Suggested Readings:
Robert B. Asprey, War in the Shadows: Guerrillas in History (1994); Michael E. Brown, ed., The International Dimensions of Internal Conflict (1996); Walter Laquer, Guerrilla (1977). | Guevara, Ernesto “Che” (1928–1967). Argentine-born revolutionary, physician, guerrilla commander and theorist, and Marxist zealot. He witnessed a CIA-sponsored coup in Guatemala in 1954 before moving to Mexico City, where he met Fidel Castro. “Che” (“Friend”), as admirers called him, accompanied Castro to Cuba in 1956 and fought alongside him in the Sierra Maestra during the Cuban Revolution. He occupied an important post in the post– revolutionary regime but, although he enjoyed making revolution, he was quickly bored and frustrated by what his revolution had made. He therefore quit the government to return to the gun, fighting in the Congo and in Latin America. He was captured during a failed ambush, part of his effort to foment an uprising among peasants in Bolivia, who proved broadly indifferent to his fanatic internationalism and embrace of violent revolution. He was summarily executed by his captors. He became a cult figure for the campus left in the West after his death. He inspired few emulators on the Latin left, however, which, upon the gross economic and political failure in the 1970s of most of the ideas embraced by Che, from the 1980s turned increasingly to democratic action and to social market reforms. His writings in “Guerrilla Warfare” (1967) were more romantic than genuinely theoretical, suffused with the same naive and populist confidence in “the will of the people,” which got him killed in Bolivia. In 1997 Guevara’s remains were returned to Cuba, where they were received as the relics of a great hero, even saint, of the Revolution. After a state funeral his remains were reburied in a grand—indeed, distinctly nonegalitarian—mausoleum. See alsoFranz Fanon. |
| Guiana. The tropical region of northeast South America. See also FrenchGuiana. |
| guided missile. Any missile steered in flight, and thus guided to its target, by means such as wires, television signal, radio, or some other mechanical or electronic control. See also ballistic missile; cruise missile. |
| guinea. A gold coin minted from precious metals originally brought out of West Africa (Guinea) to the world market by the trans-Saharan slave trade and later by ship-bound Portuguese explorers and traders. Guineas partly displaced the silver coins then in wide use, and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries served as an effective international monetary standard. They were replaced in this role by a formal gold standard after the Napoleonic Wars. |
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Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information:
Book title: The Greenwood Encyclopedia of International Relations.
Volume: 2.
Contributors: Cathal J. Nolan - Author.
Publisher: Greenwood Press.
Place of publication: Westport, CT.
Publication year: 2002.
Page number: 671.
This material is protected by copyright and, with the exception of fair use, may not be further copied, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means.
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