The transnational imagination in the 1960s and 1970s

The 1960s and early 1970s were defined by a series of world historical events, including decolonization, a rights revolution, the war in Vietnam, and the rise of student protest movements. These events were affected by and affected a shift in consciousness.Footnote ⁹ In the early 1960s, radicals on every continent perceived a meaningful link between their lived circumstances and a system of domination that transcended national boundaries. At the same time, many young leftists rejected the gradualist policies of the Soviet Union and the orthodox communist parties, embracing Trotskyist, Maoist, or Castroite visions of global revolution. Thus, ‘internationalism’, to use the idiom of the era, became central to the worldview of myriad radical movements. Grounded in what Alain Touraine called a ‘unity of attitudes’, this internationalist structure of feeling entailed new networks, coordinated actions, and symbolic demonstrations of solidarity.Footnote ¹⁰ At the core of the new internationalist consciousness was a transnational imagination.

Scholars have employed the term ‘transnational imagination’ to describe popular strategies for representing distant societies. More commonly, however, the term functions as an amorphous reference to the effects of travel, education, and media exposure on collective perceptions of global interrelation.Footnote ¹¹ Here I wish to offer a concrete definition of the transnational imagination, one that is useful for addressing the cognitive dimensions of globalization, both past and present. In the way I use the term, the transnational imagination is a mode of perception that frames local circumstances within a global historical trajectory and shapes collective desires and actions as a result. This imagination is transnational in two senses: it is a cognitive sensibility that is both attentive to inter-societal linkages and embraced by people in very different milieus. As an individual and collective social phenomenon, the transnational imagination is particularly evident in moments of heightened global exchanges and can even contribute to the acceleration of the forces of global integration.Footnote ¹²

The concept of a transnational imagination is particularly relevant to the study of left-wing movements in the 1960s and 1970s. In radical circles, perceptions of the global arena were integral to political theory, strategies for action, and group identity. Radicals subscribed to numerous ideologies and devised idiosyncratic syntheses of multiple strains of thought. However, most movements advocated common egalitarian ideals, such as ‘universal liberation’, and engaged in the collective project of ‘making connections’, or recognizing the relationships between circumstances of oppression around the world.Footnote ¹³ Western radical movements, for instance, came to see oppression and exploitation in the decolonizing world as manifestations of the same reactionary forces in their own societies. From this perspective, the struggles of the metropole and the former colony were indivisible, and resistance anywhere contributed to the prospective global revolution.Footnote ¹⁴

For many Western radicals, solidarity with liberation movements in the South – a posture often termed ‘Third Worldism’ – proved an important frame of reference and catalyst for action.Footnote ¹⁵ Moreover, many saw liberation movements in the developing world as the socialist vanguard, whose successes hastened the end of the capitalist world system. Militant organizations such as the Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF), Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement, and the Algerian National Liberation Front offered examples of victory in the face of overwhelming odds and demonstrated that anything was possible.Footnote ¹⁶ By the late 1960s the New Left had come to believe that they had an important role to play in the construction of the new world order being shaped by the global South.Footnote ¹⁷

The adoption of an explicitly internationalist lens through which to view local events was electrifying, but it was not unprecedented. For instance, many in the West saw themselves as inheritors of the spirit, though not necessarily the praxis, of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Internationals. Moreover, this anti-imperialist community of sentiment found a common language through a ‘transnational library’ that drew on a long history of radical criticism.Footnote ¹⁸ Influential thinkers such as Karl Marx, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, Mao Zedong, and Che offered concepts for apprehending current circumstances and a grammar to articulate grievances. This communitas of shared ideals and references bound by a transnational imagination helps to account for the circular amplification of radical actions, similarities among guerrilla movements, and the celebration of common heroes.Footnote ¹⁹

Radical movements shared a commitment to the anti-capitalist struggle, were inspired by each other's successes, and sometimes acted in unison. Yet, solidarity was often symbolic. The most legible means of signifying common attitudes was through the use of flags, ideograms and images. As a result, these became important components of the radical collective identity. For example, as a statement of ‘universal and international principles of social justice’, the Chicago 8 – radicals indicted for organizing protests during the 1968 Democratic Convention – placed an NLF flag and Che's portrait on the defence table during their high-profile trial.Footnote ²⁰ Heroes were critical elements in the radical transnational imagination because they condensed numerous virtues into a single human figure. As emblems of individual vision, courage, or sacrifice, heroes added flesh to the bones of radical rhetoric. National heroes such as Malcolm X, Emiliano Zapata, Augustino Sandino, and Rosa Luxemburg remained relevant throughout the 1960s and 1970s, but young people around the world were drawn to a relatively small number of shared political icons, including Mao, Marx, Ho Chi Minh, Angela Davis, Fidel Castro, and Che.

Contemporary attempts to account for Che's appeal typified the guerrilla leader as a ‘revolutionary archetype’, ‘folk hero’, ‘icon’, ‘cult figure’, and ‘idol’. The fact that Che was both a theorist of revolution and a young, idealistic rebel ensured that his profile was multidimensional. In 1968 Andrew Sinclair argued that Che personified utopian dreams of revolution because he ‘made the impossible appear to be possible’.Footnote ²¹ Though many Marxist thinkers criticized Che's ideas, and others denounced him as an ‘adventurer’, his allegory of courage and passion appealed widely. Thus, rather than marking a discrete ideology, Che became a common denominator of revolutionary optimism, a symbol for multiple possibilities.

