The Awakening of Latin America

by Ernesto Che Guevara

  Returning to the Second Declaration of Havana:

  At the outset of the past century, the peoples of the Americas freed themselves from Spanish colonialism, but they did not free themselves from exploitation. The feudal landlords assumed the authority of the governing Spaniards, the Indians continued in their painful serfdom, the Latin American remained a slave one way or another, and the minimal hopes of the peoples died under the power of the oligarchies and the tyranny of foreign capital. This is the truth of the Americas, to one or another degree of variation. Latin America today is under a more ferocious imperialism that is more powerful and ruthless than the Spanish colonial empire.

  What is Yankee imperialism’s attitude toward confronting the objective and historically inexorable reality of the Latin American revolution? To prepare to fight a colonial war against the peoples of Latin America; to create an apparatus of force establishing the political pretexts and the pseudo-legal instruments underwritten by the representatives of the reactionary oligarchies in order to curb, by blood and by iron, the struggle of the Latin American peoples.

  This objective situation shows the dormant force of our peasants and the need to utilize it for Latin America’s liberation.

  Third, there is the continental nature of the struggle. Could we imagine this stage of Latin American emancipation as the confrontation of two local forces struggling for power in a specific territory? Hardly. The struggle between the popular forces and the forces of repression will be to the death. This also is predicted within the paragraphs cited previously.

  The Yankees will intervene due to conjunction of interest and because the struggle in Latin America is decisive. As a matter of fact they are intervening already, preparing the forces of repression and the organization of a continental apparatus of repression. But from now on they will do so with all their energy; they will punish the popular forces with all the destructive weapons at their disposal. They will not allow a revolutionary power to consolidate; and, if it ever happens, they will attack again, they will not recognize such a power, and will try to divide the revolutionary forces. They will infiltrate saboteurs, create border problems, force other reactionary states to oppose it and will impose economic sanctions attempting, in a word, to annihilate the new state.

  This being the panorama in Latin America, it is difficult to achieve and consolidate victory in an isolated country. The unity of the repressive forces must be confronted with the unity of the popular forces. In all countries where oppression reaches intolerable proportions, the banner of rebellion must be raised; and this banner of historical necessity will have a continental character.

  As Fidel has said, the cordillera of the Andes will be the Sierra Maestra of Latin America; and the immense territory this continent encompasses will become the scene of a life or death struggle against imperialism.

  We cannot predict when this struggle will reach a continental dimension or how long it will last. But we can predict its advent and triumph because it is the inevitable result of historical, economic and political conditions; and its direction cannot change.

  The task of the revolutionary forces in each country is to initiate the struggle when the conditions are present there, regardless of the conditions in other countries. The development of the struggle will bring about the general strategy. The prediction of the continental character of the struggle is the outcome of the analysis of the strength of each contender but this does not exclude independent outbreaks. The beginning of the struggle in one area of a country is bound to cause its development throughout the region; the beginning of a revolutionary war contributes to the development of new conditions in the neighboring countries.

  The development of revolution has usually produced high and low tides in inverse proportion. To the revolution’s high tide corresponds the counterrevolutionary low tide and vice versa, as there is a counterrevolutionary ascendancy in moments of revolutionary decline. In those moments, the situation of the popular forces becomes difficult and they should resort to the best means of defense in order to suffer the least damage. The enemy is extremely powerful and has a continental range. The relative weakness of the local bourgeoisie cannot, therefore, be analyzed with a view to making decisions within restricted boundaries. Still less can one think of an eventual alliance by these oligarchies with a people in arms.

  The Cuban revolution sounded the bell that raised the alarm. The polarization of forces will become complete: exploiters on one side and exploited on the other. The mass of the petty bourgeoisie will lean to one side or the other according to their interests and the political skill with which they are handled. Neutrality will be an exception. This is how revolutionary war will be.

  Let us think how a guerrilla foco can start. Nuclei with relatively few people choose places favorable for guerrilla warfare with the intention of either unleashing a counterattack or weathering the storm, and from there they start taking action. What follows, however, must be very clear: At the beginning the relative weakness of the guerrilla is such that they should work only toward becoming acquainted with the terrain and its surroundings while establishing connections with the population and fortifying the places that will eventually be converted into bases.

  There are three conditions for survival that a guerrilla force must embrace if it is emerging subject to the premises described here: constant mobility, constant vigilance and constant distrust. Without these three elements of military tactics the guerrilla will find it hard to survive. We must remember that the heroism of the guerrilla fighter, at this moment, consists of the scope of the planned goal and the enormous number of sacrifices they must make in order to achieve it. These sacrifices are not made in daily combat or in face-to-face battle with the enemy; rather they will take subtler forms, more difficult for the guerrilla fighter to resist both physically and mentally.

