Return of the Rebel

For the marketers of Che Guevara merchandise, the timing couldn't have been better: the discovery of the revolutionary icon's grave on the eve of the 30th anniversary of his death. Suddenly, Che is more chic than ever. by Brook LARMER

It took nearly 30 years for the bugged bolivian mountains to give up the last secret of legendary guerrilla leader Ernesto (Che) Guevara. Late last month, on the edge of a dirt airstrip in the remote town of Vallegrande, a team of Cuban and Argentine scientists knelt in a deep pit before seven dusty skeletons. They were virtually certain that among the bones were the missing remains of Guevara, who had been executed by his Bolivian Army captors on Oct. 9,1967. The forensic scientists homed in on "Skeleton No. 2," which was lying face down, its skull shrouded by an olive army jacket much like the one Che wore in photographs taken after his capture. There was another, more grisly clue: the skeleton was missing both hands. Che's '' hands had been sawed off and preserved in formaldehyde as proof to disbelievers that the dashing revolutionary had truly been killed.

Seconds before lifting the green jacket to expose the skull, a Cuban geophysicist lowered his head in a gesture of respect. The crowd of journalists and local townspeople that had gathered to watch fell silent. Then, as the jacket was removed, several Cuban scientists broke down in sobs; two hugged each other tightly. "Everyone was overcome with emotion, not just the Cubans," says Patricia Bernardi, one of three Argentine forensic anthropologists on the excavation team. "Che was such a mythic figure, and there were a hundred different versions about what happened to his body. Now, after 30 years, the mystery is solved, the last chapter has been written."

It is, in fact, merely the latest saga of a legend that just won't die. The long-awaited discovery of Guevara's bones comes, ironically, just as the revolutionary icon is being resurrected — commercially, if not politically—all over the world. Che is suddenly chic. The anniversary of his death is generating a frenzied rush of new books, documentaries and feature films about the asthmatic Argentine who, by force of will, transformed himself into Fidel Castro's fearless compañero. (Even Mick Jagger has a film in the works.) Like other glamorous stars who died young—think James Dean — Che has long been a symbol of rebellion and idealism, forever stuck in time. But in today's ever-adaptable consumer culture, the old revolutinary has also emerged as a hip advertising pitchman. Now Che's image is being used to sell everything from rock music and designer clothes to Swatch watches and Fischer skis. One recent episode of "The Simpsons" even featured a nightclub called "Chez Guevara." Che vive, indeed.

The Cuban government played a pivotal role in creating the Che mystique, and it is not about to let its franchise slip away. Guevara's remains were flown back to Cuba on Saturday night, where his family and Castro received them in a private military ceremony. They will remain in Havana until October, when—on the anniversary of his death—they will be moved to Santa Clara, where a mausoleum is being built in the shadow of a 23-ton statue of the defiant Che gripping his rifle. Che's return invigorates the state's yearlong commemoration. But it may cause uneasiness, too. For the Cuban government, while promoting Guevara as a moral saint, is scrambling to stay afloat by abandoning many of the socialist principles he held sacred. The unsettling ironies can be found in places like Havana's Palacio de Artesanias, a colonial mansion cum mall that sells everything from Coca-Cola to Adidas shoes to Che memorabilia—for U.S. dollars only. One popular item is a Che T shirt with the slogan: IT IS BETTER TO DIE STANDING THAN TO LIVE ON YOUR KNEES.

The shirts cost $13.95, far more than the average monthly Cuban wage, but tourists are snapping them up.

What explains the Che mania? It can't be based wholly on his record. Here is a guy, for all his virtues, who failed in all but one of his revolutionary adventures. He directly participated in dozens of executions after the 1959 rebel triumph in Cuba and, in the 1962 missile crisis, was a radical voice pushing for a nuclear confrontation. Guevara's allure seems to stem, rather, from a nostalgic longing for the pure, uncompromising ideals of the past. "In a world of ferocious competition and consumerism, some element of humanity is still looking for a hero with values," says Orlando Borrego, one of Che's closest confidants during the early years of the revolution. "In Che, they have a paradigm: a man who was absolutely honest, completely selfless, constantly perfecting his personality." Che had other things going for him, too: he was a rebel, he died young (at 39) and he looked damn good in a beret.

Part of Guevara's appeal is that his revolutionary ideals no longer pose much of a threat in the post-cold-war world. Thirty years have tamed the anti-imperialist tiger and turned him into a rebel without claws. These days the Cuban government buys up a huge inventory of Swatch "Revolucion" watches with Che's image, not to confiscate them, but to sell them back to tourists. In cyberspace there are hundreds of Che Web pages in every language from Italian to Norwegian; Internet surfers can find "Che quotes for motivation" or see that rum-flavored Che coffee is selling briskly at the Lenin Shop in Helsinki. Last year an English company tried to add some virility to its "beer cooler" by marketing it with Che's image. Its slogan: banned in the usa. it must be good. The beer was banned soon after it went on sale—not by the United States but by Cuba, which had received complaints from Guevara's widow, Aleida.

