Guerrilla Warfare - Ernesto Che Guevara

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Résumé :
Written immediately after the Cuban Revolution and first published in 1961, Guerrilla Warfare soon became a how-to manual for legions of guerrilla fighters around the world-from Latin America to Africa and Asia. In this revolutionary primer, Che focuses on the general principles of guerrilla warfare, the guerrilla band, the organization of the guerrilla front, and strategies for preserving and defending power once it has been won. The book covers broad topics-guerrilla strategy and tactics; propaganda, training, and indoctrination; and the role of women-and more specific issues like medical problems, supplies, and sabotage. Che's epilogue, written a year after the culmination of the long armed civil struggle by the Cuban people, includes his analysis of the Cuban situation at the time and predictions for the country's future. Both historical document and impassioned treatise, Guerrilla Warfare was intended as a guide to realizing change when political opposition and legal civil struggle against totalitarianism are inadequate. In that sense, it provides a timeless window into revolutionary thinking today.

Biographie:
Ernesto Che Guevara, commonly known as El Che or simply Che, was a Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist. A major figure of the Cuban Revolution, since his death Guevara's stylized visage has become an ubiquitous countercultural symbol and global icon within popular culture. His belief in the necessity of world revolution to advance the interests of the poor prompted his involvement in Guatemala's social reforms under President Jacobo Arbenz, whose eventual CIA-assisted overthrow solidified Guevara's radical ideology. Later, while living in Mexico City, he met Ra?l and Fidel Castro, joined their movement, and travelled to Cuba with the intention of overthrowing the U.S.-backed Batista regime. Guevara soon rose to prominence among the insurgents, was promoted to second-in-command, and played a pivotal role in the successful two year guerrilla campaign that topled the Cuban government. After serving in a number of key roles in the new government, Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to foment revolution abroad, first unsuccessfully in Congo-Kinshasa and later in Bolivia, where he was captured by CIA-assisted Bolivian forces and executed. Guevara remains both a revered and reviled historical figure, polarized in the collective imagination in a multitude of biographies, memoirs, essays, documentaries, songs, and films. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century, while an Alberto Korda photograph of him entitled Guerrillero Heroico, was declared the most famous photograph in the world by the Maryland Institute of Art.