Did Che have a positive or negative impact on the region?
Ernesto “Che” Guevara had a huge effect on leftist-oriented intellectuals in the hemisphere (indeed all over the world). Unfortunately, his approach was flawed. He and Regis Debray, a French intellectual, developed the foco theory of revolution. Under this theory, a sufficiently motivated and prepared vanguard could attack an illegitimate government. The people would see this and rise up to join the revolution and the government would collapse. What they did not understand that, in order for the foco theory to work, the government had to be isolated domestically and internationally simultaneously. This was the case in Cuba, where Che developed his theory. It only worked one other time in the hemisphere, in Nicaragua in 1979, where the Somoza regime had simultaneously enraged all the different parts of the population (most importantly the elites) and irritated the international community. Che’s legacy was that he motivated entire generations of intellectuals to form vanguards and initia
