Weekly Summary

Approved for Release: 2023/03/28 C03154550
TSEGR-i§
Havana is pure fiction. Castro withdrew aid from
certain guerrilla groups not to placate the local
Communist party chieftains but because the guer-
rilla groups were so ineffective for so long that
Castro lost faith in their ability and desire “to
make revolution.” To use Castro’s own words:
“They had the opportunity to start and conduct a
revolution; they did indeed have the opportunity
and they fumbled it.” Furthermore, he has flatly
stated that he plans to continue support for “rev-
olutionaries like Che,” which is just the type of
activity that earned him the condemnation of the
parties.
DEBRAY AND THE NEW TACTICS
The new importance given to armed struggle
in urban areas as a result of Castro’s policy
reassessment raised questions in the minds of
many revolutionaries because it seemed to con-
flict with the theories expounded by Jules Regis
Debray in Revolution Within the Revolution? In
this treatise—much publicized by Havana—Debray
discussed at length basic guerrilla warfare doctrine
as he understood it after a year of study in Cuba.
Although Debray wrote the essay, its concepts are
generally accepted as being those of Castro and
Guevara. Thus, the high value now placed on
urban struggle compared to the low value place
on it in Revolution Within the Revolution? leaves
Castro vulnerable to charges of inconsistency in a
matter of life-and-death importance to revolu-
tionaries who are putting his theories into prac-
tice. Juan Antonio Blanco, an instructor in the
Department of Philosophy at Havana University,
for example, admits, in the October 1969 issue of
the Cuban theoretical journal Pensamiento
Critico, that “Debray, for reasons very well
known, is closely tied to our country and our
ideas about the problems of Latin America. A
criticism of his essay Revolution Within the Rev-
olu tion? is in part, a criticism of our own ideas.”
‘>3
To absolve Guevara, Castro, and even
Debray himself of any inconsistency, however,
Blanco explained further: “Despite the fact that
Debray tries to summarize the basic ideas of Ma-
jor Guevara and Fidel Castro, this does not pre-
vent certain personal viewpoints, or a poor or
simply brief statement of some aspects, from
causing different interpretations which do not
always have to coincide with Debray’s own
thought.” When it was first published in 1966 in
Havana, Debray’s essay was highly touted by the
Cubans as an important work “for those who
know that ‘the duty of every revolutionary is to
make the revolution.’ ” Blanco claimed three
years later, however, that “Debray was not trying
to write a manual of guerrilla warfare or a socio-
logical treatise on the Latin American revolu-
tion.”
In a further effort to disabuse the revolu-
tionary faithful of any misconceptions about the
theories in Debray’s book, Havana published in
Pensamiento Critico in August 1969 a preface
that Debray had written more than two years
earlier for the French edition of the book. Debray
wrote that the purpose of his book was “to seek a
maximum of revolutionary efficiency,” and he
then warned the reader to avoid “any definitive
conflict between theory and practice... Let the
combatants figure out for themselves the theory
of their fight...”
An article in the January 1969 issue of Tri-
continental also tried to disentangle Debray from
the results of his writings. The “acritical mechan-
ical application” of Debray’s theses by some
Latin American revolutionary circles, said the ar-
ticle, was “something Debray himself did not
intend to happen.” The article then goes on to
explain why the Tupamaros National Liberation
Movement in Uruguay is so successful in waging
armed struggle in spite of the fact that Debray
claims in his book that in Uruguay “there are no
Special Report - 8 - 8 May 1970
Approved for Release: 2023/03/28 C03154550