Documents / FOIA release

Weekly Summary

Central Intelligence Agency · 1970-05-08 · 78 pages · text from the file's own layer

The CIA's Directorate of Intelligence issued this Weekly Summary, No. 0369/70, on 8 May 1970. It covers events through noon on 7 May. The Far East section deals with the allied operations into Cambodia, Hanoi's cautious response and the government in exile Sihanouk formed in Peking. Other items cover Soviet military aid, the Sino-Soviet talks, Jordan, Dahomey, Guatemala and Brazil, and a special report looks at Cuban support for subversion in Latin America. Many pages are withheld, and the summary contains no UFO material.

  • p. 27 …Egyptian President l\lasir’s May Day speech included an appeal to the US to force…
Approved for Release: 2023/03/28 C03154550
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a splintering of the local revolutionary movement.
By early 1969, for example, all Cuban guerrilla
advisers in Venezuela had been recalled to Havana
and material support had been reduced so much
that several guerrilla leaders complained publicly.
In his speech of 22 April, Castro admitted that
Cuban support had been withdrawn from groups
that had constantly performed poorly, but he
made it quite clear that he would back those that
produce concrete results.
REVOLUTIONARY THEORY REVISED
Another outcome of the reassessment was a
fundamental change in revolutionary theory.
Previously, the Cubans had maintained that the
guerrilla unit in the rural areas, basing its support
on the peasants, was the focal point of the revolu-
tionary movement. Units in urban areas func-
tioned only in support of the rural guerrillas. In
revising this concept, Castro seems to have real-
ized—probably as a result of Guevara’s experience
in Bolivia—that the peasant in the countryside is
basically a conservative individual with a rela-
tively low degree of political consciousness and
therefore a poor prospect for recruitment. Castro
thus has apparently adopted a more flexible doc-
trine in which the students and workers of the
cities—who have a greater political awareness and
a more liberal bent—initiate the revolutionary
process by means of urban terrorism, later moving
to the rural areas to start the second—or guerrilla
warfare—stage.
Carlos Fonseca Amador, president of the
pro-Cuban Sandino Front of National Liberation
(FSLN) in Nicaragua, described the new theory in
early 1969 in a critique of previous FSLN opera-
tions: “Under conditions in Nicaragua—more or
less the same as Latin American countries gen-
erally—the center of action of the revolutionary
war has to be the countryside. However, the role
that the city should play also has particular im-
portance, since in the first stage of the struggle
rp \
the city must provide the countryside with the
most developed cadres in order to direct the or-
ganization of the political and militaryYdetach-
ment. Generally, the urban revolutionary cells can
be developed more easily in the first stage. Such
elements include the revolutionary sector of the
workers, the students, and a certain strata of the
petit bourgeoisie.” Havana, which described
Fonseca Amador as “one of Nicaragua’s finest
sons,” gave its imprimatur by publishing the cri-
tique in Tricontinental magazine in late 1969.
MARIGHELLA’S CONTRIBUTION
The same theory appeared again in Tric0n-
tinental in April 1970 when Carlos Marighella’s
Castro looked upon Carlos Marighella as the most
kpromising guerrilla leader in Latin America. J
Special Report - 5 - 8 May 1970
Approved for Release: 2023/03/28 C03154550

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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 78 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.