More remarkably, in the months after Che's death one image began to occupy a central place in the iconography of Left movements: that of Guevara with long hair and a beard, wearing a starred beret and looking intently into the distance. This romantic rendering of Che, dubbed Heroic Guerrilla, struck a powerful chord with many young people. Moreover, Heroic Guerrilla's beard and long hair visually approximated current ideals of youthful rebellion, and therefore its popularity seeped into the wider counter-culture and beyond.Footnote ²² In the following sections, I will plot the circulation of the Heroic Guerrilla image and ideas associated with Che across two overlapping tracks in his appeal: as a symbol of sociopolitical possibility and as a revolutionary role model.

I begin by exploring the logics of attraction to Che and the itineraries of the Heroic Guerrilla image, circuitous routes that link Cuba with radical movements around the world. In the second section, I examine the cross-currents and synchrony of New Left activism in 1968 through a reflection on the ways in which radicals in the US, UK, West Germany, France, and Mexico used Che's image and drew inspiration from his example. In the final section, I address how guerrillas in the US, Latin America, and the Middle East similarly employed his image as a symbol of transnational alliance while applying his theory of revolutionary violence to diverse political environments.

Ascent of the Heroic Guerrilla

Long after Che's death, Tariq Ali vividly recalled the day that he learned of his hero's fate. Ali was a prominent member of Britain's Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, and when he received the news of Che's execution he was preparing for a large-scale Vietnam War demonstration in London. After hearing the news, Ali was overpowered by a sense of loss. ‘I sat at my desk and wept’, he remembered. His grief was only eased by the fact that ‘On every continent there were many others who felt and reacted in a similar fashion’.Footnote ²³ Like others in this community of sentiment, Tariq Ali was a self-described revolutionary socialist who greatly admired Mao, Ho, and Che. Disillusioned with the Labour Party, he believed that egalitarian ideals had died on the stage of parliamentary politics. In his estimation, revolution in the global South offered the inspiration and direction lacking in Western democratic institutions, and Che, as a principal advocate of this struggle, represented a new beacon of idealism.Footnote ²⁴

Che's popularity among radicals such as Tariq Ali was closely linked to the Cuban Revolution and its prominent position in the New Left's imagination. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Fidel Castro and Che Guevara became anti-imperialist luminaries. Radicals hailed the Cuban success as a check on US influence in Latin America, and lionized its most recognizable personalities. As George Mariscal has suggested, post-revolutionary Cuba became a popular screen onto which a range of leftist aspirations were projected.Footnote ²⁵ The Cuban Revolution thrust Che into the international spotlight, but he gained particular notoriety for the fact that he was not Cuban. As one of the few outsiders, and sole Argentine, in Castro's army, Che gained a reputation as a committed internationalist.

In the years after the Cuban Revolution, Guevara embraced internationalism with greater zeal. In the early 1960s he became an emissary for the Cuban doctrine of ‘immediate and uncompromising armed struggle’.Footnote ²⁶ The writings and speeches of his final years clearly reflect his ardent internationalism. Perhaps his most famous work in this respect was his 1966 open letter to the Organization for Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America meeting (or Tricontinental) in Havana. In his ‘Message to the Tricontinental’, Guevara called for greater dedication to internationalism: ‘let us develop a true proletarian internationalism’, he proclaimed, one in which ‘each nation liberated is a phase won in the battle for the liberation of one's own country’, a world where ‘two, three, many Vietnams flourish’.Footnote ²⁷

Radicals such as Tariq Ali also admired Che because they saw him as an idealist who acted on his principles. Though Che occupied ministerial positions in Cuba's post-revolutionary government, he forfeited a comfortable post to fulfil what he deemed the ‘most sacred of duties’, that of fighting imperialism.Footnote ²⁸ In 1965 he travelled to Central Africa to assist insurgents in Congo. When the Congo venture failed he turned to South America. Che calculated that Bolivia could become the epicentre of a continental uprising, and in late 1966 he arrived to lay the groundwork for this revolution. Less than a year later, he was dead. At only thirty-nine, Che was frozen in time as the perpetual revolutionary: young, dedicated, and uncompromising. In this sense, he epitomized the idealism of the New Left.

Che's commitment to action also proved appealing because of the hyper-masculine culture that characterized left-wing movements of the late 1960s and 1970s. As Sara M. Evans has written, Che was a ‘brash, gun-toting, self-confident image of the masculine rebel’, or a revolutionary archetype imbued with machismo. This image accorded well with the confrontational ethos of many radical movements, one in which violent resistance was valorized even by many who were themselves non-violent.Footnote ²⁹ For instance, Che's bravado appealed to young men such as Mark Rudd of the American Students for a Democratic Society. In 1968 the twenty-year-old Rudd dreamed of being like Che, a ‘daring commander of rebels, willing to risk his life to free the people of the world’.Footnote ³⁰ Additionally, Che felt like a kindred spirit to many radicals because his background mirrored their own. He was a precursor to 1960s radicalism typified in Europe, Latin America, and, to a lesser extent, the US by young, educated, and empowered people who questioned the basis of their power. Born into a middle-class Argentine family, Che earned a medical degree before being exposed to the plight of the Latin American underclass. The educated young people who constituted the core of protest movements and guerrilla organizations in Mexico, West Germany, Uruguay, and elsewhere saw elements of their own political awakening in his biography.Footnote ³¹