  Perhaps the guerrillas will be punished heavily by the enemy, divided at times into groups, while at other times those who are captured will be tortured. They will be pursued as hunted animals in the areas where they have chosen to operate; the constant anxiety of having the enemy on their track will be with them. They must distrust everyone, for the terrorized peasants will in some cases give them away to the repressive troops in order to save themselves. Their only alternatives are life or death, at times when death is a concept a thousand times present and victory only a myth for a revolutionary to dream about.

  This is the guerrilla’s heroism. For this it is said that walking is a form of fighting and that avoiding combat at a given moment is another. Facing the general superiority of the enemy at a given place, one must find the tactics with which to gain relative superiority at that moment, either by being capable of concentrating more troops than the enemy or by using the terrain fully and well in order to secure advantages that unbalance the correlation of forces. In these conditions tactical victory is assured; if relative superiority is not clear, it is better not to act. As long as the guerrilla army is in the position of deciding the “how” and the “when,” no combat should be fought that will not end in victory.

  Within the framework of the great political-military action of which they are a part, the guerrilla army will grow and be consolidated. Bases will continue to be formed, for they are essential to the success of the guerrilla army. These bases are points the enemy can enter only at the cost of heavy losses; they are the revolution’s bastions, they are both refuges and the starting point for the guerrilla army’s more daring and distant raids.

  This point is reached if difficulties of a tactical and political nature have been overcome. The guerrillas cannot forget their function as the vanguard of the people—their mandate—and as such they must create the necessary political conditions for the establishment of a revolutionary power based on the support of the masses. The peasants’ aspirations or demands must be satisfied to the degree and in the form that circumstances permit so as to bring about the decisive support and solidarity of the whole population.

&nb
sp; If the guerrillas’ military situation is difficult from the very first moment, the political situation is just as delicate. If a single military error can liquidate the guerrilla, a political error can hold back its development for long periods. The struggle is political-military and it must be developed and understood as such.

  In the process of the guerrilla’s growth, the fighting reaches a point where its capacity for action in a given region is so great there are too many fighters in too great a concentration. Then begins the “beehive action” in which one of the commanders, a distinguished guerrilla, moves to another region and repeats the chain of development of guerrilla warfare. That commander is nevertheless subject to a central command.

  It is imperative to point out that one cannot hope for victory without the formation of a people’s army. The guerrilla forces can be expanded to a certain magnitude; the popular forces in the cities and in other areas can inflict losses; but the military potential of the reactionaries will still remain intact. One must always keep in mind the fact that the final objective is the enemy’s annihilation. All these new zones created, as well as the infiltrated zones behind enemy lines and the forces operating in the principal cities, should be unified under one command.

  Guerrilla war or liberation war will generally have three stages. First is the strategic defensive stage when the small force nibbles at the enemy and runs. It is not sheltered to make a passive defense within a small circumference, but rather its defense consists of the limited attacks it can successfully make. After this comes a state of equilibrium in which the possibilities of action on both sides—the enemy and the guerrillas—are established. Finally, the last stage consists of overrunning the repressive army leading to the capture of the big cities, large-scale decisive encounters, and ultimately the complete annihilation of the enemy.

  After reaching a state of equilibrium, when both sides respect each other, the guerrilla war develops and acquires new characteristics. The concept of maneuver is introduced: large columns attacking strong points; mobile warfare with the shifting of forces and relatively potent means of attack. But due to the capacity for resistance and counterattack that the enemy still has, this war of maneuver does not replace guerrilla fighting; rather, it is only one form of action taken by the guerrillas until that time when they crystallize into a people’s army with an army corps. Even at this moment the guerrilla, marching ahead of the action of the main forces, will continue the tactics of the first stage, destroying communications and sabotaging the whole defensive apparatus of the enemy.

  We have predicted that the war will be continental. This means that it will be a protracted war, it will have many fronts and it will cost much blood and countless lives for a long period of time.

  Another phenomenon occurring in Latin America is the polarization of forces, that is, the clear division between exploiters and exploited. When the armed vanguard of the people achieves power both the imperialists and the national exploiting class will be liquidated at one stroke. The first stage of the socialist revolution will have crystallized and the people will be ready to heal their wounds and initiate the construction of socialism.

  Are there less bloody possibilities? A while ago the last dividing-up of the world took place and the United States took the lion’s share of our continent. Today the imperialists of the Old World are developing again—and the strength of the European Common Market frightens the United States itself. All this might lead to the belief that the possibility exists for us merely to observe as spectators, perhaps in alliance with the stronger national bourgeoisie, the struggle among the imperialists trying to make further advances. Yet a passive policy never brings good results in class struggle and alliances with the bourgeoisie, although they might appear to be revolutionary, have only a transitory character. The time factor will induce us to choose another ally. The sharpening of the most important contradiction in Latin America appears to be so rapid that it disturbs the “normal” development of the imperialist camp’s conflicts in its struggle for markets.

