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. There were heated polemics about the "correct approach," about "subjective" and "objective" conditions, about the place of the vanguard, and the role of the masses in the struggle. But the number and even the quality of books produced was not necessarily an indicator to the efficacy of the movements sponsoring them. Some of the most protracted and bloody guerrilla wars such as those in Algeria, the Middle East or Ulster, produced few theoretical reflections on the subject. The Kurds fought for twenty years and knew all there was to know about guerrilla warfare even though they probably never read a book on the subject. If they were defeated in the end, it was not because of any doctrinal shortcomings. Conversely some guerrilla movements, which barely functioned, were very strong on doctrine. Broadly speaking the more remote the Marxist-Leninist inspiration, the more limited was the interest in ideological disputations. This is not to say that all the theoretical writings were innovative: most of the literature presented variations on the same theme.
The Marxist-Leninist tradition had a profound influence on the vocabulary of the Latin American apostles of guerrilla warfare, but the real impact of patriotic-nationalist traditions was quite unmistakable. (The slogan of most Latin American guerrilla movements was Patria ο Muerte-Venceremos.) About the revolutionary character of these movements there is no doubt; on the other hand they did not just "deviate" from Marxism on essential points but did to Marx what Marx had done to Hegel: they stood him on his head. That any political dogma is bound to be adapted and modified in the light of new historical developments goes without saying; Marxists in particular have always stressed the necessity of "creatively employing" their method. But if these changes are fundamental and far-reaching, if some of the basic tenets are given up, the point is bound to be reached sooner or later when the old label no longer conforms to the new content, when, in fact, it misleads and becomes a source of misunderstanding. Other ideologies and creeds have faced a similar fate: Christianity without God is an interesting phenomenon, but is it Christianity any longer?
The new doctrines of guerrilla warfare must be studied within their context of time and place, and be subjected to a critical analysis for they by no means provide a true reflection of guerrilla experience. The writings of Guevara and the speeches of Fidel Castro contain much of interest about the Cuban revolution; they contain even more myths and post facto rationalizations that only can be explained in the light of their authors' subsequent political careers. They went into the struggle with one ideology and emerged with another. While the Cuban revolutionaries were fighting in the Sierra Maestra they were a movement in search of an ideology; some of them belittled revolutionary theory altogether and thought that all that mattered was revolutionary struggle. As the Tupamaros put it in later years: "Words divide us, action unites us." Castroist-Guevaraist doctrine is the product of a later period, and offered no guidelines while the struggle lasted. It fails to explain what happened and why, it is not the key to the lessons of the Cuban revolution.
Guevara's views in 1965 differed to a considerable extent from those he had pronounced five years earlier, and Debray's estimation likewise underwent radical changes. The unity of theory and practice is always highly imperfect and ideology frequently serves as a smokescreen. To provide two extreme examples: firstly, from the ideological pronouncements of the leaders of the IRA one would not learn that sectarian elements were prominently involved in their struggle; secondly, the one major tactical innovation of the Palestinian guerrillas was that their operations were mainly conducted from outside Israel. But official pronouncements almost invariably proclaim the opposite. The IRA and the Palestinian Arab spokesmen no doubt have sound political reasons for preferring fiction to fact.
There was a tendency among the guerrilla theorists of the 1950s and 1960s to emphasize the universal applicability of their doctrines. This was as true of Lin Piao's thesis about the struggle of the world villages against the world cities, as of Frantz Fanon's analysis of the anticolonial struggle, or of the propagation of the Cuban model as befitting all Latin America. But conditions varied so much from country to country that these wholesale prescriptions were usually quite unrealistic. They led to major setbacks for the guerrillas and became a source of confusion to those trying to understand the dynamics of guerrilla warfare. What Boris Goldenberg wrote about the Cuban revolution applies mutatis mutandis to guerrilla warfare everywhere: in view of its unique character it is a topic for the historian and not the sociologist.1
Goldenberg's remark remains true despite the fact that the background of most Latin American guerrilla leaders was remarkably similar. They all hailed from middle- or upper-class families, they were young, had received higher education and, if they were not city-born, they had lived in towns before joining the armed struggle. The biographies of Castro and Guevara are of course common knowledge. Castro was not quite thirty when Granma landed in Cuba, Guevara was two years younger. The former came from a wealthy landowning family and had studied law; Guevara was a physician by training and had specialized in allergy. Debray was twenty-six years of age when he wrote Revolution in the Revolution, he came from an upper-class French family, was a normalien and had taught philosophy for a short time before he arrived in Latin America.
Of the other major guerrilla leaders, Douglas Bravo who came from a Venezuelan landowning family was also a lawyer by training; Camilo Torres, a priest and professor of sociology, hailed from one of Bogota's leading families and was thirty-six when he joined the guerrillas; Hugo Blanco, the son of a Cuzco lawyer, had studied agriculture and was in his late twenties when he became a peasant leader; Yon Sosa, son of a Chinese father, was an army lieutenant and like his comrade and rival, Lieutenant Turcios Lima, had undergone antiguerrilla training in the Guatemalan army; Raul Sendic, leader of the Tupamaros, had almost completed his legal studies when he began his revolutionary career — he too came from a landowning family; the Peruvian Hector Bejar was a poet, painter and engraver, aged about twenty-five at the time of his guerrilla exploits; Javier Heraud, the poet, was only twenty-one when he was killed; Cesar Monies, leader of the guerrillas in Guatemala, was also in his early twenties; the Brazilian Leonel Brizola was an older man, once a professional politician (and bon vivant), who served for a period as governor of Rio Grande do Sul; Carlos Lamarca, the Brazilian urban guerrilla leader, was an army captain when he joined the insurgents and he too had been trained in antisubversive warfare. The only two men who were considerably older were the engineer Carlos Marighela, the author of the Minimanual, a mulatto, who became a guerrilla fighter at the ripe age of fifty-seven after more than three decades as a Communist party official, and Abraham Guillen, who provided the Philosophy of an Urban Guerrilla, a native of Spain, had fought in the Spanish Civil War and was fifty-three when his book was published. But unlike Marighela, he was a noncombatant in the guerrilla movement.
The bourgeois background of most, if not all Latin American guerrilla leaders is not in doubt, but this does not mean, as their orthodox-Communist rivals sometimes argued, that their mentality was "petty bourgeois," or that the revolution they aimed at was bourgeois in character. There are limits to the usefulness of class analysis; throughout history revolutionaries have failed to act in accordance with "class interest." They were spostati by choice.
The theory of the Castroist revolution was formulated only in part by the Maximo Lider who was primarily a man of action (and speeches). It was given its fullest and most systematic expression by Guevara and subsequently by Regis Debray.2 During the war Castro was mainly preoccupied with the tactics of fighting, and it is interesting to note that he changed his approach more than once as he gained experience. When he first landed in Cuba, he did not assume that his small band could possibly defeat Batista's army, but he did anticipate that his initiative would trigger off a general strike in the cities that would, in turn, lead to the overthrow of the regime. There was no such strike but, as subsequent events demonstrated, the regime proved far weaker than he imagined. Once the guerrilla war was launched, Castro announced that he would burn Cuba's entire sugar crop ("including my own family's large sugar-cane farm in Oriente") as a previous generation of Cuban guerrillas had done.3 But he later changed his mind and found more effective means of weakening the regime than a scorched-earth policy. After he came to power he would proclaim the basic lesson: "El deber de todo revolucionario es hacer la revolución; the duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution ... it is not for revolutionaries to sit in the doorways of their houses waiting for the corpse of imperialism to pass by. The role of Job doesn't suit a revolutionary."4 There were other such pronouncements but for a comprehensive exposition of Castroism-Guevaraism, we must turn to Guevara's handbook La Guerra de Guerrillas published first in April 1959 and to some of his subsequent articles, the most important of which was Guerra de Guerillas: un Método.5
The essence, the three fundamental lessons of the Cuban revolution as Guevara saw it, are boldly stated at the very beginning of his handbook:
At the time he conceded that not all the conditions for a revolution could be created through the impulse of guerrilla activity:
Where a government has come into power through some form of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality, the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities for peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted.
Three years later in his article he withdrew this reservation: the conditions for armed struggle existed everywhere in Latin America. Imperialism and the bourgeoisie tried to keep in power without using ostensible violence. But the revolutionaries had to compel them to remove their mask, to expose them in their real Gestalt as a violent dictatorship of the ruling classes, thereby intensifying the revolutionary struggle. In other words, a democratically elected, constitutional government had to be compelled by provocative guerrilla attacks into using its inherently dictatorial powers.
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. In Marxist-Leninist thought, as in Maoism, the political party is the leading force and there is a heavy emphasis on ideology and indoctrination. In the Castroist-Guevaraist concept the political party does not play the central role, and there is no such emphasis on ideology and political education. True, according to Guevara the guerrilla must be a social reformer (above all an agrarian revolutionary), because this is what distinguishes him from a bandit.6 But the revolutionary spirit is somehow taken for granted, and so is support by the people.
In later years, Debray was to put it even more succinctly: a successful military operation is the best propaganda. The guerrilla force is the party in embryo. The vanguard party would not create a popular army, but it would be for the popular army to create the political vanguard.7 He based himself on Castro who declared on one famous occasion: "Who will make the revolution in Latin America? The people, the revolutionaries, with or without a party." Guevara argued that the guerrilla must triumph because of his moral superiority over the enemy and because of the mass support he enjoyed; the fact that he might be inferior to the army in firepower was of no great consequence. At the same time Guevara, like Mao, regarded guerrilla operations as the initial phase of warfare; the guerrilla army would systematically grow and develop until it acquired the characteristics of a regular army. The aim was victory, annihilation of the enemy, and this objective could be reached only by a regular army, even though its origins lay in a guerrilla band.8
The assumption that the people could defeat a regular army was not entirely new; it had been borne out, to give but one example, in Bolivia in 1952. What seemed to be new was the concept that thirty to fifty dedicated revolutionaries were sufficient to launch an armed struggle in any Latin American country. Debray was even more optimistic: ten to thirty professional revolutionaries could pave the way, preparing the masses. But was this not exactly what Blanqui had preached one hundred years earlier? Debray argued that there were two essential differences: the revolutionaries did not aim at a lightning victory, nor did they want to seize power for themselves.9
The strategic concept of Guevara and Debray differed from that of even the most militant Communists, Trotskyites, and Maoists in that they belittled revolutionary spontaneity (such as advocated by the Trotskyites) and discounted the self-defense units of the workers and peasants (such as existed in Colombia and Peru). Debray thought that the peasant syndicats' struggle was essentially defensive in character, and did not aim at seizing political power. Even if such defense associations did manage to survive for several years (as they had in the south of Colombia), they would be defeated in the long run because they constituted a fixed target for the government forces. Furthermore, the peasants merely wanted to defend their families and their possessions whereas only total partisan warfare stood any chance of success. The Chinese Communist bases, according to Debray, could not serve as a model for Latin America: China was a far bigger country, and the enemy forces there had been relatively weak. The Latin American foci, the centers of insurrection, on the other hand, had to be military in character rather than territorial; he excepted only the universities, but these were regarded as of secondary importance, mere centers of recruiting and propaganda. By itself a foco could not overthrow the system, it was merely a detonator planted in the most exposed enemy position, timed to produce an explosion at the moment of choice. The Latin American guerrillas would not survive the early stages of the armed struggle if they were to engage in static defense; they would (as Fidel put it) have to carry their foci with them like supplies in their knapsacks. It might be possible and even desirable to establish territorial foci at the very beginning of the struggle but this ought not be a strategic aim; the Cubans only set up their first foci after seventeen months of fighting in the Sierra Maestra and they would have ceded them if this had been necessary from an operational point of view.
Castro and Guevara firmly believed in the absolute primacy of the armed struggle, and their conviction grew, if anything, in the years after the Cuban revolution. They maintained that the struggle would have to incorporate many Latin American countries, creating two, three, many Vietnams. Castro stated quite specifically that the Andean region would be the Sierra Maestra of Latin America. His call was based on the assumption that the chances of success existed almost everywhere if only there were enough revolutionary enthusiasm. On the other hand, there was the realization that, in view of the political situation, that is the growing pressure of imperialism, it would become increasingly difficult to defeat the enemy and stay in power in any single country (Guevara). The regular armies had after all learned the Cuban lessons and were psychologically and militarily much better prepared for irregular warfare than they had been at the time of the Cuban insurrection (Debray).
These theses of revolutionary strategy were based on a genuine belief that an almost unlimited revolutionary potential existed over the entire continent, though the desire to reduce the pressure on Cuba must have also been a factor. Fidel, in his second Havana declaration, provided the keynote: the conditions of each country could either hasten or impede the revolution, but sooner or later it must occur everywhere. Guevara added that it was criminal not to make use of the opportunities that offered themselves. The weakest link in the eyes of the Cubans was Venezuela and, after the struggle there had failed, Guevara chose, with disastrous results, Bolivia as the most promising area for installing his "detonator."
