The Way the Wind Blows

“The duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution.” Every New Leftist in the late 1960s was familiar with that axiom, attributed to Fidel Castro, and most took it to heart. Yet in a leaderless movement, there were numerous ways to comply. Some sought to advance the revolution with marches demanding the U.S. pull out of Indochina right away, allowing the indigenous communists to win. Others set up women’s clinics, radical bookshops and food co-ops, or moved into rural and urban communes. Such institutions “prefigured” those that radicals longed to build in the ashes of the evil system they aimed to destroy. But the jefe of Cuban communism and his bosom comrade Che Guevara had made their revolution with guns and bombs. And they were urging leftists around the world, in Guevara’s words, to “create two, three, many Vietnams”—wars against imperialism—before Bolivian troops captured and murdered the guerilla icon in 1967.