I have a confession to make: When I was 12 I thought Che Guevara was a brand of T-shirt, not just any brand of T-shirt mind you, but the coolest and most desirable brand, the kind only the hippest girls at school wore. And of course I wanted one.
Later I realized that Che Guevara was the man with the beret and the indomitable look in his eye whose picture appeared not just on the T-shirts but on posters, mugs and all kinds of other objects. So who was he? My parents fobbed me off with a vague and unflattering description. At school, all I got was that he was some kind of revolutionary, someone who fought for good against evil. A little reading revealed that he was from Argentina, had been a hero of the Cuban revolution and had died in Bolivia. This was all I needed to know. Here was a truly romantic figure: Good-looking, passionate, fought against injustice and died for his beliefs. In other words a hero.
Still, I didn't buy the T-shirt.
More than 40 years after his death, the personality cult of Che Guevara lives on. Last week a four-ton bronze statue of him was unveiled in his birth town of Rosario. The previous month a statue was unveiled in the Argentine capital Buenos Aires. In Cannes this year, the best actor award went to Benicio Del Toro for his portrayal of Che in the upcoming Steven Soderbergh film. This film is a four and half hour epic that painstakingly recreates episodes from Guevara's life. Only four years ago we had the Motorcycle Diaries, the Walter Salles film, based on the diaries of the same name and which recreated the journey of the young, pre-revolutionary Che as he travels across Latin America and feels increasingly outraged by the injustice he witnesses.
Che Guevara remains a charismatic and popular icon. Not even that, perhaps it is not the man himself but his image, and just one image in particular: The Korda portrait of March 1960 that appeared on that very T-shirt I longed for. Few who buy products branded with his image adhere to or perhaps even know of his political ideology. There is a rather delicious irony in that the image of a Marxist revolutionary has been hijacked into a successful marketing tool that sells everything from mobile phones to soft drinks. I fully understand the ire of his children who have denounced the commercialization of his image. The way his image is used today is a triumph of capitalism, his revolutionary fervor is used to make any product appear more virile or exciting, in essence achieving the very opposite of what he stood for.
What I find interesting about Che Guevara is that in our modern information-based culture, where just tapping a few words on a keyboard gives you access to the contents of libraries, people cling onto the most superficial, personality-based readings. For Che now is a global brand which stands for anger against injustice, heroism, fighting for what you believe in, not being afraid to die for your beliefs, and so on. The fact that Che Guevara was a ruthless killer, who personally ordered hundreds of executions and whose writings preach hatred, goes unnoticed and is almost irrelevant. Nor is the fact that this most famous of revolutionaries was largely an unsuccessful revolutionary. Yes he played a key role in the Cuban revolution - and was that such a good thing? - but his ventures in Africa and Bolivia were abject failures. It seems that who he really was does not matter; it's what he rebelled against that people identify with.
And this makes me wonder about one Osama Bin Laden. Sometimes when I hear misguided young Muslims say they admire him, I am struck by how little they know about him. What they identify with is what they think he is rebelling against. Just like Che Guevara, they are enticed by the heroic image he projects (in their eyes) and ignore the reality of who he is and what he preaches.
What Bin Laden and Guevara have in common is that they were both men born to rich families whose anger against injustice turned into hate, and whose experience of fighting brought out a latent blood lust. And there the similarity ends, for while I think Che Guevara was essentially someone who wanted to change the world for the better, Osama Bin Laden is someone who wants to destroy the world as we know it. What frightens me is how much appeal people find in his image and how easily justified anger can be hijacked by evil and turned into hate and violence.