Che's heady allegory of internationalism and self-sacrifice led many to see him as the ultimate icon of revolution, and Heroic Guerrilla came to signify these attributes more plainly than any other image of him. Moreover, the popularity of the image highlights multiple channels of connectivity within radical circles. The Cuban fashion photographer-turned-journalist Alberto ‘Korda’ Diaz Gutiérrez snapped Heroic Guerrilla in 1960 and gave it its name (Guerrillero Heroico, in the original Spanish). However, the image gained little attention until 1967, when Korda offered a print to the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Feltrinelli returned to Italy and made thousands of Heroic Guerrilla posters in late 1967. Cuban artists also began producing images based on the Korda photograph shortly before Che's death, some of which appeared at the August 1967 OLAS (Organization of Latin American Solidarity) conference in Havana.Footnote ³²

Heroic Guerrilla circulated widely within European radical networks in late 1967, but it was in Ireland that the image was transformed into the stencilized version that gained global notoriety. The Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick was a great admirer of Che. In 1967 he received a print of Heroic Guerrilla from members of the Dutch anarchist group Provos. After creating multiple stylized adaptations Fitzpatrick stripped the original photograph of its grey tones and cast Che as a one-dimensional, black stencil. He then erased the background and replaced it with ‘socialist’ red. Fitzpatrick's version made Heroic Guerrilla into an easily reproducible work of pop art.Footnote ³³ Accordingly, he set about printing thousands of copies. He gave many away, posted a number abroad, and sold others at low prices to shops in Ireland and England. Within a few months of its creation, demand for Fitzpatrick's Heroic Guerrilla skyrocketed. For example, in early May 1968 one of France's most prominent activists, Daniel Cohn-Bendit (see below), acquired one of Fitzpatrick's posters, copied it, and distributed it among Parisian demonstrators.Footnote ³⁴

Che gained admirers around the world in the late 1960s, but nowhere was his image and example as important as in Cuba. The Castro government believed that Che's selfless example could be a valuable moral guide for the post-revolution generation. Thus, even before Che's death, the Cuban government began to promote him as a symbol of individual and collective aspiration. Soon after learning of Che's fate the government commissioned a photomural of Korda's Heroic Guerrilla to span six stories of the Ministry of the Interior building on Havana's Plaza de la Revolución. In a speech memorializing his fallen comrade, Castro predicted that Che would live as a lodestar for revolution: ‘If we wish to express what we expect our revolutionary combatants, our militants, our men to be’, Castro bellowed, ‘let them be like Che!’Footnote ³⁵

On the ninth anniversary of the 26th of July Movement's victory, 2 January 1968, Castro gave another speech in which he decreed that the entire year was to be dedicated to Che and the Vietnamese freedom-fighters: the year of the heroic guerrilla. The Cuban government funded Che murals and promoted aspirational phrases such as ‘Hasta la victoria siempre’ and ‘Be like Che’.Footnote ³⁶ At the same time, Cuba sought to make Che a principal signifier of Latin American, African, and Asian solidarity, or Tricontinentalism. The Castro government's promotion of Che to both patriotic and anti-imperialist archetype fixed Guevara as a legendary national hero and facilitated an enduring point of Cuban connection with leftist movements around the world.Footnote ³⁷

Castro's charge that others should emulate his martyred comrade struck a chord with many young people in and beyond Cuba. When the Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organizer Mark Rudd visited Cuba in March 1968, Che's image already adorned the nation, from the international arrivals terminal at Havana airport to small country towns. The image and Rudd's experience in Cuba made a great impression. He would later recall the pivotal moment when, while travelling in the Cuban countryside, he looked down from a high ridge to see an enormous image of Guevara's face painstakingly plotted in stones. Awed by the scene, Rudd began to develop a keen interest in Che.Footnote ³⁸

Che and the protest movements

For Mark Rudd, Che's ideas and selfless example were transformative. Before visiting Cuba, he was inspired by, among other works, the Autobiography of Malcolm X and Fanon's Wretched of the earth. Yet a book that expounded on Che's ideas, Revolution in the revolution?, written by the French intellectual Régis Debray, gave Rudd's activism clearer direction. Debray's 1967 treatise outlined the ‘foco theory’, or the concept that guerrilla action need not be subordinate to the machinations of political parties. Drawing on insights from Fidel Castro and Che, Debray outlined the Cuban model of revolution, which rejected orthodox Marxism's emphasis on political mobilization of the proletariat as a precondition of insurrection. Che had articulated the theory's core principle in his 1961 handbook Guerrilla warfare: ‘It is not necessary to wait until all conditions for making revolution exist’, he declared, ‘the insurrection can create them’.Footnote ³⁹ Elaborating Che's concept, Debray argued that Cuban insurgents had become the nucleus, or ‘focal point’, of revolutionary action and as a militant vanguard had created the conditions for successful insurrection. Echoing Castro and Guevara, and feeding the New Left's hunger for new strategy, Debray suggested that Cuba's lesson was that a small, determined guerrilla force could create a revolution.Footnote ⁴⁰

For radicals like Mark Rudd who were disillusioned with the political process and desirous of rapid social change, the notion that a small group could light the spark of revolution was intoxicating. Taking cues from anti-colonial, civil rights, labour, and other social movements, radicals in the West and Latin America had already embraced a range of direct action tactics, including mass protest and civil disobedience. The foco theory emboldened some radicals to expand this repertoire and it confirmed that greater militancy could yield desired gains. In Todd Gitlin's words, the foco theory ‘heightened the feeling that with sheer audacity we must – and therefore could – bull our way past the apparent obstacles’.Footnote ⁴¹ The wide circulation of Revolution in the revolution? and increased interest in Che after his death converted the foco theory into what Edward Said has termed a ‘traveling theory’, or an idea reinterpreted and transformed by its applications beyond its original context.Footnote ⁴² In the case of the foco theory, it was not the minutiae of the Cuban model or the nuances of Debray's analysis that would resonate broadly. Instead, many radicals embraced the simplified concept that spontaneous action by small groups, or focos, could engender a broader revolution.