This strategy was bound to lead to bitter controversies with the Marxist-Leninist parties. The two main bones of contention which led to open schism were the relationship between the military guerrillas and the political party, and the Cuban insistence that, as a matter of principle, the rural areas would have to be the main battlefield. The Cubans argued that the countryside had much more to recommend itself than the cities from a military point of view, if only because access was more difficult. Furthermore, the revolutionary potential of the peasantry had hitherto been virtually untapped. In the early days of the Cuban revolution Fidel's slogan had been "All guns, all bullets, all reserves to the Sierra," despite the fact that resistance to Batista in the towns had all along been far more intense and better organized. Ten years later he was, if possible, even more emphatic about the subject: it was absurd, even criminal, to try to lead a guerrilla movement from the city. Given the Cuban example, an urban guerrilla movement could not develop into a revolutionary force, capable of seizing power. The urban guerrilla was at best an instrument for agitation, a tool for political maneuvers, a means for political negotiation.10 The city, as Fidel put it, was the "grave of the guerrilla." In the towns, where there could be no single command and centralized leadership, the guerrillas were forced to disperse, particularly in the early phase of the struggle, weakening the insurgents far more than it hampered the government forces. This is not to say that the Cubans regarded the struggle in the mountains as a peasant war; essentially it would be a revolutionary partisan war which the peasants would support and which some would gradually join.11
There were other, equally weighty reasons in favor of waging war in the countryside; a war which would be expanded to the small cities and, in the end, be carried to the metropolitan centers. "As we know," Debray wrote, "the mountain proletarianizes the bourgeois and peasant elements, and the city can bourgeoisify the proletarians."12 The spokesmen of the Cuban revolution regarded the urban working class on the whole as a conservative element and they did not except the Communist parties. Living conditions in the towns were fundamentally different from those prevailing in the countryside; even the best comrades were corrupted in the cities, infected by alien patterns of thought. Life in town was tantamount to an "objective betrayal." The guerrilla movement was the real proletariat, with nothing to lose; the guerrilla leadership in the towns or aboard was the "guerrilla bourgeoisie." The city was the place where politics were made, the countryside the scene of revolutionary action. And the guerrillas, needless to say, wanted to get away from urban politics. Unitl about 1965 Debray believed that it might be possible to win over most Communist parties to the idea of the armed struggle and that this would lead, of necessity, to the old-guard Communist leadership of mere politicians being replaced by a younger, more dynamic leadership. Only after the setbacks in Venezuela and elsewhere was he inclined to write off the Communists as altogether hopeless. He regarded the guerrillas as representing the interests of the proletariat even if their social background was anything but proletarian.
Guevara's handbook of guerrilla warfare contains much practical combat advice: how terrain should affect an attack against an enemy convoy or position; the order of fire in battle; the establishment of a good supply system and medical service; the planning of acts of sabotage; the setting up of a war industry in the liberated zones. Special sections deal with the role of women in the struggle, with the conduct of propaganda, the establishment of an intelligence network, the civil organization of the insurrectional movement. But there is not much that is novel in these suggestions. What Castro and Guevara knew about guerrilla combat, they had learnt from Alberto Bayo, a native Cuban, who had emigrated to Spain and acquired his expertise in the war against Abdel Krim. Bayo served as an air force officer in the Spanish Civil War, later moved to Mexico where, in 1955, he gave a crash training course to the insurgents about to embark on their expedition to Cuba. His instruction manual, 150 Questions to a Guerrilla, was widely read (among the Weathermen, for instance) and contained a wealth of practical information.13 Bayo died in 1967, having attained the rank of "commandante," the highest in the Cuban army.
Guevara noted three stages in guerrilla warfare; first, the tactical defense, when the small guerrilla force would be hunted by superior enemy forces; gradually, the point of equilibrium, when the possibilities of action for both the guerrillas and the enemy become equalized. At this point, large columns would be employed by the guerrillas in a war of movement; this would not replace the guerrilla war but would merely be guerrilla warfare on a larger scale — something akin to Mao's "mobile warfare." Finally, a popular army would crystallize, overrun the government forces and seize the big cities. The critical period, as Guevara saw it, is the very early one, and he posited three preconditions for the guerrilla's survival — constant mobility, constant vigilance and constant distrust.14 These are sensible observations but guerrilla fighters throughout the ages have instinctively known these home truths, and they were noted by many writers before Guevara,
Of greater interest are his remarks about the human, psychological factor, even though his thoughts on this subject emerge only incidentally from his writings. Emphatic stress is given to the "political will" and "decision": "Generally, guerrilla warfare starts from a well-considered act of will; some chief with prestige starts an uprising for the salvation of his people, beginning his work in difficult conditions in a foreign country." But what if there should be no great leader such as Fidel? Guevara's answer is simple but not altogether convincing. The leaders would learn the art of warfare in the practice of war itself — struggle is the greatest teacher. In short, Napoleon's on s'engage, puis on voit. Religious terminology is frequently invoked, reference is made to a "special kind of Jesuitism"; the revolutionary, clandestinely preparing for war "should be a complete ascetic." There is much preoccupation with honor, courage, vengeance, hatred and death; hatred for the enemy drives a man beyond his physical limits and transforms him into an effective, selective and cold machine for killing—"our soldiers have to be that way." Or elsewhere, "Death will be welcome to us wherever it will surprise us if only our call will be taken up by the others. . . ." Or, on another occasion, the reference is to "the people willing to sacrifice itself in a nuclear war so that its ashes might serve as the cement for a new society. . . ."15
These are appeals by a prophet or a mystic, reminiscent of D'Annunzio or Codreanu rather than Lenin or Trotsky. They lead us a little closer to the metapolitics of Cuban guerrilla doctrine. It is not of course that Fidel was a paradigm of asceticism or that the guerrillas all wanted to commit suicide. But there certainly is a revolutionary romanticism, with its pessimistic, even tragic undertones, to which Raoul Castro and others have referred.16 Purity is the ideal, revolution is a mystical adventure, a struggle to the death for something enigmatical. Although these observations refer more to Guevara (and to Camilo Torres, about whom more below) than to Fidel Castro, almost all Latin American revolutionaries have certain features in common: their character and mental makeup present a curious mixture of contradictory qualities, admirable and not so admirable. In many ways they were the most attractive revolutionary heroes to have emerged in Latin America; enthusiastic, courageous, idealistic, willing to make sacrifices, genuinely concerned about the fate of the poor, impatient with bureaucracy. They had a sense of mission and were free of the corruption and the egotism of the society surrounding them. They became the heroes of many of the best young people in Latin America and beyond. But there was another side to it. Their heroism was by no means free of machismo or showing off, their concern for the poor was paternalistic, they were anything but democrats and the idea that the masses could or should be trusted in free elections was quite alien to them. The dividing line between selfless heroic action, caudillismo, terrorism, and gangsterism has never been quite distinct in Latin America and the same lack of delineation was true of the Cuban revolutionaries. Castro, who began his career as a university gun fighter, wrote about the companions of his youth:
. . . the young men who, moved by natural yearning and the legend of a heroic era, longed for a revolution that had not taken place and at the time could not be started. Many of those victims of deceit who died as gangsters could very well be heroes today.17
Conversely, it would appear that many, perhaps most, of the apostles of Communism, Latin American style, in the late 1950s and 1960s could with equal ease have become fighters for Fascism, Latin American style, twenty years earlier. This applies to elements in their ideology and traits in their character alike. They were children of their time; in the last resort action was more important than ideologies which had always been imported to Latin America anyway. One element remained constant — nationalism, populist and elitist at the same time; the rest was given to continual change, according to the prevailing intellectual fashion. It is quite true, as Theodore Draper has noted, that ideologically Castroism never lived a life of its own:
historically, it is a leader in search of a movement, a movement in search of power, and power in search of an ideology. From its origins to today, it has had the same leader and the same "road to power" but it has changed its ideology.18 ... A caudillist movement of a new type, it uses power not for power's sake and needs an ideology to justify power ideologically, a mixture of the Latin American revolutionary tradition and European communist elements.19
The apparent break in the ideological continuity of Castroism can be understood only against this background. The same goes for the constant changes in doctrine, the debates whether objective conditions were of any importance for a revolutionary, whether armed struggle was the inevitable road to power everywhere, whether Cuba was an example for the whole of Latin America. There is, as already noted, a great and growing discrepancy between the doctrine of Castroism as it developed after 1960 and the realities of the Cuban revolution. It is true that similar discrepancies exist between the doctrines of all revolutions and the real course of events, but it is particularly striking in the case of Cuba. The Castroist doctrine is a myth, which is not to say that it is irrelevant. Taking the Castroist doctrine of revolution at face value, one would never glean the facts that Castro and his comrades had not originally intended to launch guerrilla warfare, that the "masses" played an insignificant role in the fighting, that, generally speaking, there was little fighting at all, that the Batista regime collapsed, in the final resort, because it was rotten to the core and not because the insurgents were so strong. There is no recognition of the fact that there was relative prosperity in Cuba at the time and even relative freedom; Castro's Sierra Maestra appeal for a rising was reported in the Havana press.20 It is never acknowledged that Castro's intelligent manipulation of the mass media (including the foreign press and television) was of the greatest importance, that he received decisive financial help from bourgeois political leaders inside and outside Cuba, that America turned against Batista and imposed an arms embargo. The importance of the revolutionary struggle in the towns, which involved more fighting and cost more lives than in the countryside, is systematically played down in Castroist literature. A Marxist critic later wrote that Fidel's victory over Batista's army was not achieved by force of arms; corruption, the great Cuban vested interests, the Church, and in the final analysis, Yanqui imperialism, all assisted in Batista's defeat.21 In moments of candor, Cuban official sources have provided explanations that come close to this analysis: that the revolution was won largely because of Castro; that U.S. imperialism was disorientated; that support was given by a large segment of the bourgeoisie and some big landowners; and lastly, that most sections of Cuba's peasants were proletarianized. Only the last part of this official formula is quasi-Marxist in character and it is also the one which is incorrect. In short, the revolution prevailed in Cuba because of a unique set of circumstances, and thus attempts to reproduce it elsewhere in Latin America were bound to fail — not for lack of "objective revolutionary situations" or courageous guerrilla leaders, but because it was unlikely that the United States or the non-Communist circles would support a movement of this kind in the post-Cuban situation. By 1965 one observer noted that the counterinsurrectionists knew more about guerrilla warfare than the guerrillas themselves.
The orthodox Communists rejected Castro's "adventurism," partly because they opposed his policy for tactical reasons, but mainly because they could not accept the subordination of the party apparatus to the military leaders. The polemics usually proceeded by proxy: Castro did not want to attack Moscow openly so instead accused the Latin American Communists of cowardice — for not supporting Douglas Bravo's guerrilla operations in Venezuela, for instance. The Latin American Communists on the other hand were reluctant to engage in a dispute with the Cubans because of their tremendous prestige in radical circles all over the continent. In the circumstances, Debray became the main butt for their attacks; he was merely an unofficial spokesman of the regime and could be criticized with greater impunity. Inter alia Debray was charged with not presenting a detailed Marxist class analysis in his writings, with trying to prescribe for the whole continent, with not taking into account decisive local peculiarities, with "liquidating" theory, with having a wrong model of revolution. It was pointed out to Debray that the armed struggle was no panacea; it did not necessarily unite the revolutionaries as events in Venezuela and elsewhere had shown. It was explained to him that urban revolutionaries did not enjoy a dolce vita, that he was an "ultra-voluntarist,' an elitist, distrustful of the masses.22
Some of this criticism was quite to the point. Castro, Guevara and 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. Some criticism was correct but irrelevant: all revolutionaries are elitists and voluntarists even though some admit this more openly than others. Other charges were quite unfounded: a Marxist class analysis of Latin American society, however interesting per se, was not, as experience proved, the answer to the feasibility of a revolution. The Cuban experience demonstrated that the "subjective" factor was of decisive importance, that revolutionary war was a contest of will: if Batista lost his nerve while Fidel maintained supreme self-confidence, this had little to do with the social tensions in Cuban society. Tensions exist in every society and it would be impossible to prove that there were more tensions in Cuba than elsewhere in Latin America. Orthodox Marxists could argue that the Cuban experience was unique, an exception, but the exception had been successful, whereas guerrilla movements operating in objectively favorable conditions had failed.
The Castroist-Guevaraist doctrine was most fashionable throughout Latin America until about 1968, the year after Guevara's failure in Bolivia. In the years that followed, Cuba began to toe the Soviet line more closely (a fact for which Soviet economic pressure might accoun t in part). The Cuban leaders also lost some of their illusions about an imminent victory of the revolution in Latin America in view of the guerrillas' minimal progress on the continent; the revolutionary spirit of 1960-1968 gave way to internal splits, interminable polemics, and mutual recriminations. Ironically, Castro, who had bitterly attacked the Communist parties because most of them had not opted for the armed struggle, found himself by 1970 at the receiving end of similar charges. Douglas Bravo contended that Cuba had retreated, declared a truce, choosing to sacrifice the revolutionary cause in favor of economic development. Cuba, he argued, had refused to unleash a war on the grand scale. True, Cuba would be lost in such a war but the Cuban revolutionaries would be able to carry the revolutionary struggle to other Latin American countries.23 The Cuban leaders were in no mood to accept such advice; they preferred the establishment of closer relations with nationalist regimes, such as in Peru, which had carried out "progressive changes." Finally, the vacilations of Cuba's overall political strategy quite apart, Cuba's prestige declined among those who had enthusiastically welcomed the revolution a decade earlier. As they saw it, the great promise of 1960 had not been quite fulfilled, the regime had become bureaucratized despite all the good intentions, the revolutionary spirit was slowly petering out. It was still regarded as a progressive regime, but the image of Cuba no longer quickened the heart.
