Why did Che Guevara's tactics that succeed in Cuba fail in the Congo and Bolivia?

>>63878473 (OP)
Because Cuba's military simply didn't want to fight, Che wasn't some amazing fighter or military leader, he got lucky once.

>>63878549
There was a certain level of tactics and training required, but you are kinda right, you have to go up against a completely incompetent and corrupt army to achieve complete victory. Many other revolutionaries have tried these tactics in their own countries and they failed even worse than Che and were hardly a threat.

>>63878473 (OP)
I'm not sure about Congo but Bolivia was pure hubris. By that point he had gone full Lawrence.

Castro did him a favor.

>>63878473 (OP)
There's an argument it never worked, not even in Cuba. Or more precisely, what actually went down in Cuba was more complicated and Guevarism or "foquismo" (from "foco" like a "focal point") was formulated after they won -- more on this in a second -- and they sort of re-wrote the history of it in a misleading way to suit Cuba's situation in the 1960s.

It sounds kind of like Maoism if you squint at it. There's a small guerrilla band that grows as it engages in battle, but Maoism was about building up a peasant army in revolutionary base areas, while foquismo is really just about the guerrilla band because (as the theory goes) the Latin American countryside was more developed than in China which made the peasants lazy, but once the military struggle turns favorable then that creates a catalyst and the people will just go with it. So this theory really encourages a "voluntarist" attitude with its courage, asceticism, and self-sacrifice.

These are important qualities for partisans everywhere, and it's not like these groups can't act as a catalyst, but it wasn't like there was just 300 guerrillas vs. 10,000 of Batista's troops. They weren't even the only guerrillas. There was another group called the DR-13-M (one of its military leaders fought alongside Che and became a CIA asset later, look up Rolando Cubela Secades). There was a big student movement in the cities, and the situation in the countryside which was dotted with sugar plantations and angry machete-wielding peasants was already explosive. The foco theory ignores these "objective" conditions for strength of will.

And actually, the argument goes, foco theory re-wrote that history in the 1960s, and the reason is because Cuba was isolated and under threat from the U.S., and they wanted to inject Che and partisans and inspire imitators in other countries. While they wanted to win, at the least they could tie the U.S. down chasing rabbits in Bolivia to take the pressure off Cuba.

>>63878639
Bolivia was also ruled by a semi-competent military regime. Its leader René Barrientos, was of mixed Indian descent and spoke fluent Quechua. Despite coming to power in a US-backed coup, he did not reverse the Socialist reforms and presented himself as a populist and a man of the people. These decisions were incredibly important because if Che (or someone like Che) had arrived just ten years earlier, the Bolivian peasants would have flocked to them. But by the time Che did arrive, living conditions had improved and the Bolivian peasants were literally informing the authorities about the guerrilla movements.

BTW there's a French journalist named Regis Debray who helped them formulate this theory (he went to Cuba and worked with them and wrote a book on it called "Revolution in the Revolution?" which acted as a guerrilla handbook) which was really inspiring to New Left radicals like the Weathermen. Well, that didn't work out well either. Debray ended up becoming a conservative (sort of), although a hetorodox one (or something). Anyways, he's a public intellectual in France to this day:
https://firstthings.com/rgis-debray-radical-conservative/

>>63878791
Yep. Land had been distributed, and once that happened the Bolivian peasants found "you will own nothing and you will be happy" rather unappealing. Funny how everyone gets conservative about his own private property.

>>63878933
I think it's more a matter of compromise, cause having a system where 1% own everything and treat the majority like dirt, will convinces said peasants to join any yahoo that claims to have a better system. Bismarck understood this and therefore worked with the landowners to help appease the peasants and working class rather then oppress them to prevent a revolution against the Monarchy.
Also the land-reforms were done by a Socialist Military leader.

>>63878473 (OP)
>>63878639
He actually had a chance in the Congo, because he was dealing with forces that were arguably more incompetent than the Batista regime. But he made the mistake of trying to work with the native Congolese, and he realized that not all cultures are equal, even after training the illiterate peasants of Cuba, the Congolese were not really a people for military culture. they hated hard work, they thought digging trenches was lowly, they considered weapons personal property, they refused to clean their weapons or clothes and if the situation ever got really tough they just gave up and went home. He experienced this all the time in Congo.

>>63878984
>he made the mistake of trying to work with the native Congolese, and he realized that not all cultures are equal, even after training the illiterate peasants of Cuba,

This is just wrong,he was racist before, then became less racist when working with Africans.

