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Guevarism is a theory of communist revolution and a military strategy of guerrilla warfare associated with Marxist–Leninist revolutionary Che Guevara, a leading figure of the Cuban Revolution who believed in the idea of Marxism–Leninism and embraced its principles. (2025). 9783825896003, LIT Verlag Münster. ISBN 9783825896003
His ideology promotes exporting revolution to any country whose leader is supported by the empire (United States) and has fallen out of favor with its citizens. Guevara talks about how constant guerrilla warfare taking place in non-urban areas can overcome leaders. He introduces three points that are representative of his ideology as a whole, namely that the people can win with proper organization against a nation's army; that the conditions that make a revolution possible can be put in place by the popular forces; and that the popular forces always have an advantage in a non-urban setting. (1998). 9780803270756, Monthly Review Press. ISBN 9780803270756
Guevara had a particularly keen interest in guerrilla warfare, with a dedication to foco techniques, also known as focalism (or foquismo in Spanish), which is vanguardism by small armed units, frequently in place of established Communist party, initially launching attacks from rural areas to mobilize unrest into a popular front against a sitting regime. Despite differences in approach—emphasizing guerrilla leadership and audacious raids that engender general uprising, rather than consolidating political power in military strongholds before expanding to new ones—Guevara took great inspiration from the Maoism notion of a "protracted people's war" and sympathized with Mao Zedong's China in the Sino-Soviet split. This controversy may partly explain his departure from Castro's pro-Soviet Cuba in the mid-1960s. Guevara also drew direct parallels with his contemporary communist comrades in the Viet Cong, exhorting a multi-front guerrilla strategy to create "two, three, many ".
In Guevara's final years, after leaving Cuba he advised communist paramilitary movements in Africa and Latin America, including a young Laurent-Désiré Kabila, future ruler of Zaire/Democratic Republic of the Congo. Finally, while leading a small focalist band of guerrilla cadres in Bolivia, Guevara was captured and killed. His death and the short-term failure of his Guevarist tactics may have interrupted the component guerrilla wars within the larger Cold War for a time and even temporarily discouraged Soviet and Cuban sponsorship for focalism.
The emerging communist movements and other fellow traveler radicalism of the time either switched to urban guerrilla warfare before the end of the 1960s and/or soon revived the rural-based strategies of both Maoism and Guevarism, tendencies that escalated worldwide throughout the 1970s, by and large with the support from the communist states and the Soviet Union in general, as well as Castro's Cuba in particular.
Another proponent of Guevarism was the French intellectual Régis Debray, who could be seen as attempting to establish a coherent, unitary theoretical framework on these grounds. Debray has since broken with this.
He argued that there was a close link between the guerrillas, the and the land reform. This position differentiated his thinking from purely labor-industrial socialism and brought him closer to Maoist ideas.
His book Guerilla Warfare is a manual where tactics and strategies used in Cuban guerrilla warfare are discussed.
However, Che claimed that in certain contexts the armed struggle had no place so it was necessary to use peaceful mechanisms such as participation within representative democracy. Although Che stated that this line should be peaceful but "very combative, very brave" and that it could only be abandoned if its orientation in favor of representative democracy was undermined within the population.
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