V o L u m e I : a d

Immerman, Richard H. The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention.

Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982.

Schlesinger, Stephen, and Stephen Kinzer. Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the Ameri-

can Coup in Guatemala. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982.

Schneider, Ronald M. Communism in Guatemala, 1944–1954. New York: Praeger,

1959.

Argentine Marxist revolutionary and contributor to the doctrine of revolu-

tionary warfare. Born on 14 June 1928 to a middle-class family in Rosario,

Argentina, Ernesto “Che” Guevara de la Serna trained as a medical doctor at

the University of Buenos Aires, graduating in 1953. That same year he trav-

eled throughout Latin America, witnessing the early months of the Bolivian

National Revolution and the last months of the October Revolution in

Guatemala during the reign of Jacobo Arbenz. America’s covert 1954 opera-

876

Guevara de la Serna, Ernesto

Guevara de la Serna,

Ernesto

(1928–1967)

Cuban revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara was a key player in the overthrow of the Batista dictatorship in Cuba.

Guevara was wounded and executed by the Bolivian Army while training leftist guerrillas in Bolivia in 1967. (Library 

of Congress)

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tion that ousted the leftist Arbenz from power radicalized Guevara, as did his

later encounter in Mexico with several Cuban revolutionaries, including

Fidel Castro. Guevara subsequently joined Castro’s expedition to Cuba in

December 1956 and fought with his July 26 Movement until it triumphed

in January 1959.

Guevara became Cuba’s first president of the National Bank and then

minister of industry in Cuba’s early postrevolutionary government, where

he espoused unorthodox Marxist economic ideas about the scope and timing

of economic transformation. His notion of the “New Man” and his advocacy

of centralized planning and the urgency of abolishing capitalist influences

pitted him against more orthodox Marxist and Soviet advisors. Guevara’s line

won out in the early and mid-1960s, leading to a reliance on moral rather than

material incentives and experiments with the abolition of currency. What was

sometimes called Sino-Guevarism climaxed in the disastrous Ten-Million-Ton

Sugar Harvest Campaign of 1968. Following this, Cuba’s economic policy

retreated from Guevarista utopianism.

Guevara left Cuba in 1965, possibly because of disagreement with its

political leadership and certainly because of a long-standing commitment to

promoting worldwide revolution. In his early years in Cuba, he had been a

proponent of the heretical political and military ideas of what became known

as foco theory. The foquistas, including the French philosopher Régis Debray,

challenged the orthodox communist emphasis on parliamentary and legal

struggle, advocating instead the establishment of rural, peasant-based centers

( focos) to foment revolutionary commitments.

Guevara traveled to the Congo in 1965 and then to Bolivia in 1966. It

is now believed that Guevara’s project to initiate an insurrection there was

prompted by a desire to use Bolivia as a focus for the transformation of

neighboring countries rather than by a belief in the viability of making revo-

lution in Bolivia itself, where a major social revolution had begun in 1952.

Guevara’s overwhelming goal was to provide a diversion that would weaken

U.S. resolve and resources then dedicated to waging war in Vietnam.

The  foquistas were aware that postrevolutionary Cuba would increase

American efforts to prevent more revolutions by modernizing Latin Ameri-

can militaries and developing modernization and reform projects such as the

Alliance for Progress. But they underestimated the speed with which sec-

tions of the Bolivian armed forces would be transformed by U.S. aid and

training once Guevara had located to Bolivia.

Guevara’s revolutionary expedition was also handicapped by tense rela-

tions with the Bolivian Communist Party and its leader, Mario Monje, who

was offended by Guevara’s insistence on maintaining leadership of the revo-

lutionary focos. There was also little peasant support for the Guevarista force,

which was made up of both Bolivian recruits and experienced Cuban revo-

lutionaries. Difficult terrain also complicated the revolutionaries’ work, and

eventually they split into two groups.

The most controversial issue surrounding the collapse of Guevara’s efforts

in Bolivia is whether or not Cuban support for the guerrillas was satisfactory.

Some Guevara biographers have suggested that Soviet and Cuban relations

Guevara de la Serna, Ernesto

877

Guevara’s notion of

the “New Man” and 

his advocacy of

centralized planning

and the urgency of

abolishing capitalist

influences pitted

him against more

orthodox Marxist

and Soviet advisers.

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with the revolutionaries were partly shaped by Soviet annoyance at the

impact that the new revolutionary front might have on its relations with the

United States. Thus far, there is no conclusive evidence to support this line

of argument.

A Bolivian Army unit captured Guevara in the Yuro ravine on 8 October

1967 and summarily executed him the next day at La Higuera, Villagrande.

One of his hands was removed to facilitate identification by U.S. intelligence.

A copy of Guevara’s diaries was smuggled to Cuba, where it was published

(along with an edition brokered by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency) as

his Bolivian Diaries. Guevara’s body was uncovered in an unmarked site in

Bolivia in 1997 and, together with the remains of a number of other Cuban

revolutionaries who died in Bolivia, was repatriated to Cuba for internment

in a monument in Santa Clara City.

Barry Carr

See also

Alliance for Progress; Bolivia; Castro, Fidel; Cuba; Guatemalan Intervention; Latin

America, Communist Parties in

References

Anderson, Jon Lee. Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life. London: Bantam, 1997.

Castañeda, Jorge. Companero: The Life and Death of Che. New York: Vintage, 1998.

Lowy, Michael. The Marxism of Che Guevara: Philosophy, Economics and Revolutionary

Warfare. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974.

Russian acronym for Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerey (State Director of

Camps), an agency of the Soviet secret police that administered the Soviet

system of forced labor camps where political dissenters, dissidents, and other

alleged enemies of the state were sent.

The first gulags were established in tsarist Russia and in the early Soviet

era under Vladimir Lenin. The gulags reached their zenith in the period of

Josef Stalin’s rule. Unlike other labor camps before and after, people were

imprisoned not just for what they had done but also for who they were in

terms of class, religion, nationality, and race. The gulag was one of the means

by which to implement Stalin’s political purges, which cleansed the Soviet

Union of real and imagined enemies.

The first gulag victims were hundreds of thousands of people caught in

the collectivization campaigns in the early 1930s. After the Red Army’s inva-

sion of the Baltic states and Poland in June 1941, the secret police incar-

cerated potential resistors. When Adolf Hitler sent German armies into the

Soviet Union in June 1941, people of German ancestry in Eastern Europe

were incarcerated as well. Following the German defeat at Stalingrad, the

Red Army advanced west, capturing and imprisoning enemy soldiers. Stalin

also incarcerated partisan groups from all over Eastern Europe.

878

Gulags

Gulags

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