Debray's approach also changed markedly over the years. After his release from a Bolivian prison, he went to Chile, eventually returning to France where he joined the socialists. In La Critique des Armes, published in 1974, he stated that the hypothesis he had previously advanced had been belied by experience. The theory of foci had been wrong insofar as it had dissociated the military from the political, the clandestine from the legal, struggle. Debray now considered the political training of cadres and contact with the masses as of paramount importance. One had to return to the ABC of the great revolutionary teachers, beginning with Marx. For the zealous revolutionaries who continued to believe in theories he had advocated only a few years earlier, he felt nothing but contempt: "Schizophrenia as a norm of organization is the last stage of individual megalomania." He saw nothing but irresponsibility and revolutionary delirium in their pronouncements and noted sarcastically that the revolutionary phrase begins its flight, like the owl of Minerva, when night falls and when revolution has reached the stage of agony.24
Thus ended a chapter in the history of Latin American revolutionary doctrine. The same Debray, who had rejected the very idea of the urban guerrilla in 1965, now came to regard the Tupamaros as the most intelligent and politically sophisticated of all Latin American guerrillas — but even they were defeated. Venezuela, as he saw it, had acquired a hypertrophied and omnipresent repressive apparatus, but despite this, it still functioned as a liberal republic with elections and a normal political life; in these conditions, too, revolutionary violence failed.25 He had come back full circle in 1974, to the position adopted all along by Communist leaders like Prestes or by Guevara in 1960 before he announced the inevitability of the armed struggle.
Although the Cuban leaders were at the very center of the debate on revolutionary strategy, they had no monopoly in this field. The political splits of the Latin American radicals into dozens of factions and hundreds of groupuscules were reflected in a bewildering multitude of theses and platforms; even an encyclopedia would not do them justice. They ranged from those who advocated cooperation with "progressive" bourgeois-nationalist groups within a parliamentary framework, to the Posadistas, a Trotskyite faction, who took the Soviet Union to task for not waging nuclear war. Of the guerrilla ideologists only the advocates of urban terrorism deserve more than cursory mention; the views of the others can be summarized briefly, since they coincide, broadly speaking, with the concepts developed by Fidel, Guevara and Debray.
Douglas Bravo, the Venezuelan guerrilla commander, was in the forefront of the armed struggle on the continent for several years. A former leading Communist, who broke with the party, he established his first rural foco in 1962. The conditions facing him and his men differed in some important respects from those in Cuba: there was a greater degree of urbanization in Venezuela, where more than sixty percent of the population lived in cities; the enemy confronting the insurgents was not a Batista but a democratically elected mass party, the Acción Democratica. Guerrilla strategy manifested itself 011 the one hand in collaboration with criminal elements and the indiscriminate use of terror (such as attacks against trains carrying urban holiday-makers). The slogan was to kill at least one policeman a day. Since the policemen were usually of lower class background than the guerrillas, this topsy-turvy class struggle did not always endear them to the very groups they wanted to win over. Bravo's manifestos on the other hand were quite moderate; one would look in vain for any radical program of social change. He demanded agrarian reform and criticized the government for not conducting a friendlier policy vis-à-vis Cuba and North Vietnam. He referred at length to the glorious struggle for national liberation of 1810 and the fight against Yanqui imperialism, but these same motifs could be found in the programs of most Latin American parties.26
In later years the guerrilla movement split and some of Bravo's erstwhile lieutenants sought explanations for the mistakes committed: the guerrillas could have won in 1962, said Teodora Pet koff, if they had combined the armed struggle in the towns with an insurrection in the army. The decisive battles were fought in the cities, not in the countryside, where the rural guerrillas could not survive without help from the towns. Hence the conclusion drawn by another Venezuelan guerrilla leader: in future it would be necessary to concentrate on the urban centers, building a powerful civilian and military base on the strength of clearly formulated, concrete political goals. Foreign models were only of limited assistance and a specific Venezuelan road to socialism would have to be developed.27
Despite the fact that Peru was far more rural in character than Venezuela the Peruvian guerrilla leaders, Hector Bejar and Hugo Blanco, reached very similar conclusions when they too looked back on the reasons for their failure. Bejar wrote that the guerrillas had fought in the forests, while the peasant population was concentrated in valleys and high zones; unless they mastered the tactics of operating on high open plateaus, they would have to stay in the forests, militarily secure but politically ineffective. More importantly, "our attitude was based on an underestimation of the cities," therewith blocking the road to successful revolutionary agitation among the urban masses. He also critically reappraised the apolitical attitude of the guerrillas: "Our groups were oriented towards action and found in it their only reason for existence,"28 Bejar mentioned in passing yet another important handicap: the cultural gap between the city-born, educated guerrillas and the campesinos was enormous. Quite literally, they did not speak the same language; the former, with a very few exceptions, did not understand Quechua (the Indian language) and the latter hardly spoke any Spanish.
Hugo Blanco attained fame as a successful organizer of peasant associations. The struggle for land control was carried out under his leadership, with the slogan Tierra ο Muerte (Land or Death). These associations were to be the nucleus of a new society, they would run their own schools, courts of justice, health services. To all intents and purposes they would constitute a "dual power" on the lines of the Soviets in Petrograd in 1917. But again, in retrospect, Blanco admitted that the basic weakness of the guerrilla struggle had been its lack of support by a mass party: "We did not attach sufficient importance to the fundamental role of the party." The peasantry in Peru, Blanco said, was the major revolutionary force, but in the long run, once they were given land, they would become bourgeois. In the final analysis, therefore, the working class was the only guarantor of a socialist revolution.29
Camilo Torres, the revolutionary priest, who joined the Colombian guerrillas, made no major theoretical contribution to the actual conduct of guerrilla warfare; he was killed in the very first engagement in which he took part. His writings were devoted to the necessity of implementing social change and land reform, and to attacks against the establishment of the Catholic Church, which identified itself with the propertied classes. He tried to prove that the revolution was not just compatible with Christian ethics but was a Christian imperative.30 He realized that the precondition for the success of the revolutionary cause lay in a united front of the various opposition forces who were engaged in intense internal feuds. But his great prestige as the most eloquent spokesman of the left was quite insufficient to achieve this aim; the Colombian insurgents, more than any other Latin American guerrilla movement, remained deeply split and frequently engaged in bloody purges of their own ranks. They probably lost more of their cadres in killing each other than by enemy action.31
During the late 1960s the center of gravity in Latin American guerrilla fighting shifted from the countryside to the cities and this soon gave rise to the new doctrine of the "urban guerrilla." The basic idea was of course as old as the hills, and in Latin America in particular there was a hallowed tradition of urban insurrection, assassination and kidnappings. A radical critique of rural guerrilla fighting was provided by the Bolivian Trotskyite leader, Guillermo Lora: the guerrillas in Bolivia (and elsewhere) were an alien body in the countryside. As Guevara wrote in his Bolivian diary: the campesinos were "impenetrable like stones." When one talked to them one could not be sure whether or not they were ridiculing the guerrillas. Revolutionary impatience had been the reason for neglecting political work among the peasants; but, even if the guerrillas had succeeded in raising the banner of truth in a whole district, they would still have failed because they were cut off from the workers in the cities. Guerrilla "impertinence and adventurism," therefore, made a decisive contribution to the defeat of the whole left. As for the Cuban model with Castro as an undisputed leader of the Latin American revolution, this was according to Lora as much an imposition as the Russian Communists' pretensions after 1917 to dominate the international working-class movement.32
Michael Collins and Menahem Begin were "urban guerrillas" as, in a way, were many nineteenth-century revolutionaries. But the nineteenth-century insurgents believed in golpismo, the seizure of power following one short, violent battle. This belief had been shared by the old IRA in 1916. The Irgun believed that the struggle would be a protracted one but it did not develop any specific new guerrilla doctrine. In Venezuela there had been urban terror on a large scale during the early 1960s; in Caracas in 1963 the insurgents came very near to victory. Defeated, they transferred their operations to the countryside. It was only after the spectacular failure of Guevara in Bolivia, and the earlier setbacks in Peru, Venezuela and elsewhere that urban terror in Latin America came into its own. Cuban revolutionary doctrine was inconsistent on the subject; although the towns were rejected as the grave of the revolutionaries, there are occasional references in the writings of Guevara and others to the unjustified neglect of urban operations. Mention has been made of the fact that the Cubans must have been aware of the fact that they owed far more of their eventual success to assistance from sympathizers in the towns than they were willing to admit.
If the Cubans were opposed to "urban guerrilla" warfare but did not altogether exclude it, few of the advocates of urban terrorism rejected rural guerrilla operations in principle. It was simply a matter of different conditions and priorities. They considered their city-based operations either as the first stage of a general insurrectionary movement or as part of an insurrectionary pincer movement based on the cities and the countryside. The starting point for an "urban guerrilla" doctrine was the undisputed fact that the rural guerrilla movements had been unsuccessful on the whole. They pointed to basic social and demographic facts which their predecessors ignored to their detriment. Latin America has not only the highest rate of population growth in the world but also the fastest rate of urbanization and there is an enormous, constant inflow of poor, unskilled, jobless people to the towns.33 Of the population of Argentina, forty-five percent live in Greater Buenos Aires; forty-six percent of all Uruguayans reside in Greater Montevideo. The population of Mexico City and Säo Paulo is nearly ten million, and Rio de Janeiro will have twelve million inhabitants by 1980. In view of these facts, the idea of the countryside "encircling" the cities seemed outdated, however propitious the "objective" revolutionary situation in the villages. "Urban guerrilla" strategy is based on the recognition of the fact that the political-military-economic center of power is in the great conurbations, that it could and should be attacked there, not from the periphery.34
The first, but also the least known of the advocates of this strategy was Abraham Guillen, an "anarcho-Marxist" (Hodges) of Spanish origin, who settled in Uruguay, after working for many years in Argentina. He did not exclude cooperation with the rural milizias but did maintain that in highly urbanized countries revolutionary battles ought to be waged in the urban areas "for the revolutionary potential is where the population is."35 These observations referred primarily to Uruguay and Argentina; in Brazil, on the other hand, revolutionary warfare should preferably be rural (Guillén later revised his views and criticized Marighela for assigning a merely tactical character to the urban guerrillas and strategic significance to the rural guerrillas). Guillén argued that Carlos Lamarca (the other important Brazilian urban terrorist leader) would not have been killed had he stayed among the nine million inhabitants of Säo Paulo instead of venturing into the countryside, where he was betrayed by a hostile population.36 To endure the struggle the small armed minority would have to lead a consistently clandestine existence with the support of the population. Guillén does not clarify how this contradiction, clandestine existence and mass support, might be overcome in practice. Their basic principle should be to live separately and fight together. Urban guerrillas should use light arms, but machine guns and bazookas would have to be employed as well to give them the advantages enjoyed by a highly mobile infantry. They should not try to seize large objectives and engage in "Homeric battles" but concentrate on small, successive actions. As a result of facing a hundred guerrilla cells of five persons, the police would have to cede terrain, especially at night: "If at night the city belongs to the guerrilla and, in part, to the police by day, then in the end the war will be won by whoever endures longest."37
Writing shortly after the Paris events of May 1968, Guillén attributed a leading role in the revolutionary process to the students; he was one of the few Latin American guerrilla strategists to give them first place in the list of revolutionary forces. (Students were, of course, the strongest element in most guerrilla movements but guerrilla strategists usually felt self-conscious about this fact and preferred not to mention it.) The support of eighty percent of the population was needed according to Guillen. If they received such support, the guerrillas could win the war even though imperialism held an overall superiority of a thousand to one; for at a given place and time the guerrillas could still be superior to the enemy in numbers and firepower by five to one. Guillen agreed with the Guevara-Debray thesis about the role of the vanguard. In Brazil there was no working-class vanguard, but there was a Marxist vanguard of professional revolutionaries and, in the final analysis, it was of no importance from which class the cadres hailed. Guillen's impact on the Tupamaros was considerable in the early years of their struggle but he was by no means their uncritical admirer. He repeatedly dwelled on certain errors, tactical and fundamental, which he thought they committed.38 They had rented houses in the cement jungles of Montevideo, thus establishing a "heavy rearguard" and "fixed fronts" for billeting, food, medical supplies and armaments. This exposed them to mass detentions and the seizure of their arms. They had excelled during the first hit-and-run phase of the struggle but then failed to escalate their operations by using larger units. Such advice smacks of armchair strategy. The main problem for all "urban guerrillas" was one of broadening their ranks. While their cadres were few and the scale of their operations small, they were relatively secure. The more numerous they became, the more difficult were the problems of housing and supply, and the easier they could be identified and captured.
Guillén opposed unnecessary violence: in a country in which the death penalty had been abolished, it was self-defeating to condemn to death even the most hated enemies of the people. A popular army that was not a symbol of justice, equality, liberty and security could not win popular support in the struggle against a dehumanized tyranny. Hence his opposition to the Tupamaros' "prisons of the people," to indiscriminate execution of hostages, to the use of violence against subordinates: surely there was little point in defeating one despotism only to replace it by another. Guillén opposed the cult of leadership (of which, however, the Tupamaros were much freer than other Latin American guerrilla movements), and he complained about their ideological shortcomings. In many ways they had become overly professionalized and militarized, and did not really know what kind of revolution they wanted. On the one hand they forbade their members to criticize the pro-Moscow Communists, on the other they gave publicity to conservative nationalists. The kidnapping of the alleged CIA agent Dan Mitrione was a success, his execution a mistake. When the Brazilian consul in Uruguay was kidnapped, his wife appeared as a heroine of love and marital fidelity: "Every cruzeiro she collected" in an appeal for his release "was a vote against the Tupamaros and indirectly against the Brazilian guerrillas." By demanding large sums of money for political hostages, the Tupamaros came perilously close to resembling a political Mafia. There was a historical irony about would-be liberators who indirectly lived off the surplus of the very people they wanted to liberate.
In later years, Guillén became more appreciative of the operations of the Chilean MIR and the Argentinian ERP, who demonstrated their ability to mobilize large masses, and who, unlike the Tupamaros, were more critical of both right-wing nationalism and Communist opportunism. Towards the end of 1972 he was inclined to write off the Tupamaros altogether; they had served as the best revolutionary academy in the world with regard to "urban guerrilla" warfare but their tactical brilliance was unmatched by their strategy and politics. Their supreme command had become centralized, it knew all, said all, did all. Such excessive centralization proved fatal in the end.
