Could Che have found a Fidel Castro equivalent to work with in Nicaragua, or a prior day Daniel Ortega, in this era?
I agree with
@David T that Che could not magically make a revolution happen by pulling it out of his hat. On the other hand, out of the 15 or so countries of Latin America, there is not a particular reason why Cuba had to be the only 'ripe' one for leftist revolution in the late 1950s.
------Speaking of earlier in the decade, I remember a classmate of mine relating a comparison a teacher of his was making between Guatemala's Jacobo Arbenz and Bolivia's Victor Paz Estensorro. He said superficially, the two were doing similar things, taxations and nationalizations of international companies that dominated their countries in the early 1950s. For Arbenz, it was the United Fruit Company, for Paz Estensorro, it was the international tin-mining consortium. As is well-known, Arbenz got fingered as a Communist and overthrown in a CIA-backed coup. The Bolivian government nationalized the tin industry and survived to tell the tale. I think the contrast that was made between the two was that Arbenz never had any social connections to the US decision makers and his enemies controlled the narrative about what was happening that got through to Washington. Whereas Paz Estensorro got away with his economic nationalism because he knew some of the big Washington players socially, possibly including the Dulles brothers or Nixon, and played golf with them, and could narrate his side of the story favorably. Which I think was an asset that Panamanian ruler Omar Torrijos later used when nationalizing the Panama Canal, leveraging his personal friendship with John Wayne as a backchannel to US conservatives.----
