Guerrilla Warfare (book)

Guerrilla Warfare (La Guerra de Guerrillas) is a book by Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara that was written right after the Cuban Revolution and published in 1961. It soon became the guidebook for thousands of guerrilla fighters in various countries around the world.

Guevara intended it to be a manual on guerrilla warfare, elaborating the foco theory (foquismo) for other revolutionary movements in Latin America, Africa and Asia, but the book was also studied by counter-revolutionary military schools. While many draw parallels with Mao Zedong's On Guerrilla Warfare, Guevara claimed he had not read the book, which 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.

However, 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."

Guevara dedicated the book to his recently deceased comrade Camilo Cienfuegos, "who should have read and corrected it, but whose fate prevented him from carrying out the task."