Carlos Marighela is more famous than Guillen, partly in view of his active participation in the armed struggle, partly because his Minimanual was banned in so many countries — though it contained very little that was not known to any experienced urban terrorist. After he left the Communist party in 1966 he was primarily concerned with tactical questions. His views on strategy were quite inconsistent: in 1966 he regarded guerrilla warfare merely as one form of mass resistance and did not expect that it would be the signal for a popular rising; he thought that the center of gravity should be in the countryside. Yet he proceeded to act quite differently.39 Three years later he still argued that the decisive battles should be fought in the rural districts (the "strategic area") and that the fighting in the city was tactical and complementary only.40 His own activities were however concentrated on the "complementary" front and he would frequently and incongruously refer to the strategic importance of the great conurbations.
Marighela's basic approach was as radical as that of Fidel and Guevara. Not only was it the duty of every revolutionary to make the revolution, not only was his single commitment to the revolution, not only did the guerrilla constitute both the political and military command of the revolution, "the urban guerrilla's reason for existence, the basic action in which he acts and survives, is to shoot" (Minimanual). Towards the end of his life, he no longer revealed any interest in political goals, let alone political agitation. Robert Moss rightly noted that his later writings read like manuals of military drill, not political manifestos.41 A left-wing Brazilian critic later wrote that the "fetishist attachment" to, and the overestimation of, unlimited terrorism led to confusion, profound mistakes and, ultimately, to defeat.42 Marighela's approach, very briefly, was one of provocation, compelling the enemy to "transform the political situation into a military one." He assumed that, in the process, the government would alienate large sections of the population, particularly the intelligentsia and the clergy. North American imperialism would have to be called in for help, and this would add to the popularity of the insurgents' struggle. The fundamental objective was to shake the basis upon which the system rested — the Rio-São Paulo-Belo Horizonte triangle (whose baseline runs from Rio to São Paulo) — for it was there that the economic, political and military power was concentrated. In Mari ghela's scheme, a great deal of freedom of action was left to the small units; they were to decide whether to launch an attack without reference to the high command. They were perfectly entitled to assassinate not just the commanders of the security forces but also low-ranking "agents." The struggle should proceed on three fronts — the guerrilla front, the mass front (meaning a combat front, not agitation among the masses) and the support network. Ideally, all these fronts ought to be equally effective, but Marighela realized that the revolutionary movement was bound to develop unevenly. He insisted that the constantly expanding guerrilla front carry out a scorched-earth policy to create alarm among the dictators. His aversion to any bureaucratic hierarchy dominated by apparatchiki came to the fore time and again: in the revolutionary organization only missions and operations were to be prized, not rank and position; only those prepared to participate actively in the struggle and bear the sacrifices had the right to be leaders. No complex chain of command, no political commissars or supervisors should be set up; a strategic command and regional coordination groups would direct the military organization. The regional command, in Marighela's scheme, would not be allowed permanent contact with the mobile units: no one should know all about everything and everybody. Like many other guerrilla leaders before him, Marighela stressed the importance of training ("everything depends on marksmanship"). The personal qualities needed by an urban guerrilla were, above all, initiative, unlimited patience, and fortitude in adversity.
The basic unit in the urban guerrilla army "is the Bring group," consisting of no more than four or five people; a "firing team" constituted two such groups operating separately. Motorization was absolutely essential in the logistics of urban terrorism. The great advantages for the urban guerrilla were surprise in attack, a better knowledge of the terrain, greater mobility and speed, a better information network. Basic tactics always employed the hit-and-run principle, to attack and to get away. Attacks should be launched from all directions, in an endless series of unforeseeable operations, thereby preventing the enemy from concentrating his apparatus of repression; combat and decisive battle should always be avoided. Bank raids, Marighela noted, were the most popular form of action: "we have almost made them a kind of entrance exam for apprenticeship in the technique of revolutionary war."43 In addition there were to be ambushes, occupation of schools, factories and radio stations, provided that the withdrawal from fixed targets was well planned. The list of the urban guerrilla's revolutionary assignments was long and varied; he should defend popular demonstrations, liberate prisoners, seize weapons from army barracks, execute agents of the government, kidnap policemen and Americans. Public figures such as artists or sportsmen should be kidnapped only in special circumstances when one could be reasonably sure that popular opinion would favor such action. Transport should be sabotaged, oil pipelines cut, and fuel stocks systematically depleted. Bomb attacks should be undertaken only by those technically proficient, "but they may include destroying human lives." Spreading baseless rumors was part of the war of nerves waged by the guerrilla, and "information" should be supplied to foreign embassies, the U.N., human rights committees and other such bodies. Marighela ended his treatise with some reflections about the political results of urban guerrilla war: the people would blame the government not the terrorists for the various calamities that befell them. He apparently regarded democratic reforms as the great danger on the road to revolution, and he hoped that in the chaos brought about by the "urban guerrilla" war, elections would appear a mere farce and the political parties thoroughly discredited. The future society, as he saw it, would be built not by long-winded speakers and signers of resolutions but by those steeled in the struggle, an armed alliance of workers, peasants and students. The participation of intellectuals and artists in urban guerrilla warfare would be of the greatest advantage in the Brazilian context. Of great importance, too, was the support of the clergy, with regard to communication with the mass of the people. "This is especially true of workers, peasants and the women of the country [sic!]."
It is only too easy to detect major ideological inconsistencies in Marighela's writing. But there is no doubt whatsoever about his fanatical dedication to the cause, the burning fervor pervading all his writings, and it was this single-minded advocacy of the revolutionary deed which attracted so many young followers, willing to engage in suicidal operations. In theory, urban terror was only one element in a broader revolutionary strategy, but Marighela was not prepared to wait in vain for the rural guerrilla foci to emerge. So great was his preoccupation with his spectacular exploits in the towns that there was no time and energy left to promote insurgency in the countryside.
Marighela was killed in a gun battle in São Paulo in November 1969; his successor met a similar fate, and Captain Lamarca, the head of the even more militant and action-orientated VPR, was shot two years later. By 1971 the Brazilian security forces had defeated the terrorist challenge even though sporadic operations continued. Economic prosperity may have played a part in this, but the growing modernization of counterinsurgency and the use of torture by the police were more decisive. Debray mentions American financial assistance to the Brazilian police; according to the figures he provides, these grants amounted to a million dollars per year. Latin American guerrillas are known to have seized bigger sums in a single bank raid or as ransom for their hostages. Under torture, even some of the most trusted and steadfast guerrillas betrayed their comrades and, since urban terrorists were far more vulnerable than rural guerrillas once one link of the organizational chain was broken, they suffered irreparable losses. The Brazilian "urban guerrillas" could effect the downfall of a quasi-democratic regime and promote the emergence of a dictatorship which would not hesitate to apply torture and other means of counterterror, but they were not strong enough to survive the backlash. Torture evoked much protest but did not provide new recruits; the terrorists became more and more isolated, their heroism was admired but not emulated; even the left came to consider their action as, at best, pointless.
Urban terror in its most sophisticated and, for a while, most effective form, made its appearance in Uruguay, the very country which Guevara thought the least likely scene of armed struggle because it was the most democratic. The Tupamaros (MNL) came into being in 1963; the heyday of their movement was between 1968 and 1972.44 The movement did not, however, produce a great deal of literature; its programatic writings were few and far between. Their doctrine was first outlined in the form of a catechism, "Thirty questions to a Tupamaro," circulated in late 1967.45 The basic difference between the Tupamaros and other left-wing organizations was, as they put it, the emphasis on revolutionary action rather than theoretical statements; revolution is not made by the elegant phrase. Once accepted that the basic principles of socialist revolutions are given and tested in countries such as Cuba, "there is nothing more to discuss." An armed movement can and should start operating at any time. The Tupamaros shared the conviction of the early Fidel that action should proceed "with or without a party." Strategies adopted elsewhere in Latin America could not be applied to Uruguay if only because the prospects for rural foci were almost nonexistent. This was compensated for, however, by the fact that the enemy was exceedingly weak. The Uruguayan security forces counted only some twelve thousand men, badly equipped and trained, "one of the weakest organizations of repression in America." Montevideo was a city sufficiently large and polarized by social conflict to make it an arena more suited to the struggle than many other centers on the continent. Overcoming their distaste for political programs, the Tupamaros produced a platform in 1971 but it contains little of interest since it closely resembled the programs of other left-wing movements on the continent, referring to agrarian reform, the nationalization of big factories, the expulsion of "imperialism," etc. More revealing were their occasional pronouncements on practical issues. The Tupamaros specialized in kidnappings, and for three years the government failed to retrieve a single hostage. A Tupamaro leader stated that the kidnappings were part of an overall strategy designed both to obtain the release of captured comrades and to undermine the foundations of the regime.46 In contrast to other Latin American guerrilla movements, th e Tupamaros endeavored to keep out of the ideological quarrels of the left; this was probably easier for them to do successfully than for guerrillas elsewhere, for the Tupamaros had a virtual monopoly as far as guerrilla operations in Uruguay were concerned. They were the most internationally minded of all Latin American guerrillas and took up Camilo Torres's idea of a continental organization of armed forces. This internationalism was probably not unrelated to the exposed situation of Uruguay; they very much feared an invasion from Brazil or Argentina. Their social composition was even more middle and upper class than that of other guerrilla movements: these were the sons and daughters of the establishment. (According to an apocryphal account, a Ph.D degree was a conditio sine qua non for membership.) In 1971 they decided to join the other forces of the left in a broad popular front (frente amplio) to contest the election; their candidate, however, did rather badly, receiving less than twenty percent of the vote.
Organizationally, the experience of the Tupamaros is interesting; they managed to combine "strategic concentration" with tactical decentralization and compartamentación of the basic units. This made it difficult for the security forces to paralyze their organization despite frequent arrests. The Tupamaros were the only Latin American guerrillas to establish something akin to a countergovernment with "prisons of the people" and hospitals. They greatly undermined the authority of the government, disrupting the civil administration and the economic life of the country. Eventually, the democratic regime was replaced by a dictatorship, the army was brought in and liquidated Tupamaro activities with surprising ease. Some observers have explained the defeat of the Tupamaros in 1972 with reference to their mistaken decision of the previous year to open their ranks to many new members. But while this may have contributed to their downfall, the main reason was apparently the loss of revolutionary élan. Although the decline of the Tupamaros took place (unlike the downfall of the ALN in Brazil) against a background of severe economic crisis, there appears to be no close connection between guerrilla success (Cuba) or failure with the economic situation. Debray correctly noted in retrospect that, in digging the grave of liberal Uruguay, the Tupamaros also dug their own.47
The shift from rural guerrilla warfare to operations in the cities was by no means limited to Latin America. There had been urban terrorism in Palestine during the last years of the British Mandate, in Cyprus and Aden, and, of course, in Ireland. In some instances only sporadic actions by very small groups were involved, elsewhere the struggle lasted for years and was well organized. "Urban guerrilla" factions were plagued by internal division not less than their precursors in the countryside. Ulster and Spain provide typical examples. The IRA split into two factions in 1969: the more militant "Provisionals" advocated the establishment of a thirty-two county Democratic Socialist Republic based "on the 1916 Proclamation, justice and Christianity," and attacked the "Officials" of the IRA for their Leninist ideological bias and their failure to launch massive terrorist action in Northern Ireland.48 The Basque nationalist movement split into several factions. ETA VI propagated a Trotskyism of sorts, dissociating itself from Basque "bourgeois nationalism";49 while supporting terrorist operations in principle, it concentrated on political activities. Meanwhile ETA V, another faction of young militants (who derived their inspiration from the Algerian insurgents) engaged in spectacular terrorist acts, decrying the Marxist "vegetarianism" of their opponents. Unlike Guillen and Marighela few of the leaders of these urban terrorist groups attempted to provide a new doctrine, but they were very ready to furnish personal accounts of impressions and explanations. Pierre Vallieres, one of the leaders of the Quebec separatists (FLQ) combined Paris Left Bank anarcho-Communism with a Fanonian belief in the cathartic effects of revolutionary violence.50
For a somewhat more systematic ideological exposition and an attempt to present a coherent strategic concept one has to turn to the advocates of urban guerrilla warfare in West Germany and the United States, The groups involved were small in numbers, the effect of their operations insignificant, but they attracted a great deal of publicity and, at least to that extent, succeeded in achieving their aims. The Baader-Meinhof group (RAF — Rote Armee Fraktion), whose origins were in the student movement of the 1960s, stated in their first manifesto that the formation of armed resistance groups for purposes of "urban guerrilla" operations was both possible and justifiable.51 The overall aim was the seizure of power; the main obstacle facing the RAF was, according to the leaders of the group, the unfortunate fact that the public had been immunized by counterrevolutionary propaganda.52 With attacks against state oppression however, the masses could be revolutionized — bombs would help to awaken their consciousness. The state apparatus was to be demoralized, and partly paralyzed, thereby destroying the myth of its invulnerability and ubiquity.53 In the first phase of the struggle the main task would be to disseminate the idea of an armed struggle, to collect arms, and to organize small units of three, five or ten members. During the second phase the actions of a minority would turn into a mass struggle; with the support of the masses, militias were to be formed in those areas where the enemy was so much weakened as to be no longer able to concentrate his forces. Critics noted that the concept up to this stage closely followed Maoist strategy — simply transferring it to the cities.54 During the third and final phase, mass action (street demonstrations, strikes and barricades) would support the terror of the guerrilla units. Following the Latin American example, the RAF aimed at provoking the authorities into using increasingly brutal retaliation, massacres, and "Fascist concentration camps." The RAF regarded their struggle as part of a worldwide campaign against American imperialism, but this emphasis on the connections with national liberation movements in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America evoked criticism from within. A former leading member of the group, the lawyer Horst Mahler, noted that operations in such a context were no longer urban guerrilla warfare but the establishment of a fifth column of the Third World inside West Germany — a concept unlikely to appeal to the masses.55 He also criticized the elitist character of the RAF, "the total isolation from the masses." In their very first declarations the RAF announced the intention to combine legal political activity (Basisarbeit) with the armed struggle. Such a combination, however, soon came to be regarded as impractical be it only because it would not escape the attention of the police. Mahler argued that even though it was exceedingly difficult for individuals to engage simultaneously in legal and illegal activities, the RAF as such should have found a way to overcome this obstacle. The movement needed a (civilian) base; some of the operations initially envisaged against absentee landlords and speculators were highly appropriate and it had been a mistake for the RAF to discontinue them.
