Robert Taber (author)
Robert Bruce Taber was an American activist, journalist, and scholar.
Taber was born in Chicago in 1919, and grew up in Detroit and Dundee, Illinois, and served in the U.S. Army during World War II. He worked as a journalist in New York City, for the Queens Evening News and then for a wire service, the Standard News Association, before joining CBS News in 1950.
Taber traveled to Cuba in the late 1950s as a CBS investigative journalist, accompanying Fidel Castro, Ché Guevara, and their troops, who forced Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista to flee the country. He wrote M-26: Biography of a Revolution about this experience.
Batista, who had amassed a personal fortune, first fled to the Dominican Republic then ruled by dictator Rafael Trujillo, who had been a previous military ally of Batista. Batista eventually found political asylum in Portugal, then under the rule of the extreme right-wing António de Oliveira Salazar.
Taber founded the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, characterized on the record of 1961 United States Senate hearings "as serving to glorify the Castro government and acting as its publicity agent".
Taber's best known work is The War of the Flea: The Classic Study of Guerrilla Warfare, about "guerrilla insurgencies and their relationship to state power". The book was first published in 1965, and has since been reissued. Its premise has been applied by political writers, strategists and pundits to such embattled locales as Cuba, China, Algeria, Indochina, Northern Ireland, Palestine, Cyprus, the Philippines, Malaya, and Greece, among others.