>>63879002
Your timeline is messed up. He had racist views during his early travels, but they gradually diminished as he saw the mass suffering and common experience of the people in Latin America (he became a pan-Hispanist who saw all the people of Latin America as one spiritual people). In his time in the Congo he did not become racist(also the Cuban soldiers who joined him were Afro-Cubans). He simply became aware that there are cultural factors that prevent people from properly resisting and being competent in Military matters. This was not only his view, but the view of his Afro-Cuban comrades as well.
You can see for yourself
https://files.catbox.moe/mxxpki.pdf

>>63879271

According to some historians he failed to secure food supplies for his soldiers. The locals refused to sell food and other supplies to his forces. This caused his force to collapse.

Popular support, hearts and minds, is the single most important factor in any war. It is the difference between being an invader and liberator. Supplies, food and water, wages, a conventional or unconventional force cannot function without these.

Consider the American Revolution. It began in 1765. The first major battle did not occur until 1775. That is ten years of preparation, preaching, tensions building before the actual war began. Ten years of rallying the people.

>>63879436

The actual American Revolutionary War lasted 7 years. More time was spent rallying the people to revolution than actually fighting it, and it ended diplomatically through a formal surrender.

>>63879271
Holy fucking shit My Sides

>>63880437
That's why Mad Mike and Buddies were successful: they didn't see/treat the Congolese as 'equals', but they understood them on their terms

>>63878473 (OP)

>>63880437
>Even the most politically developed argued that it is a natural, material force and that they, as dialectical materialists, recognized the power of the dawa, whose secrets lie with jungle medicine men.
Now that's some good shit. The newly-minted jungle Marxists are like "yeah, we know Marx and Lenin and how it really helped us locate a material basis for [all the ineffective superstituous juju shit we've been doing]. That's dialectics."

>>63878473 (OP)
Because Che never was a strategist. He was a theoretician and the guy who worked on the ground, the real planning was always done by Castro. And Castro did a tremendous job of uniting anti-Batista groups together.
Not to mention the poor quality of the Batista's Army mentioned above.
>>63878788
This.
>>63878808
It's hard to call a man like Debray a radical conservative, because radical conservative is either a revolutionary in his own right (like early Junger or Khomeini) or a straight up retrograde (some dork like Varg).
Debray is just being crititcal while holding on to the older intellectual tradition, opposed to current day mumbo jumbo that pretends to be "leftist", "humanist" or whatever. Judging by the article, he's still a hardline marxist of some degree, but he's just sticking to the older and more sensible ways than typical pink-haired scum.

>>63878984
he never had a chance in Congo
there are 3 ways to motivate the Congolese
a) the explicit threat of violence
b) iron discipline based on a
c) making them believe you have some magic or magic talisman that is more powerful than theirs

The belgians did all 3.
My grandfather used to ramble about his times as kid in the Congo. Part of it was always being well dressed no matter how hot it was and about not bitching about how hot it was with the darkies around.
a bit of discipline was a key part of convincing the darkies that the whites had some sort of magic. The nikkers also had a thing for ties.
the boss man always wears a tie and he gives us the orders. We never wear a tie and we obey his orders. Hence the tie must be magical.
He also insisted that the end of the colonial period, the stealing of the kings ceremonial saber ect. took this "magic" away from the white man and explains a lot of violence against them.

For a commy to try and spread communist fervor amongst them? fat chance

>>63880437
>>63881557
What the fuck is up with Africans and believing in magic? I think I read once that a lot Liberians believed in magic and that if you ate the flesh of your enemy it would create a magic barrier around you that deflects bullets. Seems to be a very common theme

>>63881602
>What the fuck is up with Africans and believing in magic?
I live in a first world western country and when my parents were children the only electric device in the house was a battery powered radio and you had to ski 40 kilometers to catch the bus to nearest city, a generation before that we're already back to near medieval lifestyle

in african countries people still in pre-indstrial societies

>>63878589
Pretty much every revolution requires the government military in some manner refusing orders or joining the revolution. If the military are die hard loyalists, the revolution will fail. Even in the American Revolution many British soldiers and officers joined the continental army.

>>63881602
>>63881642
if your christian or muslim you also believe in magic

>>63878473 (OP)
Why is he the only normally sized one? Is this how you gain gravitas in Latin America, just by being normal size?