According to their original concept, the Baader-Meinhof group acknowledged that the revolutionary proletariat was the only force capable of guaranteeing victory over capitalism. In time the RAF would become the mailed fist of a (new) Communist party. This concept too fell by the wayside and was replaced by a new strategy which (Mahler claimed) was rooted in the anti-authoritarian phase of the student movement, with its counterculture, its "moralistic" attitude towards politics and other "petty bourgeois" ideological remnants.
The leaders of the RAF group were neither "instinctive" guerrillas nor well-educated theoreticians, but activists whose imagination had been caught by the armed struggle in other parts of the world. They wanted to apply the "lessons" of the Far East and Latin America to conditions that were utterly different. It would be unrewarding to submit their military concepts and political ideas to rigorous analysis. They never made it clear what kind of revolution they had in mind, or whether a political party was needed to carry it out. They argued that the urban insurrections of the past such as the Paris Commune or the Russian revolution of November 1917 were of no use as a model for Germany in the 1970s. But they never indicated a more appropriate historical model, nor did they develop one of their own. On the other hand, they were heirs to a German tradition in which at least lip service ought to be paid to theory. They could not possibly reject ideology as did segments of the American New Left. ("Fuck programs! The goal of the revolution is to abolish programs and turn spectators into actors. It's a do-it-yourself revolution. . . .56) What mattered in the last resort, however, was the thirst for action not a conviction based on "scientific theory."
But for the Germans' belief that all self-respecting terrorists needed a theory there were obvious similarities between the RAF and the small groups of white American "urban guerrillas" who developed out of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam demonstrations, and the university sit-ins. They were rooted in the age of radical chic when instructions for the fabrication of Molotov cocktails were featured on the cover of a journal dedicated to the critical study of English letters. Ideologically, these groups were inchoate and their manifestos were illiterate — the illiteracy of liberal, middle-class schools, not of the ghetto. Their common denominator was the destruction of the present political and social order, but beyond this it was a case of everyman-his-own-urban-guerrilla.
The main white "urban guerrilla' faction, the Weathermen, emerged when the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) split into three groups in late 1969. Many of its members had visited Cuba and Vietnam and wanted to bring the war back home: "We are adapting the classic guerrilla strategy of the Viet Cong and the urban guerrilla strategy of the Tupamaros to our own situation here in the most technically advanced country in the world."57
While guerrilla movements elsewhere fought for national liberation, the Weathermen maintained that in America the urban guerrilla has to be antinational. For the revolution to be defined in national terms within so extreme an oppressor nation as the U.S. would be tantamount to "imperialist national chauvinism," But there was at least one section of the American people to which the concept of national liberation was applicable. Hence the appeal to build a movement which would support the blacks who, in the past, had fought almost alone. The Weathermen contacted the Black Panthers but these rejected the call for a joint urban guerrilla war, instead suggesting a mere alliance.
The Weathermen were not sanguinely optimistic about the prospects of revolution in America; they saw it occurring, if at all, as a belated reaction to a successful world revolution. They were aware that it was pointless to appeal to workers or peasants, and they regarded the university campus as their main base. If Guevara (sic) had taught them that revolutionaries moved like fish in the sea, the alienation and contempt of the young people for America had created the ocean they needed. Guns and grass were united in the youth underground, freaks were revolutionaries and revolutionaries were freaks, as one of their communiqués put it. The manifestos of the Weathermen and of the SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army) betrayed the influence of a hedonistic counterculture; whatever they had learned from Guevara, it was not his appeal for an ascetic life. Making love, smoking dope and loading guns were all part of the revolutionary process, as they envisaged it. The "most potentially explosive conflict" brewing in America was between men and women and the program of the SLA stated expressis verbis that a system had to be created whereby people would not be forced to stay in personal relationships when they preferred to be free of them.58 The Weathermen's interest in politics was strictly limited; they were not concerned with training revolutionary cadres, let alone the education of the masses. The main aim was to scare and shock "honky America" and to this end all violent means, however barbaric, were appropriate. They approved of the murder by the Manson gang of the actress Sharon Tate, eight months' pregnant; to shoot a "genocidal robot policeman" was regarded as a sacred act.59 Subsequently, the Weathermen copied, without marked success, the strategy of certain black groups who saw the Lumpenproletariat and criminal elements as their natural recruits. Even later the SLA, with its emblem of a seven-headed cobra ("a i70,ooo-year-old sign signifying god and life"), aimed specifically at enlisting nonpolitical convicts into its ranks; they, after all, were only the victims of the system. What attracted a few young men and women (more women apparently than men) was not ideology but a life style, above all, "togetherness." A member later recalled that what had struck him was "that they were a family, a big very tight family. I wanted to be part of that. People were touching each other...."60
The aims of the black urban extremist groups by comparison were far more tangible. They did not complain about "our colossal alienation" but did demand lull employment, decent housing, education, and the power to determine the destiny of the black community. Some of them, such as the Cleaver faction of the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army, were advocates of urban terror. The policeman was the representative of the occupation army in the black ghetto; the weapon was needed to educate the masses. Negro youth were called upon to show their mettle by brandishing guns. America was to be burned and looted, to be cleansed with fire, blood and death. Founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, the Black Panthers were subsequently plagued by as much internal division as their white counterparts. Stokely Carmiehael, their erstwhile prime minister, a "cultural nationalist," was denounced for "not maturing to embrace" the ideology of the party, i.e., "the historical experience of Black people in America translated through Marxism-Leninism."61
The fullest exposition of their doctrine was provided by Eldridge Cleaver, minister of propaganda. Marxism-Leninism was an outgrowth of European problems and a new ideological synthesis was called for to suit American conditions. There was no ail-American proletariat just as there was no ail-American Lumpenproletariat. The working class, as he saw it, was the right wing of the proletariat, the Lumpen constituting the left wing. It was not the Lumpen who were the parasites, but the working class. The streets belonged to the Lumpen, and it was in the streets that the Lumpen would rebel. They could not strike because they had no secure relationship with the means of production: they had been locked outside the economy. Their immediate oppressor was the pig police who confronted them daily. Thus the Lumpen, who had been analyzed out of the revolution by the (white) Marxists-Leninists, would hit out at all the structures around them.62
The Cleaver faction was eventually ousted from the Black Panther party which, under Huey Newton, moved more and more towards community action. The Cleaverists on the other hand advocated the combination of above-ground political action with antipolice terror, bank robberies, the execution of businessmen and the kidnapping of diplomats. George Jackson, who was killed during an attempted jailbreak in August 1971, envisaged in his book Blood in My Eye (1972) resistance to the Fascist American government as a "fluid, mobile, self-impelled attrition of people's urban guerrilla activities lying in wait inside the black colony." Other spokesmen stressed that they regarded themselves as the "Babylonian equivalent" of the Tupamaros, Frelimo and the NLF.63 If there was only a thin line between bandits and revolutionaries this (they assured the flock) should not cause undue apprehension, for many famous revolutionaries had started their careers as bandits before becoming politicized. Furthermore, there were good tactical reasons for letting revolutionary acts seem like acts of banditry.64
The bark of the American "urban guerrilla" was considerably worse than his bite. By late 1970 the Weathermen had failed; the operations of the SLA in 1974 were no more than the actions of a few unstable individuals, the like of whom have always existed on the margins of a violent society. Eldridge Cleaver, after a prolonged stay in Algiers, discovered that the "Babylon" from which he had fled in anger and disgust had much to recommend itself. Thus the appeals to conduct "urban guerrilla warfare" petered out.
During its heyday urban terrorism had presented a problem for the American and West German police but politically it failed to become a force to be reckoned with. The white American revolutionaries, in the words of a friendly critic, were the children of middle-class families who knew no oppression. They substituted their own personal hang-ups and moods for the demands of "the people," claiming to speak for a people they had never met. The black militants were acting in a milieu far more congenial to violent action and their revendications were much less far-fetched. But they too found little sympathy for their cause within their community. Their protest was nationalist in inspiration, or, to be precise, racialist — a response to the racial oppression American Negroes had encountered throughout their history. The occasional invocations of Marxism should not be given too much weight, and the same goes, a fortiori, for the Weathermen and the SLA. Their problem was not the lack of freedom but a surfeit of freedom; their godfather was neither Lenin nor Mao but liberalism running wild.
Except when they were made in conjunction with separatist national movements, all attempts in the 1960s to conduct guerrilla warfare in the economically developed, industrialized societies of Western Europe and the United States generally failed. Guerrilla warfare was more successful in Africa against the remaining European colonial outposts. Most African countries attained national independence without an armed struggle but some did not, and it was in these parts that fighting occurred and that attempts were made to formulate a specific African guerrilla doctrine. Of the ideologists of armed struggle, Frantz Fanon, a native of Martinique and a psychiatrist by profession, was the most important by far — not so much as regards his actual impact on guerrilla warfare, but certainly with regard to the repercussions of his writings outside Africa. Fanon did comment on occasion on military issues in the narrow sense — such as the question of arms supply to the Algerian FLN (which had become difficult to secure following French counterinsurgency measures).65 But it was not for such technical advice that his fame spread; rather he provided a new ideology on the cathartic role of violence in the African revolution. Violence, as he saw it, was a cleansing force, liberating the African from his inferiority complex, his despair and inaction; it made him fearless and restored self-respect; it bound the Africans together as a whole.66 "Violence alone, violence committed by the people, violence organized and educated by its leaders makes it possible for the masses to understand social truths and gives the key to them. The Mau Mau insistence that each member of the group strike a blow at the victim was a step in the right direction, since it required each guerrilla to assume responsibility for the death of a settler. Marxism-Leninism was acceptable as far as it went, but it did not encompass the colonial situation, ignoring its racist aspects.
The idea of violence is central to Fanon's thought but he was a stranger to Africa, and it is interesting to note that he has been far more widely read and admired among American blacks than among Africans. He also had many white admirers among the European and American left even though certain aspects of his views were sometimes regarded as embarrassing or disturbing: in part because such murderous humanism was difficult to digest, and partly because the origins of the cult of violence were not, to put it cautiously, altogether respectable. It is not really material whether Fanon had been familiar with Sorel's writings67 — the uncomfortable fact still remained that the ideological precursors of Italian Fascism, such as Corradini, had already argued that the proletarian nation has a moral obligation to resort to noble violence. Mussolini himself had declared that there was a violence that liberated and a violence that enslaved, a moral violence on the one hand and a stupid, immoral violence on the other. Whereas Sorel had created his mystique of violence in the context of the struggle of a working-class vanguard, Fanon saw the peasantry and the Lumpenproletariat as the spontaneously revolutionary forces. The peasants, with nothing to lose and everything to gain, he argued, were the first to discover that violence paid off. The working class, however, pampered by the colonial regime, was in a comparatively privileged position. The Marxist idea about the history making role of the urban proletariat had been disputed before by Wright Mills and others: but Fanon went even beyond Bakunin in his enthusiasm for the role of "the hopeless dregs of humanity," the pimps, petty criminals, hooligans and prostitutes. He thought that their revolutionary potential was enormous and, if the insurgents did not give it full attention, colonialism would make use of it.68 This concept was not likely to endear him to the Communists and neither was his argument that there was "no true bourgeoisie" in Africa.
The critics argued that Fanon had got his facts wrong, that he brought confusion and division to the revolutionary movement.69 In fact, Fanon was more acute than his critics; the Lumpenproletariat (given a broader definition than his own) was about as patriotic as the rest of the population, and did play a part in the armed struggle. There were few workers in the guerrilla units simply because there were not many of them in Africa in the first place; the rank and file consisted of peasants. In other respects Fanon revealed a naïveté uncommon among students of the human psyche. He argued that the people who played a violent role in the national liberation would allow no one to set themselves up as "liberators"; one could hardly think of a more mistaken prediction of the political future of Africa. It is true that on various occasions he expressed grave misgivings about the political regimes likely to emerge after decolonization which, he feared, would only constitute a "minimal readaptation." He suspected that the new leaders would not heed his appeal to turn their backs on European civilization, to destroy European institutions, to make an end, not only to colonial rule, but also to the corruption of the settlers, to the brightly lit towns with their asphalt and garbage cans.