In the spring of 1968, Mark Rudd's travel to Cuba, exposure to Debray, and quickening interest in Che stirred a new zeal in the SDS leader. He was now guided by a dictum commonly repeated in Cuba and attributed to Che: ‘the duty of the revolutionary is to make revolution’.Footnote ⁴³ Rudd and several other Columbia activists organized a group called the Action Faction, which staged a number of protests and walkouts as a means of drawing more students to their cause. Events came to a head in April 1968 – soon after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr – when a coalition of Columbia students led by the SDS and the Student Afro-American Society (SAS) occupied a clutch of university administration buildings. The uprising was born of multiple concerns, but students focused on two main issues: the administration's decision to build a gym in Harlem's Morningside Park and Columbia University's institutional support for the war in Vietnam via its affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analysis.

Student demands for reform were local in scope, but through the prism of the transnational imagination both the SDS and the SAS interpreted the occupations as acts of international solidarity. Mark Rudd explained that ‘Every militant in the buildings knew that he was there because of his opposition to racism and imperialism and the capitalist system that needs to exploit and oppress human beings from Vietnam to Harlem to Columbia’. The SAS representative Bill Sales was equally explicit: ‘You strike a blow at the gym, you strike a blow for the Vietnamese people’, he told an audience in student-occupied Hamilton Hall, adding ‘You strike a blow at Low Library [another occupied building] and you strike a blow for the freedom fighters in Angola, Mozambique, South Africa’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Students in Hamilton Hall celebrated common heroes by hanging posters of Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, and Karl Marx on the walls of the occupied building. However, they afforded Che's image pride of place over the door of the Acting Dean's office. The Columbia revolt was short-lived, but in its wake more students joined the radical cause. Decisive action had, in Mark Rudd's estimation, changed the consciousness of Columbia students, just as the foco theory suggested.Footnote ⁴⁵ Moreover, the SDS and SAS's acts of resistance encouraged other radical student organizations to, in Tom Hayden's adaptation of Che's rhetoric, ‘create two, three, many Columbias’.Footnote ⁴⁶

Like Columbia's SDS and SAS, West German students at universities in Munich, Frankfurt, West Berlin, and Hamburg saw themselves as catalysts for revolutionary change. For Rudi Dutschke, the most prominent representative of the Socialist German Student Union (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, or SDS), the struggle of West German students was one for ‘international emancipation’ in solidarity with liberation movements in the developing world and reform movements in eastern Europe. Echoing Che's inspirational call, Dutschke claimed that the West German SDS aimed to create ‘two, three Prague Springs’. He believed that opposition to the American war in Vietnam was a critical first step towards challenging imperialism and liberating humanity from capitalist and bureaucratic oppression. Dutschke and other West German radicals raised Che as a revolutionary icon and drew inspiration from the foco theory. More precisely, Dutschke embraced the foco theory's promise of ‘revolutionizing the revolutionaries’ through confrontational action. Che was such an important influence for Dutschke that he even named his son after the guerrilla leader.Footnote ⁴⁷

At a student convention in 1967, Dutschke and his fellow organizer Hans-Jürgen Krahl spearheaded an effort to push the SDS in a more confrontational direction. The guiding spirit of student agitation would be, as Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey summarized, ‘organization by action, and not action by organization’.Footnote ⁴⁸ During a February 1968 Vietnam War teach-in in Frankfurt, Dutschke attempted to implement this strategy by calling on the crowd to occupy the American consulate. Dutschke and the protesters descended on the US consulate in Frankfurt but failed to penetrate the complex. Instead, in a heavily symbolic gesture, they stripped the German flag from the nearby US Trade Center and replaced it with two symbols of transnational solidarity: the NLF standard and a picture of Che.Footnote ⁴⁹

In February 1968 the SDS also convened its first International Vietnam Conference. Representatives from the West German SDS, French and American student organizations, and the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity (Partito Socialista Italiano di Unità Proletaria) attended the event at West Berlin's Free University. The West German SDS hosts decorated the conference hall with symbols that represented the causes uniting the groups present at the landmark event. Above the podium was an NLF flag as a sign of solidarity with Vietnam. As a symbol of global revolution, the organizers hung a banner bearing Che's image and the maxim ‘The duty of every revolutionary is to make revolution’. French students who attended the conference were inspired by the sophistication and determination of the West Germans. It would be the first time that they would hear the chants ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’ and ‘Che, Che, Che Guevara’. Three months later, they repeated these chants on the streets of Paris.Footnote ⁵⁰

One of the French student groups that attended the West Berlin conference and later played a role in the French May uprising was the Revolutionary Communist Youth (Jeunesses Communistes Révolutionnaires, or JCR). The JCR voiced its solidarity with labour, anti-colonial, and anti-bureaucratic movements and celebrated Che as a revolutionary hero. Mixing elements of Che's thinking with Trotskyism in an unconventional ideological cocktail, JCR members believed that they could ignite a revolution that would lead the metropolitan working classes to socialism. In February 1968 one of the JCR's founders, Janette Habel, argued that western European youth should draw inspiration from Che as a true internationalist. ‘We must defend Che like a flag’, she argued, ‘defend his concept of the new human being, who is involved in the anti-imperialist fight … who is sensitive to the fate of all the exploited’. Che's ‘many Vietnams’ call to arms, and other axioms such as ‘The duty of a revolutionary is to make revolution’, peppered JCR discourse.Footnote ⁵¹

