“This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.” –Che Guevara
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The Los Angeles Times: Capitalizing on Che Guevara’s Image.
Snapped in March 1960, Alberto Korda’s iconic image of Ernesto “Che” Guevara is possibly — who’s counting? — the most-reproduced photograph in the world. Some version of it has been painted, printed, digitized, embroidered, tattooed, silk-screened, sculpted or sketched on nearly every surface imaginable. Brick and mortar city walls. Poster board waved high above a crowd. Gisele Bündchen’s bikini.
And though he never went away — except in the strictly mortal sense — Che is suddenly everywhere again. In October, an Iranian student militia organized a “Che Like Chamran” conference, attempting to enlist the martyred Marxist in the Islamic revolution. (They made the mistake of inviting his daughter, who pointed out that her dad did not believe in God.) Hollywood is at it as well: Steven Soderbergh’s long-anticipated, two-part Che biopic (”The Argentine” and “Guerrilla”) premiered May 21 at Cannes, with Benicio Del Toro playing the legendary Argentine-doctor-cum-internationalist-revolutionary. And “Chevolution,” Trisha Ziff and Luis Lopez’s documentary on the mass dissemination of the Korda image, is now making the film festival rounds…
Rebels and activists the world over still take inspiration from Guevara. But the image has lost something; Che’s face on a poster in 1968 isn’t quite the same thing as it is on a mousepad 40 years later. Perhaps it is precisely that loss — the shedding of Che’s radicalism and ideological rigor — that renders him so supremely marketable today. Things are not going well these days. Kids don’t want revolution so much as, um, something different.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise that L.A. artist Shepard Fairey, in his design for a Sen. Barack Obama poster, looked to Korda’s Che. Fairey’s Obama is not wearing a beret, and he’s looking left instead of right, but his face tilts at the same angle as Che’s. His jaw is set with the same willfulness and strength, and he too is gazing recognizably upward into the future (hasta la victoria siempre . . . ). Obama’s eyes, though, are filled not with righteous anger but with vague and lofty hope.
Che means change, if nothing else — and not necessarily Marxist or anti-imperialist or radical at all.
The poster mentioned in the story is actually for sale at Barack Obama’s campaign website (Update- poster is sold out).
From Investor’s Business Daily, some facts about Che Guevara:
[Guevara] was a psychopath with a central role in Cuba’s 1961 mass executions in the “year of the wall.” Guevara signed at least 600 death warrants and executed children against firing squad walls; he was responsible for at least 2,000 deaths.
After that, the Argentine-born communist organized Cuba’s gulag. His violence was so over the top it scared even Castro, who eventually sent him away to fight mercenary wars in Africa.
Guevara also left a lot to be desired on a personal level, never paying bills, living in houses he confiscated and wearing Gatsby suits and smoking from a cigarette holder as Cubans starved.
Young America’s Foundation: VIDEO, The Truth About Che Guevara.
The Real Cuba: 156 Executed at La Cabaña Prison at Che Guevara’s Orders.
Michelle Malkin: The Victims of Che Guevara.
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Not to be forgotten…
Little Green Footballs, from February: the communist Cuban flag, with the image of Che Guevara, hanging in Barack Obama’s Houston campaign office.
OneNewsNow: Cuban-born Author Blasts Obama Campaign Volunteers for Displaying Che Guevara Flags.
Note: the Obama Soviet-style hat in the cartoon is available here or at Ushanka.us.