Fanon died at the early age of thirty-six. His influence on the African political elites was not lasting; their main interest was not in the cultural aspects of the African revolution; they were preoccupied with economic and administrative problems, or with simply bolstering their own positions. What Fanon had written on the evils of bureaucracy and one-party, one-leader dictatorships was not of the slightest use to them.70
Passing on to the writings of Amilcar Cabral, one descends from the rarified heights of existentialism to the well-trodden paths of Marxism-Leninism, from a Dostoyevskian novel to sober and unexciting political-socioeconomic analysis. Cabral, who hailed from the Cap Verde islands, was assassinated in Conakry in 1972 by political rivals. Like many other guerrilla leaders in the Portuguese colonies, he was of mixed mulatto rather than of pure Negro origin and, like Mondlane, the head of Frelimo, he married a white woman. He studied agriculture in Lisbon, became a Leninist, and for several years worked as an adviser to the Portuguese government in Africa. Cabral agreed with Fanon about the necessity of an armed struggle. Although he wrote from time to time about the liberating role of violence without which there could be no national liberation, he never engaged in the fetishization of violence. From time to time, he even submitted offers to the Portuguese authorities to negotiate a settlement. Like Fanon, he stressed the importance of the participation of African women in the struggle for liberation, and agreed with Guevara's thesis that there was no need to wait for a revolutionary situation, one could create it.71 In contrast to Fanon's emphasis on psychological and cultural issues, however, he was far more interested in economic development. While Fanon hardly ever mentioned the role of the political party in the struggle, this was a central issue for Cabral, whose assessment of the forces likely to support the armed struggle also differed greatly from that of Fanon.
To begin with Cabral and his comrades of PAIGC faced great difficulties in winning over the peasants. The slogan "the land to him who works it" could not be applied to Guinea-Bissau, as he admitted, because there the land did belong to the peasants; neither were there big land holdings — the land was village property. Without concentrations of foreign settlers (Cabral wrote), it was not at all easy to prove to the peasant that he was being exploited, as Fanon had argued.72 Extreme suffering alone did not produce the prise de conscience needed for the national liberation struggle.
Cabral's view on the role of the petty bourgeoisie in the armed struggle is of considerable interest; he admitted that in Guinea-Bissau, as in other parts of Africa, it played a leading role in the struggle. Yet, economically, it was without a power base and hence could not seize political power. The historical dilemma facing it was in Cabral's words either to betray the revolution or to commit suicide as a class.73 This assumption was not however shared by a close and very sympathetic observer of the Guinean scene, who, on the contrary, reached the conclusion that the lower middle class was the natural holder of power in tropical Africa because it was the only class possessing knowledge, know-how and organization.74
The political party which Cabral founded was organized according to the Leninist principles of "democratic centralism," and though its statutes provided for "collective leadership," all important decisions were taken by Cabral himself. He acted not only as head of the Central Committee, and as commander in chief, but also as secretary for political and foreign affairs. While expressing strong support for the Soviet Union, he tried not to become implicated in the Soviet conflicts with Cuba and China. The Chinese initially supported PAIGC but later grew markedly cooler in view of Cabral's "opportunism" vis-à-vis Moscow.
Cabral had no military experience when he launched the guerrilla war but he devoted more time and energy to providing guidelines for the armed struggle than most other African guerrilla leaders. PAIGC enjoyed several important advantages in its fight. The army facing it represented the weakest of all European colonial powers; when the insurrection broke out there were altogether one thousand Portuguese soldiers in Guinea-Bissau. (The total number of inhabitants was about half a million.) Furthermore, PAIGC had a permanent base in neighboring Conakry for the training of its cadres and for supplies. (There was no such base to support guerrilla warfare in the Cap Verde islands and no armed struggle took place there.) Early on in the campaign, almost one-half of Guinea-Bissau passed into the hands of the PAIGC. Admittedly, this was the less important part; the Portuguese had never really controlled the whole country, and Cabral noted that "we had established guerrilla bases even before the guerrilla struggle began." Within a year or two after the start of the war, Cabral's forces organized semiregular units and popular militias, and soon a Northern and Southern front came into being.75 The Portuguese forces were too few in number to engage in systematic on-the-ground attacks against rebel bases, and their air force insufficiently strong to inflict decisive damage on the rebels. The greatest obstacle with which PAIGC had to contend in the early phase of the struggle was the tribal structure of the population. There was no lack of enthusiasm to join the struggle, but guerrilla chieftains tended to act independently; there were, in Cabral's words, "isolationist tendencies.' The command decided to carry out a major purge and at a later stage it became official policy to appoint a member of one tribal group as commander of another.76 Furthermore, PAIGC had to contend with rival groups supported by Senegal. PAIGC carefully avoided criticizing religious beliefs and superstitions and did not ban the use of fetishes and amulets (Mezinhas), on the assumption that the guerrillas would soon learn that a "trench was the best amulet" (Cabral). It should be noted in passing that the religious issue was of considerable importance to most African liberation movements. Replying to European left-wing criticism, an Algerian writer stressed that in a colonial country, where the dominant religion was persecuted, rejection of Islam was a sign of snobbery on the part of a Western-assimilated, intellectual elite, who were not only detached from the people but neutralized and corrupted by the ideology of the oppressor.77 The journal of the FLN frequently noted that, of all the Islamic peoples, the Algerians were perhaps the most attached to their faith.78 But a distinction must be drawn between the Algerian rebels, most of whom were devout Muslims quite irrespective of whether Islam was "persecuted" or not, and the Marxist-Leninists, who tolerated religion for tactical reasons, hoping that sooner or later it would disappear.
Cabral's realistic approach can also be gauged from his attitude towards nationalism and Panafricanism. He was on close terms with other African revolutionary leaders, but unlike Fanon, or Nkrumah in his last years, he did not think that African unity was an aim attainable in the forseeable future. He was perhaps the most intelligent, certainly the most sober, of the African guerrilla leaders; comparisons with Guevara, therefore, seem a little far-fetched. Marxism-Leninism was the great formative influence in his youth, but when in later years he referred to the overriding importance of the "historical reality" of each people, the fact that social and national liberation were not for export, the necessity of conducting policy and warfare according to widely varying local and national conditions, these assessments reflected the maturing of a mind not given to slavish imitation of foreign models. Cabral paid his respects both to the Kremlin and the pope; but as the years passed, the specifically African elements in his thought reasserted themselves to a certain extent. Like all intellectuals in backward countries, he was a socialist, but not of the democratic-socialist variety. His socialism was largely synonymous with nationalism, anti-imperialism, and national liberation, an ideology very different from the European socialist tradition and impossible to define within the language of that tradition.
Many guerrilla wars took place in the Middle East and North Africa in the postwar period — from Algeria to Kurdistan, from southern Sudan to Dhofar in southern Arabia. But only the Palestinians in their struggle against the state of Israel developed a more or less coherent strategic doctrine. Its military models were highly eclectic in character; there were innumerable references to the lessons of China, Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria and other wars, even when these were of little relevance to Arab-Israeli conflict.79 In their choice of tactics, the Palestinians were more innovative: the Cubans apart, they were the first to hijack planes on a large scale; they dispatched letterbombs; they attacked Israeli nationals abroad and non-Israeli Jews. Their operations were launched from bases outside Israel and some were undertaken by foreigners rather than Arab nationals (the Lod airport massacre for instance). But these innovations would not be discussed on the theoretical level. On the contrary, the leading Palestinian organizations dissociated themselves from operations which made for bad publicity. They would be attributed to some new ad hoc organization, of which no one had heard before, and which would evanesce as suddenly as it appeared. Fatah doctrine adopted guerrilla warfare as the most suitable approach for the destruction of Israel; it was skeptical of the Arab governments' adherence to conventional warfare. The Palestinians did not trust the Arab governments on the assumption that even if they were to decide to go to war and succeed in defeating the Israelis, this would not result in the destruction of Israeli society — the ultimate aim of the Palestinians. Furthermore, the conflict had to be Palestinianized for psychological reasons: having tasted the bitterness of defeat, the shame ought to be wiped out by the Palestinians themselves. Echoing Fanon, the spokesmen of Fatah argued that violence has a therapeutic effect, inculcating courage, purifying the individual, and forging a nation.80 For a variety of reasons the Palestinians wanted to emulate the Cuban example. The wars in China and Vietnam, unlike the Palestinian struggle, had been sponsored by Communist parties; furthermore, Mao had uttered doubts as to whether a protracted war was at all possible in small countries. Conditions in Algeria had been different, where a great majority of the Arab inhabitants supported the FLN against a minority of French settlers. Moreover, unlike Algeria, most of Israel was a plain and thus unfavorable guerrilla territory. Again unlike Algeria, the insurrection had to be prepared for from outside the borders of the state.81
Palestinian Arab doctrine frequently referred to the formation of a "revolutionary vanguard," to a "revolutionary explosion," to various stages in the struggle for liberation, but these phrases were simply copied from other guerrilla movements. Less vague were the explanations about the aims: there would be a long series of small battles, the Israeli enemy would be worn down, the army would constantly have to deploy strong forces against the fedayeen. The financial burden would become intolerable, foreign investment would cease, immigration would be discouraged, and there would be growing political polarization within Israel. The rise in casualties would create a climate of confusion and fear, the "grievance community" would widen, and eventually the Israelis would realize that unless they successfully resisted Zionism, they would be crushed by it.82
The critics of the Palestinians have argued that theirs was neither a war of national liberation nor a guerrilla war. It was not a war of national liberation because the Palestinians did not want to liberate the inhabitants of Israel, but to replace them: it was, in other words, a conflict between two peoples for the same territory. The Palestinians counterclaimed that the Israelis are neither a nation nor a people. The Jews were to be thrown into the sea according to an earlier Palestinian guerrilla doctrine; after 1968 this slogan was no longer used. The aim was not physical destruction but merely the return of the Arab refugees and the establishment of a democratic, secular state. The slogan of the "democratic state," however, created further ideological difficulties: the guerrilla organizations had to insist at the same time on the Arab character of the future democratic state, intending it to be an inalienable part of the wider Arab homeland. Because the Palestinian movements failed to establish bases inside Israel, the guerrilla nature of their operations was open to dispute. If agents who were not Arabs were enlisted to hijack airplances that were not Israeli, this was certainly not a "people's war" in any meaningful way. The spokesmen of the Palestinians would answer that all that counted was the political effect, namely to publicize the Palestinian cause all over the world.
That the political content of Fatah doctrine remained vague was no mere accident. The ideologists of Al-Fatah declared that the aim of the movement was to bring together all the revolutionary forces engaged in the struggle for liberation, and that "Byzantine discussions " about the social structures to emerge after liberation were to be eschewed. Unless there was ideological neutrality, the patriotic effort would be dissipated and the Arab masses alienated: in a battle for survival ideological differences had to be put aside.83 Other Palestinian organizations, such as the two factions of the "Popular Front of the Liberation of Palestine" (PFLP and PDFLP) refused to accept such ideological neutralism. This group, originally known by the name ANM (Arab National Movement, Kau- miyun el arab) was founded in Beirut in the 1950s. Among its slogans, the concept of "vengeance," with its connotations of Arab tribal vengeance, featured prominently, and it was also known as the "fire and iron" group. In the words of its historian, the ANΜ gradually gave up these slogans under the pressure of charges of Fascism and fanaticism.84 They supported Nasserism at first but later many members announced that they had embraced "scientific socialism." In 1969 the group split into two factions — one led by Dr. Habash (PFLP), the other headed by Naif Hawatme. The doctrinal differences between the two factions were insubstantial, but Hawatme's PDFLP did place greater emphasis on political rather than terrorist activity; it also regarded itself as the more Marxist of the two groups, stressing its affinity with Cuban and Vietnamese socialism. In actual fact the cause of the split was not a clash of political views so much as a clash of temperaments between the leading figures. Both factions agreed on certain theoretical formulations, such as the necessity to conduct the war under the leadership of a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist party, and to transform the guerrilla war into a "people's war of liberation." In contrast to Fatah, they inveighed against Arab "reactionary circles," threatening to blow up installations in the oil-producing countries. On several occasions they even threatened that a revolution in the Arab world was the prerequisite for the liberation of Palestine. The leadership of the Palestinian resistance, as they saw it, had to be taken out of the hands of "petty bourgeois elements"; only the working class, in coalition with poor peasants, would safeguard the revolution.85
As so often, however, guerrilla practice was by no means coincident with guerrilla doctrine: the PFLP did not carry out its threats against Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, and no attempt was made to put working-class cadres at the helm of the guerrilla movement. If the PFLP spokesmen proclaimed that they did not fear the prospect of a third world war for they had nothing to lose, this assertion also has to be taken with a pinch of salt. Of all guerrilla movements in history, the Palestinian resistance groups appear the richest by far; the annual contributions by Arab governments were estimated in 1973 as being in the range of fifty to a hundred million dollars.86 The Arab guerrillas have more to lose than their chains. Neither PFLP nor PDFLP showed any intention of forming a Marxist-Leninist party, or of cooperating with the existing Communist parties.
There were many unique elements in the history of the Palestinian organizations. They became involved in large-scale fighting in their host countries (Jordan and Lebanon) which felt threatened by the emergence of a "state within a state." The Palestinians showed great aptitude in the conduct of propaganda warfare abroad; it was a major political victory that by the mid-1970s there was growing acceptance of the fact that the Palestine issue was not just a refugee problem but involved the restoration of a people's legitimate national rights. This achievement was not however the result of a successful guerrilla war but of the oil weapon and the increasing weight of Arab governments in international politics.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s guerrilla warfare was a topic of the greatest interest; one U.S. Marine Corps officer called the sixties "the decade of the guerrilla."87 Those recently engaged in guerrilla warfare were asked to make their thoughts and their experiences more widely known. Others like Kwame Nkrumah who had no obvious expertise in the field, practical or theoretical, nevertheless volunteered obiter dicta on the subject. Nkrumah wrote his book during his Conakry exile, shortly before his death.88 On the basis of various diagrams, he tried to show that colonialism was "primitive imperialism," Fascism was "extreme capitalism," that revolutionary warfare was the key to African freedom, and that a new African nation ought to be established within the continental framework. His blueprint envisaged the establishment of an All African People's Revolutionary Army (AAPRA) under the command of an All African People's Revolutionary Party. The main enemy was neo-colonialism, and though Nkrumah called for its unmasking, he finally restricted himself to innuendoes about certain, unnamed regimes. Nor did he elaborate in his Handbook on the fact that the guerrillas, in all probability, would haye to fight Africans rather than foreign neo-colonialists. Since Nkrumah had no firsthand knowledge of guerrilla warfare, the military sections of his book are not original; he borrowed quite indiscriminately from Mao, Castro, the Algerian and other guerrilla leaders. The resulting admixture was so vague that it could be applicable to every country and none. The Communists were ambivalent towards Nkrumah: they welcomed his attempt to apply Marxist-Leninist ideas to Africa, but were dismayed by his ideological pretensions, his claims to have established an original system ("Conscientism," "Nkrumahism"). In addition, there were differences on matters of substance; to give but one example — neo-colonialism for Nkrumah was "collective imperialism," whereas the Communists always emphasized the contradictions between the various imperialist powers.