In May 1968, French radicals staged a series of protests that began as demonstrations against the war in Vietnam and the structure of French universities but quickly gained such force as to threaten the de Gaulle government. One organizer of the uprising was Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Like the JCR, Cohn-Bendit's Movement of 22 March drew inspiration from, among other sources, Che and the foco theory. For instance, the movement reckoned that vanguard actions by students could create the conditions for revolution. Cohn-Bendit became a seasoned agitator in Nanterre, where the Movement of 22 March gained a number of concessions. Emboldened by these victories he turned to Paris and assisted students there to organize demonstrations. In May, Parisian students occupied the Sorbonne and plastered it with posters of inspirational figures, including Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, and Che. In a nod to the wide appeal of the Cuban revolutionary, students renamed the Sorbonne's main auditorium Che Guevara Hall.Footnote ⁵²

When workers joined the striking students, the demonstrations became the largest strike in French history, a spontaneous wildcat strike that numbered roughly nine million labourers. A loose confederation of labour, anti-Gaullists, and students coalesced in the strike, and together they paralysed Paris, brought the economy to a standstill, and applied significant pressure to the de Gaulle government.Footnote ⁵³ However, concessions to workers and police reprisals against student demonstrators quickly dissipated the coalition. Despite the failure of the coalition to usher in a new order, in the eyes of many radicals the general strike that developed from student agitation validated the idea that exemplary action can rouse the masses.

In the summer of 1968, students in Mexico City resurrected Che's spirit in a more explicit fashion. The activist, and later Che biographer, Paco Ignacio Taibo II recalled that, within Mexican radical circles of the late 1960s, Che was the quintessential revolutionary hero, or ‘the man to follow’.Footnote ⁵⁴ More than any other figure, Che represented the anti-authoritarian, anti-imperialist, and internationalist sensibilities of the Mexican student movement. By August 1968 he had become a central point of connection with movements across Latin America, western Europe, and North America. As one student explained in that year, Che was ‘our link with student movements all over the world’.Footnote ⁵⁵

Less than two months after the end of the French strike, students in Mexico City initiated a series of protests. Student demands included the release of political prisoners and an end to police aggression. Launching the protests just ahead of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, the leaders placed significant pressure on the Gustavo Díaz Ordaz government at the very moment when Mexico was poised to capture the world's attention. On 26 July students led a mass demonstration in solidarity with Cuba's 26th of July Movement. On 13 August university and secondary school students marched to the centre of Mexico City, in a demonstration where Che's inspirational role was manifest. Protesting students chanted, ‘Che, Che, Che Guevara’ and ‘Create two, three, many Vietnams!’ ‘Che is not dead’, a banner read, ‘he lives in our ranks’. As other protesters swelled the student ranks, events seemed to validate the foco theory. One demonstrator concluded that ‘Che's thesis is proven in Mexico’.Footnote ⁵⁶

Che's symbolic presence grew with the size of the demonstrations. Those at the front of a 17 August march carried a giant banner of Fitzpatrick's Heroic Guerrilla inscribed with the slogan ‘Hasta la victoria siempre’. One student recalled:

As in the US, West Germany, and France, Che's inspirational example emboldened Mexican students’ acts of resistance. Ten days later, on 27 August, an even larger group of students, numbering roughly 400,000, entered the Zócalo. They now carried portraits of Che alongside those of Mexican national heroes, including José María Morelos, Benito Juárez, Emiliano Zapata, and Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa.Footnote ⁵⁸

Che was the most important transnational hero of the Mexican student movement, but from late August 1968 he would become a significant political liability to the protesters. The Mexican government and the popular press pointed to Che references as evidence that the student movement was being controlled by external, communist powers, notably Cuba.Footnote ⁵⁹ To deflect this charge, on the eve of a solemn demonstration set for 13 September, the Great Silent March, organizers asked demonstrators to carry only placards depicting Mexican national heroes. Despite such efforts, the government responded to the demonstrations with extreme force, which culminated in a massacre of protesters at Tlatelolco the following month.Footnote ⁶⁰ Though Che's image had become a liability, in Mexico City as elsewhere in 1968 it reflected a subversive transnational imagination and communicated solidarity in a global struggle.

Che and the guerrillas

In the late 1960s and early 1970s many radicals emphasized the emancipatory power of violence and took up arms, often against greatly superior forces. In Peru, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and many other contexts, guerrilla strategists drew on the Cuban experience and Che's writings. The application of the foco theory to armed struggle came to be known as ‘Guevarism’, or foquismo. The foco theory proved attractive to militant groups eager to bypass processes of political mobilization and other precursors to revolution prescribed by orthodox communism. More precisely, revolution by sheer audacity appealed to militants frustrated by the reformist approaches of the Soviet Union and the Old Left, alienated from the working class, and driven by a profound optimism that the dominant socioeconomic system could be toppled. For instance, in 1968 an overzealous admirer of Che at the University of Colorado-Boulder explained to his fellow students that, contra orthodox Marxism, the revolution did not need the masses behind it. Just one man, he wrote, ‘can bring a city to its knees’.Footnote ⁶¹

