“The form of violence resorted to by Fidel Castro and his followers was guerrilla warfare. Momentum and legitimacy – two elemental aspects of the Cuban Revolution’s guerrilla warfare – also come up in Merle Kling’s article entitled “Cuba: A Case Study of a Successful Attempt to Seize Political Power by the Application of Unconventional Warfare”. Such size would allow Cuba’s revolutionary guerrillas to wage a complete war, one in which their effectiveness would no longer be determined by an unwavering prudence when dealing with Batista forces. These tactics correspond to a desired momentum, and, as Ernesto “Che” Guevara disseminates in his book Guerrilla Warfare, this momentum was necessary to develop an army of conventional size. Guerrilla tactics, in fact, are the response to an army that insurgents do not yet outmatch, or even rival in size.

But terrorism (and torture) had no place in the praxis of Castro’s or Cuba’s guerrilla vanguard.

That is, he sought to reestablish constitutional authority in Cuba. Simon Reid-Henry notes in his book Fidel and Che: A Revolutionary Friendship that Fidel Castro specifically wanted to reinstate the Constitution of 1940. Additionally, it is important to distinguish the desired end of the revolutionary guerrillas in their asymmetrical war with Batista’s army of conventional size. The prospect of legitimacy is key to understanding how the Cuban Revolution defeated state-sponsored terrorism in the late 1950s. By way of guerrilla warfare and tactics, Cuba’s 1959 Revolution, and its Marxist revolutionaries, defeated terrorism in Cuba. By engaging in guerrilla warfare, the Cuban people and their revolutionary vanguard did much more than simply refusing to succumb to the terrorism that repressed the island under Batista.

This revolutionary struggle for liberation, which ousted Cuba’s unconstitutional Batista dictatorship of the 1950s, did not resort to the terrorism that the illegal dictatorship deployed against innocent Cubans for political sway. For the Cuban Revolution, however, such was not the case. This is vital to acknowledge, as actors may use guerrilla tactics and terrorism in tandem to determine their desired political outcome. Guerrilla warfare may be categorically different from terrorism, but definition alone does not make the two mutually exclusive. “We have found, then, that we wish for the end, and deliberate and decide about what promotes it hence the actions concerned with what promotes the end will express a decision and will be voluntary.” – Aristotle

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