The following quotations are from:
Che Guevara, “Create Two, Three, Many Vietnams,” from Che Guevara Reader.
“To wish the victim success is not enough; one must share his fate. One must join him in death or in victory.” 316
“What is the role that we, the exploited of the world, must play?
The peoples of three continents are watching and learning a lesson for themselves in Vietnam. Since the imperialists are using the threat of war to blackmail humanity, the correct response is not to fear war. Attack hard and without letup at every point of confrontation—that must be the general tactic of the peoples.”
But in those places where this miserable peace that we endure has not been broken, what shall our task be?
To liberate ourselves at any price.” 317
“Latin America constitutes a more or less homogeneous whole, and in almost its entire territory U.S. monopoly capital holds absolute primacy. The puppet or—in the best of cases—weak and timid governments are unable to resist the orders of the Yankee master. The United States has reached virtually the pinnacle of its political and economic domination. There is little room left for it to advance; any change in the situation could turn into a step backward from its primacy. Its policy is to maintain its conquests. The course of action is reduced at the present time to the brutal use of force to prevent liberation movements of any kind.
Behind the slogan ‘We will not permit another Cuba’ hides the possibility of cowardly acts of aggression they can get away with—such as the one against the Dominican Republic; or, before that, the massacre in Panama and the clear warning that Yankee troops are ready to intervene anywhere in Latin America where a change in the established order endangers their interests. This policy enjoys almost absolute impunity. The OAS is a convenient mask, no matter how discredited it is. The UN’s ineffectiveness borders on the ridiculous or the tragic. The armies of all the countries of Latin America are ready to intervene to crush their own people. What has been formed, in fact, is the International of Crime and Betrayal.” 319
“The confrontations of revolutionary importance are those that put the whole imperialist apparatus in check…” 321
“The Yankee agents of repression will increase in number. Today there are advisers in all countries where armed struggle is going on. It seems that the Peruvian army, also advised and trained by the Yankees, carried out a successful attack on the revolutionists of that country. But if the guerrilla centers are led with sufficient political and military skill, they will become practically unbeatable and will make necessary new reinforcements by the Yankees. In Peru itself, with tenacity and firmness, new figures, although not yet fully known, are reorganizing the guerrilla struggle.
Little by little, the obsolete weapons that suffice to repress the small armed bands will turn into modern weapons, and the groups of advisers into U.S. combatants, until at a certain point they find themselves obliged to send growing numbers of regular troops to secure the relative stability of a power whose national puppet army is disintegrating in the face of the guerrillas’ struggles.
This is the road of Vietnam. It is the road that the peoples just follow. It is the road that Latin America will follow, with the special feature that the armed groups might establish something such as coordinating committees to make the repressive tasks of Yankee imperialism more difficult and to help their own cause.
Latin America, a continent forgotten in the recent political struggles for liberation, is beginning to make itself felt through the Tricontinental in the voice of the vanguard of its peoples: the Cuban revolution. Latin America will have a much more important task: the creation of the world’s second or third Vietnam, or second and third Vietnam.
We must definitely keep in mind that imperialism is a world system, the final stage of capitalism, and that it must be beaten in a great worldwide confrontation. The strategic objective of that struggle must be the destruction of imperialism.
The contribution that falls to us, the exploited and backward of the world, is to eliminate the foundations sustaining imperialism: our oppressed nations, from which capital, raw materials and cheap labor (both workers and technicians) are extracted, and to which new capital (tools of domination), arms and all kinds of goods are exported, sinking us into absolute dependence.” 323
“We must carry out a task of a general kind, the tactical aim of which is to draw the enemy out of his environment, compelling him to fight in places where his living habits clash with existing conditions.” 324
“And the battles will not be mere street fights with stones against tear gas, nor peaceful general strikes. Nor will it be the struggle of an infuriated people that destroys the repressive apparatus of the ruling oligarchies in two or three days. It will be a long, bloody struggle in which the front will be in guerrilla refuges in the cities, in the homes of the combatants (where the repression will go seeking easy victims among their families), among the massacred peasant population, in the towns or cities destroyed by the enemy’s bombs.” 325
“The great lesson of the guerrillas’ invincibility is taking hold among the masses of the dispossessed. The galvanization of the national spirit; the preparation for more difficult tasks, for resistance to more violent repression. Hate as a factor in the struggle, intransigent hatred for the enemy that takes one beyond the natural limiations of a human being and converts one into an effective, violent, selective, cold, killing machine. Our ssoldiers must be like that; a people without hate cannot triumph over a brutal enemy.
We must carry the war as far as the enemy carries it: into his home, into his places of recreation, make it total. He must be prevented from having a moment’s peace, a moment’s quiet outside the barracks and even inside them. Attack him wherever he may be; make him feel like a hunted animal wherever he goes. Then his morale will begin to decline. He will become even more bestial, but the signs of the coming decline will appear.” 325
“Let us sum up as follows our aspirations for victory. Destruction of imperialism by means of eliminating its strongest bulwark: the imperialist domination of the United States of North America. To take as a tactical line the gradual liberation of the peoples, one by one or in groups, involving the enemy in a difficult struggle outside his terrain; destroying his bases of support, that is, his dependent territories.
This means a long war. And, we repeat once again, a cruel war. Let no one deceive himself when he sets out to begin, and let no one hesitate to begin out of fear of the results it can bring upon his own people. It is almost the only hope for victory.” 326-327
“Our every action is a battle cry against imperialism and a call for the unity of the peoples against the great enemy of the human race: the United States of North America.” 328