The use of tanks is a lovely metaphor, but the pedant in me makes me want to point out Che Guevara’s process when it comes to organising a guerrilla insurgency as detailed in his book on guerrilla warfare. The tanks didn’t come until the revolution was on a much more even footing, at a point where you might say the collapse of the Batista regime was already assured as it was. What mattered more than factories for tank treads when the insurgency was still on wobbly ground were cottage tanneries for boot leather and tobacco to keep the freedom fighters in good spirits. Weaponry was all procured off enemy combatants for the initial stint of the revolution and above all else the guerrillas emphasised mobility so as to avoid encirclement by a larger and better equipped force.

This lack of any committed infrastructure is the single greatest advantage of the guerrilla band, as this deprives the incumbent state of any opportunity for positional warfare where they can bring their greater materiel to bear, while the guerrilla can attack his industrial base with relative impunity. This was something Mao wrote much about as well, and it seems like the Cubans derived their methods largely from his own.

Of course, the examples I am using is pretty dated at this point. Fidel Castro never had to worry about being identified with FLIR optics or satellite reconnaissance, let alone targeted by drone bombings in the dense wilderness of the Sierra Maestra.