The victory of Fidel Castro's rebel army in Cuba was due in no small part to the training, strategy and leadership provided by Ernasto Che Guevara. Despite the deluge of biographies, memoirs and documentaries that appeared in 1997 on the 30th anniversary of Guevara's death, his military career remains shrouded in mystery. This work offers an objective view of Guevara's record as a Guerilla soldier, commander and strategist from his first skirmish in Cuba to his defeat in Bolivia eleven years later. Using new evidence from Guevara's previously unpublished campaign diaries and declassified CIA documents, Paul Dosal reassesses Guevara's impact as a guerilla warrior and theorist, comparing his accomplishments with those of other guerilla leaders with whom he has been ranked, including Colonel T.E. Lawrence, Mao Tse-Tung and General Vo Nguyen Giap. This reassessment reveals that Guevara was often underated as a conventional warrior and theorist. Guevara achieved his greatest military by applying a conventional military strategy in the final stages of the Cuban Revolution, orchestrating the defensive campaign that held off the Cuban army in the summer of 1958. As a guerilla commander, he scored impressive victories in ambush after ambush in Bolivia, but in winning the battles he lost the war. He violated most of his own precepts during the Bolivian campaign, compelling analysts to question the validity of both his strategies and his command skills. Through he is credited with developing foco theory, Guevara never attempted to advance a new theory of guerilla warfare. He was a fighter, not a theorist. He wanted to defeat American inperialism by launching guerilla campaigns simultaneously in Asia, Africa and Latin American, but his tricontinental strategy resulted in failures first in the Congo and then in Bolivia. This book presents the full record of Guevara's successes and failures, separating myth from reality about one of the 20th century's most contraversial revolutionary figures.
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