“Two, Three, Many Vietnams”

Abstract

Ernesto "Che" Guevara's message to the Havana meeting of the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL)also known as the Tricontinental Conferencewas the clearest elucidation of his Tricontinental vision of revolutionary warfare. The speech lauded the Vietnamese people for their courageous struggle against US imperialism and called for the creation of many other Vietnams. Guevara's conviction that the international proletariat shared a common enemy led him to promote a strategy for guerrilla warfare on the continents of what is now widely referred to as the "Global South." Though the nomenclature took a while to catch up, this shift in the conceptual construct of the developing countries, from the "Third World" to the "Global South" tracked an evolving understanding of the ways in which the world was divided. Guevara, among others (Figure 10.1), came to believe that the most salient divisions were not between the capitalist and communist blocs, but between the Global Norththe industrialized economic powers, including the Soviet Union and other highly developed economies of the Eastern blocand the Global South. The latter term was understood as including not only the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin Americain other 1 Che Guevara, Message to the Tricontinental (Havana: Executive Secretariat of the