Comandante Che

The victory of Fidel Castro&’s rebel army in Cuba was due in no small part to the training, strategy, and leadership provided by Ernesto Che Guevara. Despite the deluge of biographies, memoirs, and documentaries that appeared in 1997 on the thirtieth anniversary of Guevara&’s death, his military career remains shrouded in mystery. Comandante Che is the first book designed specifically to provide an objective evaluation of Guevara&’s record as a guerrilla soldier, commander, and strategist from his first skirmish in Cuba to his defeat in Bolivia eleven years later. Using new evidence from Guevara&’s previously unpublished campaign diaries and declassified CIA documents, Paul Dosal reassesses Guevara&’s impact as a guerrilla warrior and theorist, comparing his accomplishments with those of other guerrilla leaders with whom he has been ranked, including Colonel T. E. Lawrence, Mao Tse-Tung, and General Vo Nguyen Giap. This reassessment reveals that Guevara was often underrated as a conventional military strategist, overrated as a guerrilla commander, and misrepresented as a guerrilla theorist. Guevara achieved his greatest military victory by applying a conventional military strategy in the final stages of the Cuban Revolution, orchestrating the defensive campaign that held off the Cuban army in the summer of 1958. As a guerrilla commander, he scored impressive victories in ambush after ambush in Bolivia, but in winning the battles he lost the war. He violated most of his own precepts during the Bolivian campaign, compelling analysts to question the validity of both his strategies and his command skills. Though he is credited with developing foco theory, Guevara never attempted to advance a new theory of guerrilla warfare. He was a fighter, not a theorist. He wanted to defeat American imperialism by launching guerrilla campaigns simultaneously in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but his tricontinental strategy resulted in failures first in the Congo and then in Bolivia. Comandante Che presents the full record of Guevara&’s successes and failures, separating myth from reality about one of the twentieth century&’s most controversial revolutionary figures.

"This book documents an encounter between Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and Aleida Guevara, daughter of the legendary revolutionary Che Guevara and a prominent figure in the antiglobalization movement. Over the course of an extended, exclusive interview, Chavez explained his fiercely nationalist vision for Venezuela, the worldwide significance of the Bolivarian revolution and his commitment to a united Latin America. Their conversation, which was at times remarkably intimate, also covered Chavez's personal political formation and the legacy of Che's ideas and example in Latin America today. Included as an appendix is an exclusive interview with Jorge Garcia Carneiro, Venezuela's minister for defense, who played a key role in defeating the April 2002 coup. Today he is in the forefront of the project to transform Venezuela's army into an army of the people."--BOOK JACKET.

It is inevitable that humankind will become extinct. Nowadays, the advance of technology has overtaken the human capacity to control the possible consequences of any kind of progress. Extinction is always multifactorial. Double-faced Janus Meerkater, a reborn Neanderthal and leading nanotechnologist, has created EMULATOR, an unexcelled thinking machine and technological singularity. Thus Murphy’s law and the Dürrenmatt principle are put in motion. Leo Lobeck the Trojan, Jason Stardust and Xixi Bruneau are fighting the technocalypse. Brain emulation in combination with wormhole physics could create an escape route for mankind. That way reality is broken and reveals itself as an illusion in the empirical dimensions of human experience. The world events turn out to be pure satire. In the end all human minds will be uploaded to EMULATOR and Friedrich Nietzsche, the great but unfortunately insane philosopher, will be God. “Perhaps we are all part of an experiment. Maybe to be human is just a test of what animate creatures would do given by nature limited intelligence and maximum ignorance.”

In the New York Times–bestselling spy series, Agent Oakes is in Cuba for secret negotiations with Che Guevara—on a mission that soon turns deadly. From his 1st day in office, President Kennedy has been bedeviled by Cuba. The CIA forced the Bay of Pigs invasion down his throat, resulting in lost lives, international embarrassment, and a new low in America’s relationship with the Caribbean. More than anything, Kennedy wants Cuba contained. Brute force didn’t work; it’s time to try a subtler approach—and there is no spy more tactful than Blackford Oakes. The CIA calls it Operation Alligator: a top secret back-channel negotiation to put Cuba and the United States on better footing. Oakes goes south to meet with Castro’s right-hand man, the notorious Che Guevara, in hopes of finding common ground between their countries. Instead, he discovers a sinister Communist plot that could destabilize the hemisphere, and lead the US president to his doom. See You Later, Alligator is the 6th book in the Blackford Oakes Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.