guevara. There is a picture of Che

in all his campaign headquarters. The picture is proof that even fools and

incompetents can take over countries if they are willing to use tactics from the

dark side.

Che Guevara himself was killed in Bolivia during October 1967, after a

carefully orchestrated confrontation with the Bolivian Security Forces. He misread

the local situation. There had been an agrarian reform years before; the

government had respected many of the peasant communities' institutions; and the

army was close to the United States despite its nationalism. "The peasant masses

don't help us at all" was Guevara's melancholy conclusion in his Bolivian diary. Even

worse, Mario Monje, the local communist leader, who had no stomach for guerrilla

warfare after having been humiliated at the elections, led Guevara to a vulnerable

location in the southeast of the country. The circumstances of Che's capture at

Yuro Ravine, soon after meeting the French Marxist intellectual Régis Debray and

the Argentine painter Ciro Bustos, both of whom were arrested as they left the

camp, was, like most of the Bolivian expedition, an amateur's affair.

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