>>63881602
they never developed past the iron age on their own
it's not just about technology, it's understanding how the world works. Not in a volts and laws of physics kind of way. But how causality work, how time is linear ect. ect.
in the West the mix of Christianity and the Classics changed how we look at the world, the Africans never had that.
you can educate an African and graft it onto them, the évolué. But that's for individuals, an educated elite. It doesn't shift their culture that takes a lot more time.

>>63881661
muslims? yes
Christians? no, we believe in miracles when God decides to set aside the laws of His creation aside. Man can not commit magic that is man can not change or set aside reality.

>>63881695
TBF, both Christians and Muslims (especially in rural religions) tend to "change" their faith in ways they are not even aware of. That's how you get Christian shamas in Mexico, even voodoo is largely based on Catholicism.

>>63881775
true, but folk religion just shows that magical thinking is the default for humans
you need an intellectual framework to get beyond it, one that imposes causality as law.
Christianity allows exception only trough an act of God. In islam there is no causality and allah makes every moment anew. In Asia Confucianism and Buddhism pushed causality.
Having causality as an ingrained part of your culture is what allows for anything and everything advanced.
without causality science and technology doesn't work and magic does. In fact the products of science and technology becomes just an other form of magic

>>63881815
Christianity, Islam and Buddhism tend to produce similar thought patterns, one of which is that
>I am going to live an ascetic and renounce the world
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Fathers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fakir

>>63881602
It's like that in every pre-industrial or recently industrialized society. Folk knowledge, rules of thumb, religion, cure-alls passed down from grandma or local augur is how they see the world.

>>63881602
Read about the Kamajors and other hunting societies. The junta in Burkina Faso has been recruiting these guys (they go by a different name there) and they'll wear magic jackets with pouches sewn into them and they carry magical totems in the charms.

These are primitive fetishes, and it certainly looks primitive, but fundamentally it's no different from wearing a cross around your neck. Or in highly modern, industrialized and consumer societies, how people treat fandom, or build "shrines" with their Star Wars collection, or how people look to acquiring consumer objects as a way of gaining certain powers. We basically do the same shit but we have more money and factories and stuff like that:
https://youtu.be/JPBpZCTRM0I

>>63878473 (OP)
Fidel did all the heavy lifting in Cuba
The locals also actually wanted to help Fidel win the fight, and he was already something of a celebrity
And the Cuban military wasn't particularly enthusiastic about fighting.
Most of the Cuban leadership though Che was kind of retarded and they stopped supporting him after a while

>>63881880
>Most of the Cuban leadership though Che was kind of retarded and they stopped supporting him after a while
Right. I'm not that well read on it, but there was this whole myth around Che that built up, and part of the story seems to be them trying to get rid of Che, but also start fires in Daddy Yankee's backyard, and the foco theory could do that at least. But leftists ran with that and were like oh man, you can make revolution with, like, 30 guys and it's no big deal. And, yes... but also no. There are no shortcuts.

>>63881856
>Christianity, Islam and Buddhism tend to produce similar thought patterns
but no when it comes to causality
muslims do not at the heart of it believe in a world ruled by causality, it's all inshalla.

>>63881862
Nobody is going into battle thinking their Rick and Morty funko pop will save them. It is fundamentally different.

>>63881912
Che grew increasingly bitter about the rift which was growing between him an the rest of his old crew and that sort of factors into the later discourse on it, especially on the South American mainland
The Cuban Revolution was the perfect mix of a lot of things

>>63881862
>These are primitive fetishes, and it certainly looks primitive, but fundamentally it's no different from wearing a cross around your neck
it is tough the kaffers believe that those charms and fetishes have power in and off it's self.
there is no outside power, those things warp causality and men made them.
Christians don't believe (or at least shouldn't considering the Church is very clear that superstition is idolatry) that their cross is in and of it's self magical, it doesn't warp causality.
You wear it as a religious devotion and the only way for causation to warp is divine intervention. That is why Christians will ask God to protect them. They do not ask a man to warp causality for them, they ask God the creator of causality to nudge it for them.

I ended up on his wikipedia page yesterday and lol’d when it appeared that things were going just fine and then one sentence later “he was captured by CIA-backed forces in Bolivia and summarily executed”. What an anti-climactic ending.