Despite the foco theory's popularity, its formula for revolution was narrow: a rural insurrection led by a revolutionary vanguard and supported by the peasantry. As a result, the foco theory was, by Debray's own admission, not easily transposed to other environments. Che's death demonstrated the foco theory's limited applicability. After only a few months of fighting in Bolivia, Che's forces alienated the Bolivian Communist Party, failed to gain the support of local peasants, and encountered stiff resistance from US-trained counter-insurgency forces. When the Bolivian military finally captured Che, his band had dwindled to a handful. Che could not recreate the Cuban Revolution by force of will, and his attempts to do so led many critics on the Left to denounce his efforts as reckless and counter-productive.Footnote ⁶²

Given the centrality of the rural guerrilla movement to the foco theory, it is no small irony that Che inspired urban guerrillas to launch campaigns that diverged substantially from the Cuban model. Guevarists often borrowed selectively from Che's canon, merging the foco theory with concepts adopted from other militant strategists, such as Carlos Marighella and Abraham Guillén. Many foquista guerrilla movements based in the city focused on spectacular martial acts, which they believed could deliver the masses to the revolutionary cause. As a result, urban guerrillas inspired by the foco theory often more closely resembled anarchists than Cuban revolutionaries.Footnote ⁶³Foquismo also widened ideological divides within the Left. In many instances, frictions between foquistas, Maoists, and those committed to less violent forms of agitation led to the Guevarists’ detachment from mass movements. Therefore, unlike Fidel and Che's 26th of July Movement, many guerrilla organizations of the 1960s and 1970s found themselves isolated from potential bases of support, including the urban and rural working classes as well as students.

In western Europe, the US, and Latin America, proponents of revolutionary violence often emerged from the student movements. One group that moved from protest to violence, and looked to Che as a primary inspiration, was a faction of the American SDS known as the Weathermen. In 1969 militant wings of the SDS, including the Action Faction in New York (see above) and the Jesse James Gang in Ann Arbor, Michigan, formed the Weathermen. Under the leadership of Bernadine Dohrn, Mark Rudd, Cathy Wilkerson, Bill Ayers, and others, the group published a position paper, ‘You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows’, which argued for the necessity of revolutionary violence. In a clear articulation of the transnational imagination that propelled their movement, the Weathermen explained that the world was locked in a battle between American imperialists and those who resisted them. They saw Vietnam as a primary theatre in this war, but held that a new front should be opened on American soil. This new front, the group suggested, would add internal conflict to the ‘many Vietnams’ that would ‘dismember and dispose of US imperialism’. To rally militants around this idea, the Weathermen adopted the slogan ‘Bring the war home’.Footnote ⁶⁴

The Weathermen initiated the war at home by setting off a bomb in Haymarket Square, Chicago, on 7 October 1969. Two days later, they staged an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Chicago's Lincoln Park to coincide with the anniversary of Che's death and the trial of the Chicago 8. They hoped that the demonstration would drive the protest movement towards armed clashes with the police. The event only drew a small crowd, but those who attended were committed to the Weathermen's militant vision. Those assembled in the park carried symbols of their struggle, including NLF flags and a banner bearing Fitzpatrick's Heroic Guerrilla captioned ‘Avenge Che Guevara’. Bernardine Dohrn announced to the militants present that, while it was the anniversary of Che's murder, his death ‘has not killed the revolution’. The chants ‘Che lives’, ‘Venceremos’, and ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’ filled the night air. From Lincoln Park the demonstrators took to the streets, smashing symbols of conspicuous consumption and fighting running battles with the police.Footnote ⁶⁵

The Chicago police bludgeoned the Weathermen, but the faction remained convinced of the necessity of revolutionary violence. Soon after the confrontations in Chicago, national leaders of the SDS met to discuss the future of the student organization. Dohrn and the Weathermen called for armed struggle.Footnote ⁶⁶ The exodus of members of the Maoist Progressive Labor Party from the SDS had already split the organization, and Dohrn's call to arms alienated many remaining members. As the Weathermen hastened the SDS's collapse, the faction reconstituted itself as a clandestine network of urban cells known collectively as the Weather Underground Organization (WUO).

WUO guerrillas fashioned themselves as a fifth column of the worldwide revolution in solidarity with the Vietnamese NLF, the Uruguayan Tupamaros, the Black Panther Party, and other Left movements. Cathy Wilkerson, a founding WUO member, explained that the organization sought to create links with revolutionaries in Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria, and elsewhere while positioning themselves ‘to bring down the critically weakened center [of the capitalist system] from the inside’. Influenced by the foco theory, the group initiated a carefully orchestrated bombing campaign designed to rouse the masses and encourage similar acts of revolutionary violence. As a testament to the centrality of Che's inspirational example, cell members hung framed photographs of the fallen guerrilla in their safe houses.Footnote ⁶⁷ WUO operations did not, however, stimulate a wider insurrection. Instead, revolutionary violence isolated the WUO from nearly all bases of support.