Abdul Harris Nasution was not among the trailblazers of guerrilla warfare either, but he commanded more respect as a military authority, in view of his personal involvement. He was twenty-three years of age when the Japanese invaded his native Indonesia and had just been commissioned in the Netherlands Indies armies. He then served in the Civil Defense Forces established by the Japanese. In the war against the Dutch he first commanded a division and was later made chief of the operational staff of the Indonesian armed forces. Subsequently, as Indonesian minister of defense, he had considerable counterinsurgency experience. His guerrilla handbook, written in 1953, reminds one of Mao with the politics left out. As a precondition of success in guerrilla warfare, according to Nasution, the guerrilla's roots must lie in the people. The counterguerrilla had to try to sever the guerrilla from this base, not only by military operations but by political, psychological and economic action.89 He is not an uncritical admirer of guerrilla warfare, and time and again stressed its limitations: "How great were the setbacks and how great the amount of confusion and difficulty that befell us because we played the role of the guerrilla too long." In his view, guerrilla-mania (the lack of discipline, planning, the belief that everyone could fight as he wished) was the most dangerous enemy of the guerrilla movement, having the effect of a counterguerrilla movement. Like Mao, Nasution accepted the general fact that guerrilla warfare alone could not ensure victory; hopefully, it weakened the enemy by draining his resources. Final victory, as he saw it, could only be achieved by a regular army in a conventional war.90
An axiomatic statement of this kind might have been true with regard to China. But it certainly did not apply to Indonesia where resistance against the Dutch never proceeded beyond sporadic acts of violence. General Grivas's experience in Cyprus is further proof that generalizations about guerrilla warfare are of doubtful value; according to the classics of guerrilla warfare, it should never have happened because the territory was too small. Yet a handful of combatants, variously estimated between sixty and two hundred, who never had more than a hundred automatic weapons and five hundred to six hundred shotguns between them, sustained a fight against several divisions of British soldiers for four years and eventually ousted the British.91 Conditions were not propitious for a variety of reasons: EOKA was right wing whereas many Cypriots gravitated towards Communism; the Turkish minority needless to mention saw in the EOKA fighter the enemy par excellence. Metaphorically, EOKA was anything but a fish in a friendly ocean. One unique feature of guerrilla warfare in Cyprus was the smallness of the units involved, which only rarely exceeded eight to ten men. Grivas's original plan had been to concentrate his units in the Olympus and Pentadactylos mountains where the terrain seemed most suitable. But he soon changed his plan; most of the fighting proceeded in the lowlands, and eventually in the towns and the suburbs. On the basis of his experience, Grivas wrote that leadership was more important than terrain. Some of his best results were achieved in fiat and nearly treeless terrain: "It remains axiomatic that in guerrilla warfare, with able and courageous leadership, one can take on any undertaking, whatever the nature of the terrain."92 Most of his observations are in the mainstream of guerrilla doctrine: there is not set, textbook approach and no universal tactics, each case is special. Attacks should be sudden blows of short duration, boldly executed, and followed by instant and rapid withdrawal. The entire territory should be a single field of battle, without distinction between front and rear. The enemy should never know where one might strike. The overall strategy should be to wear the opponent down by prolonged attrition. All this was unexceptional but it is most unlikely that Grivas would have made any progress had he faced an enemy more resolute than the British forces in Cyprus. Britain was about to liquidate the last outposts of its empire in any event and, given these circumstances, even very slight armed resistance was bound to precipitate the process. General Grivas's experience shows that guerrilla operations can be launched in the most unlikely conditions, but they are likely to succeed only if the enemy is either weak or refuses to take drastic action. There are no universal lessons to be drawn from the Cyprus experience. The political constellation was auspicious and this more than compensated EOKA for the adverse topographical conditions. Guerrillas trying their luck in similar conditions against a different enemy would have been destroyed.
Contrary to widespread belief there is no specific Communist guerrilla doctrine. Communists have of course been concerned with the seizure of power, be it as the result of armed insurrection, civil war, or political process. Soviet and European Communists assumed that more probably than not this would involve the use of military force, but they have never argued that it was the only possible way to power. Guerrilla warfare for the Russians was just one manifestation of the revolutionary process, which ought to be utilized in the fight for the worldwide victory of Communism. For the Chinese it was one specific stage in an armed struggle which would inevitably lead to national and social liberation in the Third World and thus prelude the triumph of Communism in the industrially developed countries.
Such general observations do not, however, suffice for an interpretation of Soviet and Chinese policies vis-à-vis guerrilla movements. For the approach towards individual groups depended upon a great many factors, doctrinal considerations being only one of them. The Soviet policy of détente did not in principle preclude support for movements of national liberation in Asia and Africa. On the contrary, the Soviet leaders had a genuine interest in their success for they assumed that as a result there would be a shift in the overall global balance of power in their favor. They knew, furthermore, that unless they supported these liberation movements the Chinese would appear as the champions of national liberation. On the other hand detente, or to be precise, Soviet reluctance to become involved in a world war in the nuclear age, did inhibit to a certain extent the amount of help that could be given to the proponents of armed struggle in various parts of the world. For the Soviet leaders assessed, quite correctly, that it would be difficult in the long run to prevent a major war unless some control was exercised over the conduct of small wars outside their own immediate sphere of interest. This assessment gave rise in Latin America, and to a certain extent in the Middle East, to complaints about "Soviet betrayal." Most guerrilla movements would have instinctively turned to China but for the unfortunate fact that China could be of much less help as a supplier of arms and money, and could not lend them much political support either. They also did not like certain aspects of Chinese theory and practice which were thought too primitive for Latin America or simply inapplicable to other parts of the world.
On the whole, Soviet leaders took a dim view of guerrilla warfare in developed countries. In their book it was the task of the Communist parties in these countries to make the revolution; meddling petty bourgeois elements only caused trouble. More likely than not their endeavors would fail, bringing harm upon the Communists too. On the other hand Communist spokesmen justified an armed struggle in Third World countries and, on certain conditions, else-where;* Communist parties have on occasion engaged in guerrilla warfare not only in Asia but also in Greece, Venezuela and the Philippines. But more often than not the initiative seems to have come from the local leadership. During the last decade Moscow appears to have counselled prudence and caution: more than a spark was needed to kindle the flame in countries in which the working class was weak and disorganized. The main problem facing the newly independent nations was, in the Soviet view, to overcome backwardness and poverty and to consolidate their political and economic independence. The leaders of the main Communist parties in Latin America, such as Prestes, Corvalan and Arismendi, have echoed these warnings against "adventurism." Only mass movements led by the experienced vanguard party of the working class, armed with Marxist-Leninist theory, could guarantee the victory of the revolution. Or to quote the leader of the Peruvian Communists, Jorge del Prado: international experience has shown that "revolutions are made by the masses" and though "the majority of our people feel the need for radical changes . .. the masses have not yet come to see the need to fight for political power."93 Venezuela in 1962 was the one major exception to the rule in Latin America but the leaders of the party soon had second thoughts there too and discovered that an armed struggle was after all only an "auxilary form" of the general fight. Orthodox Communists quite justifiably suspected the loyalty of pro-guerrilla elements for the very same Venezuelan leaders who had been most enthusiastic about guerrilla warfare (Bravo, Petkoff, Marquez) were later to display a disturbing lack of loyalty, criticizing Soviet policy in Czechoslovakia, for instance. Eventually they all left, or were excluded from, the party.
The Soviet leaders faced problems whenever they had to deal with radical elements who had come to power after a successful guerrilla war. In both Cuba and Algeria the Communist parties had stood aside initially or had even opposed the struggle. In Cuba the problem was solved, after some minor altercations, by the merger of Fidel's supporters and the local Communists. The Algerian FLN, on the other hand, did not wish to transform itself into a Marxist-Leninist party, and the Soviets had to desist from giving open support to the Algerian Communist party. In Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau there were no Communist parties of standing and, for that reason, no complications arose in the relationship between the Russians and the local guerrillas. In the Arab world the Communist parties supported the Palestinian guerrillas in principle without however actively participating in the fighting. There was political rivalry but it did not reach a critical stage.
Ideological reservations quite apart, their own experience with the Yugoslavs, the Albanians and the Chinese has taught the Soviet leaders to view the guerrillas with concern. One only had to scratch these self-styled Communists to discover that they were fiercely nationalistic underneath. Worse still, they disputed Soviet hegemony over the Communist camp and even pursued policies contrary to Soviet interests. There was a real danger that victorious guerrillas elsewhere would prove no more amenable. On balance, Soviet policymakers found it much easier to cooperate with non-Communist military dictators than with radical revolutionaries unwilling to accept guidance, let alone control.
Soviet spokesmen did stress that they favored the armed struggle provided conditions were right. But this raised the question as to what "ripeness" really meant. According to the orthodox interpretation guerrilla war in Malaya and the Philippines, in Burma and in Greece had failed because the mass base of the insurgents was too narrow. It was admitted, in retrospect, that in Malaya and the Philippines a revolutionary situation had not existed, and the hope that it would come about under the impact of a guerrilla war had been misplaced: "The maturity of the national liberation struggle had been overestimated."94
The Chinese were not plagued by such doubts and reservations; if a guerrilla struggle failed it simply meant that the guerrillas had not tried hard enough. Violent revolution, as they saw it, was the universal law. This approach found its extreme formulation in Lin Piao's famous article of 1966 on the international significance of Mao's theory of People's War. Lin Piao wrote that to despise the enemy strategically was an elementary requirement for a revolutionary, for without the courage to despise him and without daring to win, no revolution could be made. All over Asia, Africa and Latin America, where the basic political and economic conditions resembled those of old China, the people were being subjected to aggression and enslavement. Only the countryside provided the broad areas in which revolutionaries could maneuver freely and proceed to final victory: "Taking the entire globe, if North America and Western Europe can be called 'the cities of the world' then Asia, Africa and Latin America constitute the 'rural areas'. . . . The contemporary world revolution presents a picture of the encirclement of the cities by the rural areas."95
Pronouncements of this kind are closely studied in the West without, however, sufficient attention being paid to the fact that there is no greater congruence of theory and practice in China than in the Soviet Union, and that, furthermore, theories change as do the fortunes of those who enunciate them: Lin Piao did not survive his famous article for long. Though the Chinese are committed to support the forces of revolution all over the world, they also have a solemn commitment to coexist peacefully with the countries of the Third World. Chinese experience has shown that guerrillas can create a mass base while fighting an enemy, but this happened in very specific circumstances, during a full-scale war against a foreign invader. With all their belief in voluntarism the Chinese leaders never stated that everyone could start a revolution. Only a truly popular revolutionary movement, with a mass base, would stand a chance of prevailing over its enemies, and therefore a secretly organized coup could be successful in the Third World only in exceptional circumstances.96 Chinese willingness to support revolutionary movements was not unlimited; it did not, for instance, extend to "urban guerrilla" groups.
In practice Chinese policy was conducted on pragmatic lines: the competition with the Soviet Union for influence in the Third World no doubt played a greater role than did ideological considerations. The Chinese have supported certain guerrilla movements because, in the main, their rivals were assisted by the Russians; the political orientation of the factions was by no means the deciding factor. Thus the Chinese supported ZANU against ZAPU, UNITA and GRAE against MPLA, SWANU against ANC. In the ideological exchanges between Peking and Moscow, the question of revolution and the armed struggle in Africa, Asia and Latin America has been one of the central issues. The Chinese argued that these were the most vulnerable areas under imperialist rule and "the storm centers of the revolution."97 They accused the Soviets of revisionism, pusillanimity, defeatism and capitulationism, of trying to demoralize the revolutionary movements. But in the final analysis, the policies pursued by the Soviet Union and China vis-à-vis national liberation struggles and guerrilla wars were not that dissimilar, whatever the doctrinal differences.