>>63881602
>What the fuck is up with Africans and believing in magic?
Overexposure to highly-effective phenomena without clear mechanisms of action, in an environment isolated from the centers of academia, and thus, extension efforts.
Consider how the following work in reality, and ask yourself what someone without access to the K-12 system and Wikipedia might assume:
>Strophanthus Hispidus
>Sleeping Sickness (both the ways it infects and the success of the tactics employed to protect animals from it)
>Malaria, particularly as it relates to Non-African settlers and the spread of Quinine.
>Gilgai
>The many practical elements of Vodun (and later, Voodoo) which are regularly harnessed to afflict people with psychosomatic illnesses.
There are a lot of things in Africa that might as well be magic, which are hopeless for the average person to rationalize or mitigate, even if they have a host of explanations fed to them.
Even nowadays, if you were to show the average American the symptoms of any of the aforementioned items, absent the context of a demonstration, some would default to irrational explanations and revert to magical thinking.
Also, the "Charms cause bullets to fail" thing was repeated verbatim by the Boxers of China. It's not unusual.

>>63878473 (OP)
Probably because it was Frank Sturgis, not Che Fraudvara, who taught Castro's men about tactics.

>>63882277
>What an anti-climactic ending.
Life isn't a novel or a movie and there are no main characters. Death is usually undignified and pointless. Romantic poets and manipulative politicians try to sell sacrifice as glorious, but then people die choking on blood in the dirt or scattered to pieces across the landscape.

>>63882299
This explanation is sound but is not the full picture. Blacks in America with access to education and, more importantly, the internet, also engage in a good bit of magical thinking. I think it’s just that the world doesn’t make sense to them so they fill in the blanks with magic. It’s not even limited to blacks. My Armenian mom also believes in magic and will gladly enrich clairvoyants if they tell her nice things about her past and future lives. She thinks the sleep paralysis demon is real. My brother has tries to no avail to explain to her that magic is not real, but she won’t budge. She’s not a dummy - she’s college educated (back when credentials were not simply issued to everyone) and has a well-paying career - which leads to me to the main point, that belief in magic is almost a path of low resistance and source of psychological satisfaction. People are just compelled to believe things they really want to be true. The more they want it to be true, the more they will suspend disbelief and ignore obvious contradictions with, like, laws of physics and what not.

>>63881602
They believe a lot of wacky shit. In some parts of Africa, they’ve adopted the belief that the skull of a bald man contains gold nuggets. So they will smash my (t. Baldlet) skull open to get at the gold inside.

The way they exaggerated the class conflict was like that of a cult.

>>63882001
And what about charms that actually do have real effects?
Candles and soaps are types of charms there, and you don't need to convince modern men of their potential effects, or of the potential dangers that come from burning psychoactives outside someone's room.
Everyone memes on herbal tea, but the second one of those herbs is quinine or caffeine, the tone changes.
Likewise, protective gloves and lightning rods are easier to use (even if not to great effect) than to understand.
Corpses moved near enemy residences, morale-affecting effigies, and all manner of combat charms are simply difficult to verify the effectiveness of. When one sees his enemy's gun explode in his hands, he's (somewhat) justified in believing something on his person was the cause, even if his assumption is wrong.

>>63882500
Anti-intellectual populists talk about "common sense," but it always devolves into magical thinking and obsession with conspiracy theories. It's a low IQ, low education thing in general, but if there is a blindfpot fed by religion or traditional belief/culture it bypasses critical thought, especially if populist politicians are sounding an alarm about sime social issue.

Che was playing Jagged Alliance 2 while the opps in the Congo and Bolivia were playing Combat Mission

>>63882500
>>63882569
Yeah, it's really just a human quirk, amplified by an enabling circumstance. Any answer is better than no answer, even if the answer is likely wrong, as it's at least actionable, and action can potentially alleviate the symptoms (or solve the problem), even if the reasoning behind it is completely off the mark.
I believe this is also why people favor "men of action".

>>63881962
Says you, my Clear Bing Bong is gonna make me live forever

>>63882567
>caffeine is a charm because it has real effects

Caffeine is an actual chemical compound with a mechanism of action in your brain. It exists within space and time - it is not magic. Psychoactive substances do not alter your mind by magic. It might feel that way, but it’s still beholden to laws of chemistry and physics and causality.

>morale-affecting [charms]

We are discussing the realness of the contents of a belief system, not whether or not the belief system exists, nor the effect it has on believers. I am of the opinion that magical thinking, the type one is hopelessly compelled towards by psychological imperatives, in its limit, is just religion. But I am aware that religiosity changes people’s lives, often for the better, not because it’s true, but because the person believes it to be true and so his mental state is in a different place now.