Foquismo reached its zenith in Latin America, where Che's uncompromising stance against US imperialism and his doctrine of immediate revolution fired the imagination of a generation. In the mid 1960s many radicals across the region argued that non-violent agitation had produced minimal results. As the demands of protest movements met with severe reprisals and the US expanded its support for regional security forces, new models of armed struggle gained currency within radical circles. Castro and Guevara had been heroes of the Left since the 1950s, but from the middle of the 1960s, and particularly after his death, Che was a central reference for revolutionary leftist movements from Chile to Nicaragua. In 1968 the journalist Norman Gall argued that Che's Guerrilla warfare was probably the most influential book published in Latin America since the Second World War. Guerrilla warfare was not a bestseller, but in Gall's estimation it altered the tone and focus of Latin American revolutionary struggles.Footnote ⁶⁸

Che's biography, internationalist message, and personal sacrifice resonated with the transnational imagination and revolutionary fervour of Latin American radicals, particularly those of urban, middle-class backgrounds. His influence even extended to the Latin American clergy. The most celebrated cleric to integrate Che's ideas with Christian precepts was the Colombian Roman Catholic priest Camilo Torres. For Torres, the lives of Jesus and Che were analogous, since both men were devoted to the liberation of the oppressed and challenged social inequalities regardless of the personal cost. Adapting the famous phrase associated with Che, Camilo Torres asserted that, ‘the duty of every Christian is to be a revolutionary, and the duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution’.Footnote ⁶⁹

At the end of the 1960s Guevarist guerrillas were more numerous in Latin America than any other part of the world. Among the most notable were the Chilean Movement of the Revolutionary Left (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, or MIR), the Bolivian National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, or ELN), Uruguay's Tupamaros (Movimiento de Liberación Nacional-Tupamaros), Venezuela's Armed Forces of National Liberation (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional), the Peruvian Revolutionary Left Movement (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria), the Nicaraguan Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional), the People's Revolutionary Army of Argentina (Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo, or ERP), and Brazil's Revolutionary Movement of October 8 (Movimento Revolucionário 8 de Outubro). Each group looked to Che as a revolutionary role model, though each fused Che's ideas with other strains of revolutionary theory.

Che's influence was perhaps most symbolically evident in the Brazilian Revolutionary Movement of October 8, or MR-8. MR-8 grew out of a popular student campaign to oppose the 1964 military seizure of power. In 1966 a core group of student radicals took up arms against the military dictatorship. The following year members chose the date of Che's capture as the name of their organization, a choice that both memorialized the fallen revolutionary and symbolically linked Brazilian efforts with the global liberation struggle. MR-8 commandos organized a number of operations, including bank robberies and the kidnapping of a US ambassador, which they believed would lay the groundwork for a larger, rural insurrection. Yet the MR-8's efforts failed to foment a wider uprising in Brazil.Footnote ⁷⁰

In neighbouring Uruguay, the Tupamaros launched a similar urban insurgency. Tupamaros members were mainly students, academics, and other middle-class intellectuals, who believed that they could bypass traditional forms of political mobilization to become a revolutionary vanguard. The revolution, the Tupamaros argued, ‘cannot wait’. Echoing Che's rhetoric, they outlined their overall strategy as an attempt to create ‘many Vietnams’ in order to challenge US imperialism and its regional agents.Footnote ⁷¹ Though the Tupamaros were constituted in the early 1960s, they only began to execute notable operations on a highly symbolic occasion: the second anniversary of Che's death. In October 1969 the Che Guevara Commando Unit, which consisted of at least fifty Tupamaro guerrillas, led an assault on the town of Pando (about thirty kilometres outside Montevideo). The raid aimed to demonstrate the ability of the people to rise up against the forces of oppression, and the targets included a police station as well as three banks. The Tupamaros continued their efforts for several years and won the sympathy of many Uruguayans, but, like the MR-8, they were not able to foment a popular revolt.Footnote ⁷²

The People's Revolutionary Army (ERP) of Argentina also held Che in high regard. He was the ERP's primary inspiration because of what they referred to as his ‘exemplary practice of proletarian internationalism’. In a dramatic articulation of the transnational imagination, the ERP's stated goals were to pave the way for socialism and, like Che, to be in ‘whatever place people are fighting imperialism arms in hand’.Footnote ⁷³ As a measure of the ERP guerrillas’ commitment to Che's internationalist vision, in 1973 they joined forces with the Tupamaros, the Chilean MIR, and Bolivia's ELN to create a popular front against their respective governments and US influence in the region. The four insurgent groups established the first international coordinating committee of Guevarist guerrillas, the Junta for Revolutionary Coordination (Junta de Coordinación Revolucionaria, or JCR).

The JCR was united by common grievances, Che's spirit of defiance, his vision of global socialist revolution, and, to a lesser degree, the foco theory. In a 1974 communiqué the consortium suggested that their collaboration was a necessary first step towards concretizing ‘one of the principal strategic ideas of comandante Che Guevara’: the internationalization of revolution. The JCR claimed that, as a transnational league of guerrilla fighters, they were sowing the seeds of ‘the second [Latin American] independence’, which would eliminate the ‘unjust capitalist system’ and establish ‘revolutionary socialism’. The coalition adopted a red flag emblazoned with Fitzpatrick's Heroic Guerrilla and the words ‘Che Guevara’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Thus, Che's image, filtered through Korda, Fitzpatrick, and the radical circuits of the era, became the standard for a collective insurgency that saw national movements as components of a global struggle. The transnational imagination and political conditions in the Southern Cone had engendered an ostensibly regional guerrilla war.

