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".
Guerrilla Warfare (book)
"Guerrilla Warfare" is a manual for the left-wing insurgency that draws on Guevara's experience as a participant in the Cuban revolution. It elaborates the foco theory ("foquismo"), for which the guerrilla operates as a vanguard even before the development of the "objective" conditions for a popular uprising. While many draw parallels with Mao Zedong's "On Guerrilla Warfare", Guevara claimed he had not read Mao's book. Instead it draws on the lessons of fighting during the Cuban Revolutionary War, which in turn were informed by two books from the Spanish Civil War, "Nuevas guerras" and "Medicina contra invasión", stressing the need for an underpinning political motivation to guerrilla methods, organisation and supply. Guevara emphasizes that guerrilla warfare is a favorable method only against totalitarian regimes, (such as the revolutionary war against the Batista dictatorship in Cuba), where political opposition and legal civil struggle is impossible to conduct. South African revolutionaries read the work in the early 1960s; former Minister of Intelligence Ronnie Kasrils notes that the Apartheid regime's police questioned his late wife about an order of "Che Guevara's book on guerrilla warfare."