All Go and No Show

His rugged countenance grips you like the militant equivalent of a UNICEF poster child. But what precisely does his gaze compel you to do? To rebel against your government? To have a stiff drink? To undress a supermodel? Such is the dilemma posed by the photographic legacy of the 20th century’s most glamorous revolutionary, Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Since his death, his iconic visage has accompanied Parisian student riots, advertised Smirnoff vodka, and even adorned Gisele Bundchen’s brassiere.

The commercial use of images based on Alberto Diaz’s classic 1960 photograph have reduced Che to a cog in the very capitalist machine he fought to destroy. This irony has not been lost on Che’s family and supporters. In 2000, Diaz successfully sued Smirnoff’s parent company to force it to stop using Che’s image as a promotional gimmick. Now, Che’s widow Aleida plans to initiate a campaign of lawsuits against companies she believes continue to exploit the image. "We can't attack everyone with lances like Don Quixote, but we can try to maintain the ethics [of Che’s legacy],” she explained. She intends to helm this effort from the Che Guevara Studies Center, set to have opened in Havana in late 2005.

I have absolutely no enthusiasm for Che Guevara, but I staunchly support Aleida’s efforts. Though I find Che’s doctrines and methods deplorable, I must acknowledge that he believed passionately in a cause and pursued it relentlessly. I cannot say the same for the companies which manipulate his iconography, unless reckless profiteering counts as a cause. They have brazenly turned Che into a generic symbol of vague and fashionable antiauthoritarianism, a motif for restless youths to express their disaffection with such amorphous entities as “the man” and “the system.” Che’s life and work demand to be taken seriously, more so than they have been by corporations, and more so than they have been, it would even seem, by his wife. I agree with her as to the paramount importance of preserving his legacy, but I radically disagree with her as to the true nature of that legacy.

Che rose to international prominence as Fidel Castro’s second-in-command during the Cuban revolution. An admirer of the Soviet Union and China, Che once declared, “I am one of those people who believes that the solution to the world’s problems is to be found behind the Iron Curtain;” he named his first son Vladimir in honor of Vladimir Lenin. However, he behaved more like Stalin after Castro appointed him as state prosecutor. In that capacity he liquidated the antagonists of the revolution, establishing Cuba’s first forced labor camp and even executing numerous former comrades who refused to embrace Castro’s dictatorship. By Che’s own account he played a key role in bringing Soviet ballistic missiles to Cuba, precipitating 1962’s missile crisis; in a later interview with an English newspaper, he stated that, had he had the choice, he would have launched a nuclear attack on the United States. In his will, he wrote of the “extremely useful hatred that turns men into effective, violent, merciless, and cold killing machines.”

If history demands the preservation of Che’s legacy, then truth demands the accurate recounting of it. While this selective biographical sketch does not fully illuminate Che’s complex character, which doubtless had some positive aspects, it serves to demonstrate that his ultimate legacy consists of pure amorality. His personal code dictated that the end justifies the most atrocious means, that the cause trumps all other conceivable considerations. Like his icon Mao Zedong, a self-described “man without law or limit,” Che embraced the venerable maxim that “you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette.” Che never even approached the death tolls of Mao and Stalin, who between them killed over 100 million people, but not for lack of trying. Have the “omelettes” of the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba justified their sanguinary seasoning? Perhaps Che’s legion of t-shirt toting devotees have all along been raging against the wrong machine.