  The majority of national bourgeoisie have united with US imperialism so their fate shall be the same. Even in the cases where pacts or common contradictions are shared between the national bourgeoisie and other imperialists, this occurs within the framework of a fundamental struggle that will sooner or later embrace all the exploited and all the exploiters. The polarization of antagonistic forces among class adversaries is up to now more rapid than the development of the contradiction among exploiters over dividing the spoils. There are two camps. The alternative becomes clearer for each individual and for each specific stratum of the population.

  The Alliance for Progress attempts to slow that which cannot be stopped. But if the advance on the US market by the European Common Market, or any other imperialist group, were more rapid than the development of the fundamental contradiction, the forces of the people would only have to penetrate into the open breach, carrying on the struggle and utilizing the new intruders while having a clear awareness of what their true intentions are.

  Not a single position, weapon or secret should be given to the class enemy, under penalty of losing all. In fact, the eruption of the Latin American struggle has begun. Will its storm center be in Venezuela, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador…? Are today’s skirmishes only manifestations of an unrest that has not come to fruition? The outcome of today’s struggles does not matter. It does not matter in the final count that one or two movements were temporarily defeated because what is definite is the decision to struggle that matures every day, the consciousness of the need for revolutionary change and the certainty that it is possible.

  This is a prediction. We make it with the conviction that history will prove us right. Analysis of the objective and subjective conditions of Latin America and the imperialist world indicates to us the certainty of these assertions based on the Second Declaration of Havana.

  1. Here Che Guevara is quoting his own work, Guerrilla Warfare (Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press).

  Letter (1963)

  Letter to Mr. Peter Marucci

  Havana

  May 4, 1963

  Year of Organization

  Mr. Peter Marucci

  Editor of The Telegraph

  The Daily Mercury

  Guelph, Canada

  Compañero,

  First of all, I must confess that bureaucracy is solidly and thoroughly entrenched in our country. It absorbs papers; incubates them; and, in time, allows them to reach the people to whom they are addressed.

  This is why I haven’t replied to your letter before this.

  Cuba is a tropical, indomitable, naive and joyous socialist country. It is socialist without losing any of its own characteristics, the socialism adding maturity to its people. It is well worth knowing. We will be happy to welcome you whenever you wish to come.

  Sincerely,

  Homeland or Death!

  We will win!

  Commander Ernesto Che Guevara

  1964

  Speech

  On December 11, 1964, Che Guevara, representing the revolutionary government of Cuba, addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York stating “the final hour of colonialism has struck.”1 The representatives of Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama and the United States responded with vitriolic attacks, to which Che made the following reply.

  Response to the Attacks against Cuba in the UN General Assembly

  December 11, 1964

  I ask your indulgence for my taking the floor for a second time. I am doing so to exercise my right of reply. Naturally, even though I’m not particularly interested in doing so, I could go on making rejoinders indefinitely.

  One by one, I am going to reply to the statements of the delegates who have attacked Cuba’s participation, and I will do so in more or less the same spirit in which each of them made those statements.

  I will begin by replying to the delegate of Costa Rica, who deplored the fact that Cuba had allowed i
tself to be carried away by some lies in the sensationalist press and who said that his government had taken some immediate measures of inspection when the free press of Costa Rica—which is very different from the enslaved press of Cuba—made some denunciations.

  It may be that the delegate of Costa Rica is right. I cannot make a definitive statement based on the articles that the imperialist press — especially that of the United States—has repeatedly made about the Cuban counterrevolutionaries. But, if Artime was the head of the Bay of Pigs invasion, which failed, he was the head of it for just a while, only until the invaders arrived at the Cuban coast and suffered their first casualties, because he went back to the United States then. Most of the members of that “heroic liberating expedition” were “cooks or health personnel”—according to the statements they made after being taken prisoner, all of the “liberators” of Cuba arrived in Cuba in those capacities. Artime, who now starts to be their leader again, was indignant about the accusation. Of what? Of smuggling whiskey? He said there was no contraband whiskey in their bases in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, which “trained revolutionaries to free Cuba.” Those statements were made to the news agencies and have gone round the world.

  That accusation has been made in Costa Rica many times. Costa Rican patriots have told us about the existence of those bases in the Tortugueras and neighboring areas, and the government of Costa Rica should know very well if it is so or not.

  I am absolutely sure that these reports are true, and I am also sure that Mr. Artime, among his many “revolutionary” occupations, also had time to smuggle whiskey, because, among the kind of liberators that the government of Costa Rica is protecting—even if only halfheartedly—that is a perfectly normal thing to do.