The JCR was the most advanced attempt to realize Che's dream, but its constituent movements realized few successes. The ERP, for example, was subdued after initiating a guerrilla campaign in Argentina's Tucumán Province. The Isabel Perón government responded to the ERP threat with overwhelming force, granting the military and police unusual powers to neutralize the insurgents. By 1977 security forces had broken the back of the guerrilla movement through a counter-insurgency programme that included targeted assassinations, ‘disappearances’, and torture. Other regional governments likewise used heavy-handed tactics to crush members of the JCR. This overwhelming state response to Guevarist insurrections shifted the political landscape of Latin America in ways that militants had not foreseen. Instead of installing revolutionary socialism, Guevarism emboldened regional governments to act with impunity, encouraged greater coordination among them, and prompted more significant US counter-insurgency assistance. Foquismo became a justification for greater militarism and repression.Footnote ⁷⁵

Latin American guerrilla organizations engaged Che's ideas with the greatest verve, but his example inspired many other militants around the world, including prominent members of the Irish Republican Army, the Red Army Faction, the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran, the Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Fatah), and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). For instance, Che played a central role in the decision of the PFLP commando Leila Khaled to join the armed struggle. The combination of the Six-Day War and Che's death convinced Khaled to become part of the resistance movement. She pledged to fight Israel and its American ally, and believed Che to be the ideal role model for Palestinian revolutionaries. Sounding notes similar to radicals in the US and Latin America, Khaled admired Che because ‘his commitment was total’. She believed that ‘my people needed revolutionaries and heroes of Che's calibre’, and so she vowed to follow Che's example by committing herself to the liberation of Palestine.Footnote ⁷⁶

As with the WUO in the US and the JCR in South America, PFLP militants saw Che as a lodestar for anti-imperialism and a crucial link with the global liberation struggle. As a result, PFLP operatives referenced Che during a hijack designed to bring international attention to the Palestinian cause. In 1969 the PFLP leadership selected Leila Khaled to head the Che Guevara Commando Unit on a mission to commandeer a Transworld Airlines flight. The choice of an American airliner was significant. After taking control of the airplane, Khaled explained to the passengers that the PFLP had hijacked the flight because of the US government's support of Israel. ‘We are against America because she is an imperialist country’, Khaled told the hostages, ‘[a]nd our unit is called the Che Guevara Commando Unit because we abhor America's assassination of Che and … we are a part of the Third World and the world revolution’.Footnote ⁷⁷

In 1970 the Che Guevara Commando Unit attempted another operation, in a coordinated effort with three other PFLP cells, a series of events that would be known as the Dawson's Field hijackings. To demonstrate their solidarity with other guerrilla movements, during hostage negotiations representatives of the PFLP gave interviews to the international press under posters representing transnational unity in the struggle against imperialism: Che, Mao, and Ho. In the wake of the hijackings, the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, exploited the PFLP's adoration of Che to launch a counter-attack. The PFLP leader Bassam Abu Sharif claimed Guevara as one of his ‘special heroes’, and so Mossad agents tried to assassinate him by delivering a book about Che packed with explosives.Footnote ⁷⁸

In the 1960s and 1970s Che offered leftist guerrillas a source of inspiration, theoretical grounding for the practice of revolutionary violence, and a symbolic point of connection with other militant groups around the world. Nonetheless, the dream of liberation that seeded armed struggles in the West and Latin America often soured with the inability of violence to mobilize the masses. At the same time, foquismo exacerbated doctrinal divisions within the Left and isolated many guerrilla movements from larger bases of support. Attempts to realize Che's dream of ‘many Vietnams’ led some groups to political suicide, while the concept of immediate revolution lost its rhetorical force under the weight of state repression. Che's spirit continued to inspire militants in Peru, Palestine, Northern Ireland, Nicaragua, and elsewhere. By the end of the 1970s, however, the notion that the violent acts of a vanguard faction could awaken the masses and usher in a revolutionary consciousness had lost its appeal among radicals in many parts of the world.Footnote ⁷⁹

Conclusion: legacies of the possible

In the late 1960s and 1970s left-wing radicals on every continent struggled against what they viewed as a world system of imperialist oppression with myriad local manifestations. Galvanized by a transnational imagination, they sought to internationalize movements that were practically national and domesticate ideas borrowed from differing sociopolitical milieus. In this context, the death of Che Guevara, a high-profile proponent of worldwide socialist revolution, was momentous. Many radicals came to see him as a martyr for revolutionary internationalism, and thus the resurrected guerrilla functioned as a symbolic common denominator across diverse movements. Che and other shared heroes affirmed a seeming unity of attitudes and offered psychological solace that each movement, no matter how marginal, was part of a global fight for social justice.

The politics of morality, solidarity, and possibility that radicals projected onto Che Guevara in the 1960s and 1970s transcended the particularities of the era. While the symbolic legacies of 1960s radicalism are more ambiguous than the successes of national liberation and equal rights movements, the emphasis that radicals placed on symbols as sources of inspiration and tools to build solidarity continues to imprint the Left. Long after Guevarism has withered, Che remains an important anti-establishment reference. Perhaps there is no better example of the symbolic power that 1960s radicals vested in Che than the fact that their children's generation resurrected him as a nostalgic means of critiquing the injustices of the post-Cold War world.Footnote ⁸⁰

The most remarkable aspect of Che's afterlife is that when young radicals thrust him back onto the global stage in the 1990s his popularity exceeded that of the 1960s. As many analysts have demonstrated, his recent celebrity is to a great extent the result of the commercialization of Fitzpatrick's Heroic Guerrilla. Yet it is important to recognize that, in spite of the gross commodification of Che's image, many young people revere Guevara as an inspirational anti-authoritarian figure who links individual struggles with a wider longing for change.Footnote ⁸¹ The discourse of global socialist revolution has faded but, more than four decades after his death, Che was the only figure championed simultaneously by Greek anti-austerity demonstrators, Yemeni critics of the Ali Abdullah Saleh government, and Occupy activists in the US. His most important legacy may therefore not be as a guerrilla tactician or a popular T-shirt design, but as a perennial symbol for alternative social and political possibilities.