>>63881862
I've got a list of Yoruba combat charms. It should be pretty easy to understand once you see their named effects.
>Ayeta: Prevents gun bullets from reaching soldiers
>Afobon: Causes enemy gun barrels to explode
>Afeeri: Causes invisibility
>Egbe: Can be deployed to teleport away from the battlefront
>Ayipada: Enables transformation to scare off enemies
All of these are observably beneficial chance benefits and advantages that otherwise can't be guaranteed by untrained or panicked soldiers.
There's likely no one saying they'll work whenever you want them to, but rather, they tell them they'll activate when most needed. One can easily imagine a figure of authority happily inscribing cheap pieces of paper or animal skins with the knowledge that it'll make his soldiers less likely to desert in the heat of battle (or plan to, in the case of Egbe), and maybe even pay him out of their own pockets for a guarantee of relative safety, which he can offer through assignments and battle strategy, in ways aligning with the charms provided.
In the most cynical sense, these could be considered a form of bribe receipt within an institution extending back to the civilian world, allowing people with money or connections to secure improved chances for survival.
>>63882697
>Caffeine is an actual chemical compound with a mechanism of action in your brain.
I'm saying it doesn't matter, because concepts like "mechanism of action" become abstract for people who lack an unwavering belief in the laws of cause and effect.
Sure, it may be obvious that drinking alcohol inebriates you, but that's because it's so widespread that everyone is expected to understand it. Things like the effects of inhalants, fire hazards, or obscure liquids? Not so.
They have no particular reason to draw a boundary line between effective charms and everything else.

>>63882764
>part 2 of your post

Ah. Well alright then. Disregard my initial reply to you entirely.

>>63881862
You argue that's why a lot of soldiers would buy pistols before they got shipped off. Yeah if you're a GI on Guadalcanal you're rifle or whatever else is gonna kill japs better than a 1911 will. But the 1911 is *yours* and you can take it everywhere. It just has the added benefit of being a functional weapon in addition to making you feel safer.

>>63882500
>sleep paralysis
This is tricky because people inherently cannot think rationally or perceive the world of sound mind when they are in a state of sleep paralysis. Anecdotally, I was able to handle sleep paralysis much better once I realized that it and the nightmares associated with it were the result of my mind trying to wake myself up, usually because I wasn't getting enough air while I was asleep. It mostly went away when I changed my sleep posture, taking pressure off of my throat.

>>63878615
Based Mike.

>>63881695
>, we believe in miracles when God decides to set aside the laws of His creation aside.
That's literally magic you retarded kike worshipper.

>>63883045
Well, obviously when you’re asleep, you’re in a dream state where anything goes, anything is plausible. But then you wake up and realize it was just your brain morphing and hallucinating a demon out of the shadows or the coat on the wall or whatever.

Thankfully it’s only happened to me once. I was aware while it was happening. Eyes were open and I knew what I saw were hallucinations, but I couldn’t move anything nor could I wake myself up. I think after some time I managed to violently shake myself awake (Shake-awake is /k/ related). Don’t remember exactly, this was like 8 years ago.

>>63881695
Nah. Religion is the most widespread form of magical thinking. Also the most load-bearing as ultimately it seeks to satisfy the most pressing and only unfulfillable imperative - that of self-preservation. Such is an inevitable consequence of self-awareness. If there are intelligent aliens elsewhere in the universe, with finite lifespans, they too are doubtless religious.

For the record, I hold no animus towards religion in general, and specifically none against Christianity. I adore the world that Christianity makes possible and my entire family except my sister are Christian. The consequences of that viral belief system are real and great, but the contents of it are made-up and exist to assuage the very primal fear of death.

>>63878473 (OP)
Che must have had plot armor or something since the way he raised his army and fought was entirely illogical and reads like something out of Hollywood.

>>63878808

>https://firstthings.com/rgis-debray-radical-conservative/

That was an interesting article. Thanks.

>>63883045
I can't sleep on my back anymore because I get it anytime I do. Which sucks because that's my favorite sleeping position

>>63881602
They believe you can cure AIDS by raping a virgin, and they kill albinos because they believe they have gold inside their heads.

>>63878788
Well said. Cuba was a very complex, multifaceted situation with political conditions that were perfect for revolution. M-26-7 simple revised history afterwards to make it look like they did all the work. Now they certainly did a lot of the work but only Che was retarded enough to actually believe the revisionism was the truth.

>>63883366
> and they kill albinos because they believe they have gold inside their heads.

IIRC it was the heads of bald men they believe contain gold.

Where does such a belief even come from? How does it get started? Did someone spread a rumor about how he smashed a norwoodcels head open and found gold inside?