There's a fascinating book that's only available in Spanish, as far as I know. It's called the Manual of the Complete Latin American...and Spanish...Idiot and it's by three Latin American liberal journalists and writers named Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, who is Colombian, Carlos Alberto Montaner, who's Cuban, and Álvaro Vargas Llosa, who is Peruvian. One of their chapters is titled "Ten Books that Latin American Idiots Love". (They are by no means calling all Latin Americans and Spaniards idiots, just those that still believe in, like, Socialism and stuff.) This comes up because one Régis Débray wrote a nasty op-ed in the New York Times a couple of days ago in which he said all kinds of nasty stuff about the United States. None of it looked too shocking to me, since I'm used to these Porcel-Solé-Haro Tecglen-Vázquez Montalbán Yankee-bashing frenzies that I have so faithfully informed y'all of. Andrew Sullivan and James Taranto sure thought that Débray's rant was out of line, though, and they took him to task for his revolutionary past; James Lileks took the fiskbroom to him.

Well, Régis Débray wrote a book called Revolution within the Revolution? in 1967, and it is one of the ten best-loved books of the Idiot Left according to Mendoza, Montaner, and Vargas Llosa. Here's their take on it, and him.

In the decade of the sixties, Régis Débray--born in Paris in 1941--was a young French journalist, with a degree in sociology, incredibly mature for his age, seduced by Marxist ideas, and--even more--by the Cuban revolution and the photogenic spectacle of a paradisiac Caribbean island governed by audacious bearded men who were preparing the final assault on the imperialist American fortress.

With good prose and a crazy young head predisposed toward sharp analysis, he was received in Havana with open arms. Cuba was a petri dish of men of action, but there was not an abundance of theoreticians capable of giving meaning to the facts or, simply, thinkers competent enough to justify them reasonably well. Che, for example, had published his famous manual "Guerrilla Warfare" and was preparing to put it in practice on the South American stage, but the battle he was on the point of launching left a dangerous flank open: what was the place of the Communist parties and the traditional Marxist-Leninist organizations? Besides, from a theoretical perspective it was necessary to explain the rupture with the old script written by Marx in the 19th century and finished by Lenin in the 20th. Hadn't we agreed that Communism would come as a consequence of the class struggle, egged on by the revolutionary vanguard of the working class organized by the Communist Party?

This is what Revolution within the Revolution? deals with, not as an abstract intellectual exercise, but as an extremely important revolutionary task, absolutely deliberated, which reveals itself with total candidness in a paragraph which says the following: "When Che Guevara reappears (he had "gotten lost" to prepare the uprising in Bolivia), it would not be too adventurous to affirm that he will be at the front of a guerilla movement as the unchallenged political and military leader". Débray, simply, was one more guerrilla soldier, although his mission was not to ambush enemies but to justify actions, rationalize heresies, write in the newspapers, spread revolutionary theses, and open up a space for the comrades in the First World. He was, in the old language of the Cold War, a fellow traveler, totally consciously, and proud of his work.

He'd had some practice. In 1964, under the pseudonym Francisco Vargas, he published in Paris, in the magazine Révolution, a long article ("A Guerrilla Experience") in which he described his visit to the Venezuelan subversives who were then trying to destroy the incipient democracy resurging in the country since the overthrow of Pérez Jiménez (1958). It was this long text which won him the confidence of Castro, the intellectual author and material accomplice of the Venezuelan guerrillas, to whom he sent not only weapons and money, but even his best-loved disciple: Captain Arnaldo Ochoa, shot by a firing squad many years later in 1989, with the rank of general, after ceasing to be sufficiently loyal to him.

In any case, if Che was about to begin his great (and last) adventure, and if this action would provoke the wrath, the rejection, or the indifference of the local Communist parties, dependent upon Moscow, they had to get ahead of the action with a sort of grammar-book of the Cuban revolution: Revolution within the Revolution? The little Frenchie said three fundamental things for the happiness and benefit of Havana as well as for the greater glory of Che: in the first he advised that revolutions in Latin America must emerge from a rural military base which, in its moment, will give birth to a political vanguard. This thesis is referred to as "focusism". In the second he affirms that, when the order of factors is inverted--creating the political vanguard first and then trying to create the "focus" of insurrection--the political organization becomes an end in itself and never manages to forge an armed struggle. With the third, he signals the enemy to be defeated: Yankee imperialism and its local henchmen.

This gibberish--a true conceptual amplification of Guevara's manual--didn't do him much good. A patrol of badly armed Indians shot down the pompous theory of "focusism". Débray was captured by the Bolivian Army after a visit to the guerrillas organized by Guevara and was tried for armed rebellion, despite his protests of innocence based on his journalistic alibi. He admitted, nonetheless, having kept watch a few nights, denied ever having fired at anyone, and asked for the procedural guarantees which he certainly never defended for his hated bourgeois enemies. Fortunately, his captors didn't mistreat him beyond slapping him around a few times, and due to international pressure, after a few months he was released despite the long sentence that he had been given. After his return to Paris he underwent a slow, gradual evolution and, much to his regret, became profoundly hated and held in contempt by his Cuban friends. Débray had learned that within the revolution there was not another revolution, but an immense and bloody lie that led to the deaths of thousands of dreamy adolescents in love with political violence.

By the way, the authors' list of the Ten Books Loved by Idiots consists of:

10. History Will Absolve Me, Fidel Castro, 1953.
9. The Damned of the Earth, Frantz Fanon, 1961.
8. Guerrilla Warfare, Che Guevara, 1960.
7. Revolution..., Débray, 1967.
6. The Elemental Concepts of Historical Materialism, Marta Harnecker, 1969.
5. The One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse, 1964.
4. How To Read Donald Duck, Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, 1972.
3. Dependence and Development in Latin America, F.H. Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, 1969.
2. Toward a Liberation Theology, Gustavo Gutiérrez, 1971.
1. The Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano, 1971. The authors call this "The Idiot's Bible" and devote a whole chapter to fisking some of its most ridiculous assertions.