Che Guevara
In early 1965, Guevara went to Africa to offer his knowledge and experience as a guerrilla to the ongoing conflict in the Congo. According to Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella, Guevara thought that Africa was imperialism's weak link and so had enormous revolutionary potential. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had fraternal relations with Che since his 1959 visit, saw Guevara's plan to fight in Congo as "unwise" and warned that he would become a "Tarzan" figure, doomed to failure. Despite the warning, Guevara traveled to Congo using the alias Ramón Benítez. He led the Cuban operation in support of the Marxist Simba movement, which had emerged from the ongoing Congo crisis. Guevara, his second-in-command Víctor Dreke, and 12 other Cuban expeditionaries arrived in Congo on April 24, 1965, and a contingent of approximately 100 Afro-Cubans joined them soon afterward. For a time, they collaborated with guerrilla leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who had helped supporters of the overthrown president Patrice Lumumba to lead an unsuccessful revolt months earlier. As an admirer of the late Lumumba, Guevara declared that his "murder should be a lesson for all of us". Guevara, with limited knowledge of Swahili and the local languages, was assigned a teenage interpreter, Freddy Ilanga. Over the course of seven months, Ilanga grew to "admire the hard-working Guevara", who "showed the same respect to black people as he did to whites". However, Guevara soon became disillusioned with the poor discipline of Kabila's troops and later dismissed him, stating "nothing leads me to believe he is the man of the hour".
René Barrientos
Barrientos had ample opportunity to prove his anti-Communist credentials in 1967, when a guerrilla force was discovered to be operating in the Bolivian southeast under the leadership of the Argentine-Cuban revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara in the Bolivian jungle. Barrientos was very concerned with Guevara's alleged popularity among the miners in the southwestern part of the country, and clamped down in the area with some very heavy-handed measures (such as the Massacre of San Juan). Guevara felt that such an atrocity by the Bolivian Army and Air Force would be the tipping point in his favour in rallying the miners to his Communist cause, but eventually the miners signed an agreement with the government-owned mining company Siglo XX, which agreement Guevara felt undermined his reason for being there. The war between President Barrientos and Che Guevara's militia did not end there, but eventually the Bolivian Army Rangers captured Guevara and executed him in October 1967.