The spread of guerrilla warfare after 1945, and the many setbacks suffered by Western armies and local government forces against the insurgents, caused much heartsearching among political leaders and military commanders; it also precipitated the emergence of new doctrines of counterguerrilla warfare. In the present context these doctrines are of interest only insofar as they attempt to explain the essence of revolutionary warfare. Since some proponents of these new theories were apparently unfamiliar with previous guerrilla wars and of the history of revolutionary movements, they tended to assume that the phenomenon was of recent date. It was designated "subversive warfare" or "revolutionary warfare," whereas counterinsurgency was termed "modern warfare."98 In the words of one author, "Mao Tse-tung was the first to treat guerrilla battlecraft as a proper subject of military science and nobody has made a greater contribution to the guerrilla strategy than he. . . ."99 At the very least Mao was said to have been the first to pull together into a single operational theory the disparate ideas and data previously available, and to have abstracted a set of principles.100 Such false assumptions about historical origins may well appear of little practical consequence, but this is not so; for Mao, after all, was a "Marxist" and hence the conclusion that the study of Marxism would provide the key to modern, revolutionary, subversive, guerrilla warfare. The works of Marx, Engels and Lenin were subjected to minute examination, all their sayings about war and civil war were collected and analyzed, as though their writings have relevance to what happened in Indochina, Algeria, Cyprus, Kenya, Latin America and the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s. French generals and colonels were particularly attracted by Mao's thoughts on total war and its political function and they became almost as enthusiastic as the young Chinese Communists waving the Little Red Book at the time of the cultural revolution.101 A strong philosophical-theological element in French thought developed in the 1950s; this was reflected, for instance, in General Nemo's aside on guerrilla warfare: "There is no true war but religious war." The new doctrine became a new orthodoxy and was accepted by the Ecole de Guerre in 1956; the Algerian war was waged according to the lessons learnt in Southeast Asia.102 The proponents of the doctrine of "modern warfare" were among the first to realize that in the age of the bomb, nuclear war was out of the question, conventional war unlikely, but there were good prospects for revolutionary wars. They noted, again correctly, that the French army (and Western armies in general) were quite unprepared to counter such wars from a military-technical point of view and, even more so, in view of their lack of psychological preparation and political sophistication. As they saw it, the third world war already had begun. There was one enemy from Hanoi to Algiers — international Communism.103 True, in some instances the enemy was merely the unconscious tool of Communism but this hardly mattered in practice. The guerre revolutionnaire could be effectively combatted only if, at an early stage, strong measures were taken against subversion, for otherwise it would lead inevitably to guerrilla warfare. This meant, in practical terms, turning the rebels' organizational weapons and propaganda against them — to combat fire with fire.104 Some theorists of guerre révolutionnaire saw the main problem as the indoctrination of the masses, the conquest of hearts and minds; whereas others, such as Trinquier and Godard, thought that the FLN had succeeded through terror and coercion, and that (Western) propaganda could only succeed once the physical threat was removed. Yet other proponents of this school chose to emphasize the very real grievances underlying the Algerian revolution.105
Policies such as those proposed by these theorists could not possibly be carried out within the framework of a democratic society — hence the great frustration they felt. They were sure that they could win the war, but only on condition that they were given a free hand. Politically some of them tended towards right-wing Catholicism, others to "national Communism." While Communism was the enemy from which they wanted to save France, they held the highest admiration for their foes and the greatest contempt for liberal democracy with its self-deception about the nature of the danger facing it, its irresolution and cowardice. One of the leading advocates of revolutionary warfare told an American correspondent that he was a "Communist without doctrine," and Trinquier stated that if he was forced to choose between Communism and international capitalism, he would opt for the former.106 Ten years later France partly opted out of NATO, ideological-military fashions in Paris changed, and the defense of Christian (or Western) civilization against international Communism in North Africa gave way to close military and political collaboration with yesterday's enemies.
The impact of Maoism on the French generals was by no means unique; perhaps even more dramatic was the influence on the young Portuguese officers fighting in Africa of Frelimo and Cabral's theories. From Frelimo they learned the principles of conspiracy, from Cabral the theory about the "progressive role" of the petty bourgeoisie in the social struggle. Since they too were of petty bourgeois origin this doctrine suited well their social position and their political aspirations. Thus the counterinsurgents of 1973 turned into the "revolutionaries" of 1974, a modern edition of the story of Saulus-Paulus.
American thinking on guerrilla warfare was influenced by the approach of modern political science, mostly behaviorist in character; there was, as one critic noted, a tendency to concentrate on techniques of manipulation and control and administrative measures.107 There was also the same trend as among the French to see in guerrilla warfare more than meets the eye; the military philosophy of Mao Tse-tung "is much more than it at first seems to be" wrote one author, and another noted that "modern guerrilla movements are armed with elaborate psycho-political weapons."108 Compared with Pancho Villa or with Zapata these observations were no doubt of a certain validity; in China, Vietnam and elsewhere, guerrilla warfare was not just a localized insurrection or old-fashioned banditry but part of an overall political strategy. But this had been the case, mutatis mutandis, in other guerrilla wars in ages past. The key to Mao's success and to that of the Vietminh lay not in the elaborate character of their psycho-political weapons but on the contrary in its simplicity. The failure of Communist guerrilla movements in some countries and the success of non-Communist insurgents in others ought to have been sufficient proof that "Marxism was not the solution to the riddle. The real explanation is, of course, that the former colonial powers no longer had the strength to hold on to their possessions and, at the same time, classless intellectuals had managed to establish themselves as the vanguard of the masses in the underdeveloped countries. "Since in a backward country all classes of the population with the exception of a thin oligarchic stratum and a few merchants, feel cheated and exploited by foreigners, it is fatally easy to work up a head of steam behind any nationalist movement that promises to end this state of affairs."109 These national revolutionaries may turn to any radical ideology combining socialist and nationalist elements; they cannot possibly embrace liberalism and democratic rule. Democracy has flowered only in the presence of certain historical conditions which in most Third World countries do not exist and which elsewhere too have progressively weakened.
Some of the writings of American counterinsurgency experts contain much that is of interest and deals with the technique of guerrilla warfare, conspiracy, the preparation of armed insurgency, the motives of guerrilla fighters, the role of propaganda, and other aspects. But for a realistic explanation of the wider political context one looks in vain — not because the military or bureaucratic mind is incapable of understanding the ideological subtleties of highly sophisticated guerrilla movements; there is nothing subtle about them. It is not that these writings are necessarily too prejudiced: on the contrary, there is quite often a tendency to lean over backwards and give the enemy the benefit of all possible doubt. Thus the Field Manual of the U.S. Army on the motives of guerrillas: "Resistance begins to form when dissatisfaction occurs among strongly motivated individuals who cannot further their cause by peaceful and legal means."110 As if there was no dissatisfaction in every known society, and people unable or unwilling to further their cause by peaceful means. A strong modern dictatorship, whether Communist, Fascist or any other variety, has nothing to fear from these dissatisfied, highly motivated individuals, however deep and justified their grievances. Dissatisfaction there is always, but resistance only has any chance of success against a liberal-democratic regime, or an old-fashioned, ineffectual authoritarian system.
British authors on the subject have been inclined to take an empirical attitude towards guerrilla warfare; while stressing the need for social and political reform, they have reservations about the French and American concepts of psychological warfare. As Julian Paget noted, the cause of the guerrilla has to be simple, inspiring and convincing.111 If French writers such as Trinquier thought that the support of the population was the conditio sine qua non of victory, was it not true that EOKA killed more Greeks than British, and that the same applied, as regards their local populations, to the Malayan guerrillas, the Vietcong, the Fatah, the Mau Mau and others? The great importance of an effective intelligence system and of territorial defense was noted by these authors; the French authorities had not been aware that the Algerian nationalists had established a combat organization in Cairo in 1954 and, as a result, were taken by surprise by the armed insurrection. There was no territorial defense in either Malaya or Algeria; North Africa, an area four times bigger than France, was soldiered by fifty thousand French soldiers, and as a result the French lost Aurès and Kabylia at the very beginning of the rising.112 McCuen detected three main phases in an urban insurgency: organization, civil disorder, and terrorism. The French author Hogard discerned five stages in guerrilla warfare, with agitators fomenting resentment in the first stage to a general offensive in the last. Brigadier Kitson noted that in most guerrilla wars there was an incubation period of several years; it lasted four years in Cyprus, the Philippines and Kenya, three years in Malaya. It was during this period (of the mobilization of the masses) that the movement was most vulnerable.113 But in Algeria the incubation period lasted only for eight months, and in Cuba there was no incubation period at all. Robert Thompson, who acquired much experience in revolutionary warfare in Malaya and Vietnam, also pointed to three stages: subversion leading to insurgency, guerrilla warfare, and lastly the takeover. He saw the most vital feature of guerrilla war in organization; he held little sympathy for the view that it was a spontaneous uprising of the people, directed against a repressive, inefficient and corrupt government. The main weakness of the West, Thompson wrote, lay in the attitude of the intellectual community which never gave its own government the benefit of the doubt, even though a Communist regime might prove far more repressive. A similar point was made by the French author Jean Baechler: in a pluralistic political system there was inevitably a party in favor of a negotiated peace. The prime strategy of the insurgents was to try to turn this party into the majority. If the insurgents held out militarily long enough for war weariness to set in, they would win the war.114 According to Thompson, the aim of revolutionary war, in contrast to guerrilla war, is political. It might perhaps be more correct to say that in a Communist-led guerrilla movement political and military strategy are more closely connected. For the aim of any war is political even if this is not clearly stated or perceived. Revolutionary war, as Thompson defined it, provides a technique for a small ruthless minority, with neither a good cause nor genuine popular support, to overthrow a government.115 When the organization was good and the cause weak, the strategy of a protracted war was called for. Thus it was essential to assess at the outbreak of any guerrilla war (i.e., during the second phase of revolutionary war) whether its organization or its cause was the vital factor. If organization were the vital factor, the revolutionary movement could not be defeated by political or social reforms but only by superior organization. Thompson's formula (given here in the briefest detail) is one of the more interesting contributions to the understanding of guerrilla warfare. But it still left a great many questions open, inevitably, perhaps, because reality is always richer and more complicated than any forinula, however ingenious. Every movement, revolutionary or not, has a cause, and whether this is "good" or "bad," "strong" or "weak" depends upon a great many factors that defy measurement. It depends above all on the correlation of force — not just military force — in a given country. A gifted leader (or a demagogue) can work up enthusiasm for an almost nonexistent cause. It depends, needless to say, on the political culture of the country. In the early phase of most guerrilla wars, accident is perhaps more important than any other single factor. It is doubtful whether the Chinese Communists would have won if Mao had indeed been killed in the late 1930s, as the Soviet press announced at the time. It is almost certain that the Yugoslav partisans would not have lasted beyond winter 1941 but for Tito, and the Cubans were the first to admit that without Castro the invasion of Cuba would have failed.
Counterinsurgency theorists all agree that guerrilla warfare is cheap, and the fight against it very costly indeed. The budget of the Algerian FLN was about thirty to forty million dollars a year, whereas the French spent a sum of this magnitude in less than two weeks. The cost of killing a single rebel in Malaya was more than two hundred thousand dollars. Writers on counterinsurgency have pointed to the great importance of outside support in guerrilla war, of supply lines and sanctuaries. They noted that guerrilla wars have started almost unnoticed in some countries (Vietnam), and with a big bang in others (Cuba, Algeria). They drew attention to the fact that the size of basic units varied from country to country according to geographical and other conditions; in Cyprus the basic unit consisted of five to eight men, elsewhere it was much larger. The investigations into the origins of guerrilla movements usually raised more questions than were answered. Many writers on the subject have stressed the close connection between guerrilla war and agrarian unrest. J. L. S. Girling maintained that Chinese Communism was based on peasant support, but he also noted that the Chinese (and the Vietnamese) leaders later turned against peasants; in any case, he attributed rural poverty more to overpopulation than feudal abuse.116 David Galula observed that the slogan "land to the tiller" was unlikely to be very effective in northern China where seventy-six percent of the land was in the hands of the owners, and twenty-two percent more in the hands of part-owners; the redistribution of land, on the other hand, could have been a factor of greater importance.117 The land grievances on which the propaganda of the Mau Mau leaders focused had been relatively minor. Land tenure was not an issue at all in GuineaBissau. These and other illustrations show that the connection between agrarian unrest and guerrilla warfare is more tenuous than some observers have claimed.
It has been asserted that nationalism alone could not explain the fact that Algerian farmers were ready to risk their lives: they summoned up such resolution only when they felt morally alienated from their rulers.118 But the great-grandfathers of the Algerian guerrillas had fought for many years under Abd el-Kader without any sense of moral alienation. Liberal observers usually pointed to the link between guerrilla war, social change, and the satisfaction of popular aspirations. This theory has been formulated most succinctly by Eqbal Ahmad:
Organized violence of the type used in revolutionary warfare is discouraged, rarely breaks out, and so far has not succeeded in a single country where the government made a genuine and timely effort to satisfy the grievances of the people. ... A regime unwilling to satisfy popular aspirations begins to lose legitimacy. This results in the moral isolation of the incumbents, the desertion of intellectuals and moderates. . . . Popular support for the guerrilla is predicated upon the moral alienation of the masses from the existing government. Conditions of guerrilla warfare are inherent in a situation of rapid social change. The outbreak normally results mainly from the failure of a ruling elite to respond to the challenge of modernization.119
This takes us back to the grievance theory. Unfortunately, grievances are part of the human condition: they always exist, however perfect the society. Furthermore, there is no way to measure the intensity with which grievances are felt. Even if a "grievance scale" did exist, it is by no means certain that a revolutionary war is more likely to break out in a country replete with grievances. Guerrilla war succeeded in Cuba but failed in other Latin American countries despite the fact that Cubans had less objective reason to feel aggrieved than many other Latin Americans. The guerrilla victories in Yugoslavia and Albania (and in many other countries) had nothing whatsoever to do with modernization; rapid social change was not the issue in China in 1940, or in Vietnam in 1950. A democratic, or semidemocratic regime unwilling to satisfy popular aspirations, indeed gradually loses legitimacy. A totalitarian regime, on the other hand, can afford to disregard popular aspirations without fearing that it will be "morally isolated," or that the moderates and intellectuals will desert it. If revolutionary war has usually failed in democratic societies this does not mean that the grievances are insubstantial. It simply shows that some societies are less violent than others.120 History has demonstrated that guerrilla war stands a better chance of success against foreign domination than against one's own kind — nationalism is, by and large, the single most potent motive force. But nationalism per se, pure and unalloyed, is an abstraction; in· the real world it appears only in combination with other political and social concepts, and programs. It is in this context that the infusion of radical — not Marxist — ideas takes place.
*On some occasions Soviet support was apparently given to urban terrorist groups in Western countries. Such assistance was not, however, given openly but through various intermediaries such as the Cubans.