Josefina Tommasi. A truck advertising the Che soft drink in Vallegrande, Bolivia.
via NYTimes:
Not just in the hearts of revolutionaries, Marxist insurgents and
rebellious teenagers, but on T-shirts, watches, sneakers, key chains,
cigarette lighters, coffee mugs, wallets, backpacks, mouse pads, beach
towels and condoms. He’s not only been used by politicians like the
Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez,
to promote their own agendas, but he’s also been employed by merchants
to sell air fresheners in Peru, snowboards in Switzerland and wine in
Italy.
The supermodel Gisele Bündchen pranced down a runway in
a Che bikini. A men’s wear company brought out a Che action figure,
complete with fatigues, a beret, a gun and a cigar. And an Australian
company produced a “cherry Guevara” ice cream line, describing the
eating experience like this: “The revolutionary struggle of the
cherries was squashed as they were trapped between two layers of
chocolate. May their memory live on in your mouth!”
As Michael
Casey, the Buenos Aires bureau chief for Dow Jones Newswires, observes
in his fascinating new book, “Che’s Afterlife,” the image of Ernesto Guevara
most frequently used by politicians, demonstrators and merchants alike
is based on the famous 1960 picture of the guerrilla leader taken by
the Cuban photographer Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez, known as Korda. It’s the
familiar, ubiquitous close-up, often rendered in high-contrast blacks
and whites, which features the handsome 31-year-old Argentine-born
revolutionary looking off into the distance as if he had his eyes on
the future, his gaze — described, variously, as pensive, determined,
defiant, meditative or implacable — as difficult, in Mr. Casey’s words,
“to put a finger on” as the Mona Lisa’s smile.
In this bracing
and keenly observed book, Mr. Casey traces how Korda’s photograph
became one of the most widely disseminated images in the world, how Che
went from being a symbol of resistance to the capitalist system to one
of the most marketable and marketed brands around the globe, how the
guerrilla fighter became a logo as recognizable as the Nike swoosh or
McDonald’s golden arches.
Although newspaper and magazine
articles have traversed this ground before, none have done so with the
thoroughness and globe-trotting ardor of “Che’s Afterlife.” Mr. Casey
has written a book that is not only a cultural history of an image, but
also a sociopolitical study of the mechanisms of fame. It is a book
about how ideas travel and mutate in this age of globalization, how
concepts of political ideology have increasingly come to be trumped by
notions of commerce and cool and chic, and how the historical Che
Guevara gave way, post-mortem, to a host of other Ches: St. Che, said
to possess the ability to perform miracles; Chesucristo, a Christ-like
figure revered for his ideals, not his advocacy of violence; an
entrepreneurial Che, promoting the lesson “that individuals should
honestly strive to produce their utmost for the good of all”; and the
Rock ’n’ Roll Che, more representative of youthful
anti-authoritarianism than of any political dogma.
Korda’s famous
photograph of Che was taken in 1960, at a state funeral for victims
killed by an explosion aboard a freighter docked in Havana’s harbor. By
radically cropping the shot, snipping out a palm tree and the profile
of another man, Korda gave the portrait an ageless quality, divorced
from the specifics of time and place.
This abstract element
would be emphasized further in paintings and silk-screen variations on
the picture (like those done in the style of Andy Warhol’s
Marilyn and Mao), which, Mr. Casey notes, stripped the image of its
historical and political roots and created a more mainstream,
accessible Che.
Korda, who died in 2001, Mr. Casey writes,
would not be able to collect royalties on his wildly ubiquitous image
until 1997, when the Castro government signed the Berne Convention for
the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, an international
copyright treaty.
Although Korda’s original photograph was not widely distributed for years, Mr. Casey says, Fidel Castro
began using the image as a branding symbol for Cuba in 1967, months
before Che’s death. It was a clever marketing plan on Mr. Castro’s
part: Che’s denunciations of the Soviet Union made him popular among
“thinkers and artists of the Western European left, many of whom had
lost faith in the Soviet Union,” while his condemnation of imperialism
“sat well with young radical students in the United States and Europe,
who were impatient for societal change and for whom the very word
revolution was inspiring.”
After Che was killed in Bolivia in
October 1967 at 39, at the end of a disastrous guerrilla campaign, his
fame and popularity — as a martyr now — spread even more rapidly around
the world: red and black posters based on Korda’s photograph became
symbols of the resistance movement during the 1968 student protests in
Paris, and they surfaced, too, in America, where the revolutionary was
embraced by both the Black Power movement and by hippies and antiwar
activists.
In its May 17, 1968, issue, Time
magazine observed that the Che legend had given “rise to a cult of
almost religious hero worship among radical intellectuals, workers and
students”: there were “Guevara-style beards” and berets in Italy, the
magazine reported, and “handkerchiefs, sweatshirts and blouses
decorated with his shaggy countenance” in “half a dozen countries” —
all making for “a new source of profits for composers, poster makers
and book publishers.” It was an article that could have easily run some
four decades later, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Che’s
death.
Clearly, it’s not what Che Guevara had in mind when he
declared that “the revolutionary idea should be diffused by means of
appropriate media to the greatest depth possible,” but in becoming one
of the world’s most iconic brand names, Che has achieved an immortality
that even exceeds the predictions of the stranger he meets at the end
of his “Motorcycle Diaries,” who tells him “the spirit of the beehive
speaks through your mouth and motivates your actions.”
Though
anti-Castro Cubans continue to denounce him as a murderer with a cold
capacity for violence, Che is embraced in Latin America and the Middle
East and by antiglobalization protestors as “a die-hard foe of yanqui
imperialism”; in Hong Kong as a symbol of rebellion against the
authoritarianism of the Beijing government; and in the United States by
immigrant activists, demanding “the right to inclusion, to be
considered part of the American Dream.”
For many, Che has
become a generic symbol of the underdog, the idealist, the iconoclast,
the man willing to die for a cause. He has become, as Mr. Casey writes,
“the quintessential postmodern icon” signifying “anything to anyone and
everything to everyone.”