Che's appeal is no longer limited to aging justifyists. He's got Gen X cool, too. The rock-rap group Rage Against the Machine uses his image every chance it gets, while the Allstonians, a Jamaican-style "ska" band, released an album this month with a piece called "Doctor Che Guevara." But Che sells more skis than ska. Over the past two years, the sales of Fischer "Revolution" skis have quadrupled, in part because the vans that promote the product at ski slopes across the country are plastered with Che's visage. Until recently, Che's face was pretty much limited to T shirts and dorm-room walls. But Label, a New York boutique that caters to urban youth, now has a postgrunge fashion line featuring dresses and shirts with Che military motifs— and they are selling fast. "At the end of the 1990s, people are feeling empty and they are yearning for a return to idealism," explains Laura Whit-comb, 29, the clothes' designer. "Che conjures up that whole spirit." Even in Argentina, where Che had been shunned as a prodigal son, a university lecture series is drawing standing-room-only crowds.

The rebel's other incarnations these days are so gentle they could be called Che Lite. Take "The Motorcycle Diaries" (Verso), Guevara's journal of his 1952 road trip through South America on a wheezing Norton 500. The Jack Kerouac -- like adventure opened young Emesto's eyes to poverty and imperialism, and marked the beginning of his voyage from middle-class Argentina to the armed struggle in Cuba. The Cuban government didn't allow its publication until 1995, reportedly because Guevara displayed "bourgeois concerns" and had a penchant for seducing women and mooching meals. But the book has been a surprise hit, selling more than 30,000 in both the United States and England—and 80,000 in Italy. Even more is expected from "Tania," an upcoming Warner Brothers film about the apocryphal romance between Guevara and East German agent Tamara (Tania) Bunke, who also died in the star-crossed Bolivia campaign. Director Michael ("Il Postino") Radford and executive producer Mick Jagger have been reportedly trying to lure Antonio Banderas into playing the role of Che, as he did in the film "Evita."

Che's resurrection as a cuddly pop-culture icon hasn't pleased everybody. Cuban exiles see the Argentine guerrilla as a murderous interloper responsible for the destruction of their homeland. When Jon Lee Anderson read selections from his stunning new biography "Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life" in a Miami bookstore recently, there were no Che T shirts in the audience. Anderson's portrayal reveals all facets of Che's character, from the romantic idealist who inspired millions to follow his example of self-sacrifice to the coldhearted enforcer who sent 55 people to their deaths during his time as "supreme prosecutor." "Cuba's revolutionary avenging angel," Anderson writes, "was respected and admired, despised and feared, but nobody was indifferent to him." As if to prove his point, one Cuban exile stands up and shouts: "How can you justify making money by putting this man's face on the cover of your book?"

Guevara himself might be bemused to see his rising popularity, 30 years after his death. But not surprised: after all, he self-consciously created the legend, transforming the young Ernesto Guevara into the implacable "Che." (In doing so, he turned the Argentine expression "che," meaning buddy, into a universal nickname.) The process began after his trip around South America and accelerated when he joined Fidel Castro and his band of rebels in Mexico in 1955, as they prepared to go to war against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. By the time they marched triumphantly into Havana in January 1959, Che had forged himself into the "New Socialist Man": fearless, disciplined and willing to die for the cause. "We are not men, but working machines," he said. Still, his charm, intellect and honesty were seductive to mere mortals; even the Soviet agent assigned to spy on Che couldn't help falling in love with him, as did millions of European justifyists. "Che is more than a mythical figure for cultural consumption," says Niki Vendola, the first leader of the Gay Communists in Italy. "He still inspires us with the great passion he put into his revolutionary quest for the perfect man."

Che's final days in Bolivia were the culmination of a quixotic, almost suicidal journey. He had tried to be an exemplary minister and national-bank president in Havana, building society around the New Man. But he worried about Castro's tightening embrace with the Soviet Union. And he had always felt more alive, more Che, when he was fomenting revolution. Che's first two attempts, in Argentina and the Congo, were disasters. Bolivia would be no better: the conditions did not exist for a revolution, much less one that would spawn, as he had hoped, a dozen Vietnams in Latin America. But Che's capture and execution, even amid such blindness, only enhanced his legend. "He died well," muses Alberto Granado, his old Argentine pal who rode with him around South America — and then moved to Havana. "It wasn't a useless death."

Martyrdom turned Che into an instant global icon, a symbol of a generation. The following year, 1968, students from Mexico City to Paris to Prague all marched under his banner. In Cuba, however, after a year of solemn observance, there was a strange silence surrounding Che that lasted for 15 years. It was only in the mid-1980s that Castro revived Che's uncompromising image as a defense against Soviet glasnost and perestroika. The Soviet Union disintegrated before the effort got very far, and the combination of that collapse and the U.S. embargo has forced Castro to dollarize the economy and allow some foreign investment. Yet as Anderson notes, Che remained standing "as the spiritual validation of what little remains of 'revolutionary' Cuba." The Argentine is not only the face of the Cuban revolution, more visible than Fidel. He has been reincarnated as a secular saint, remembered by Cuban school kids every morning when they repeat in unison: "Pioneros comunistas, seremos como el Che." Communist pioneers, we will be like Che.

In Cuba, as in the commercial world, the new Che is softer, gender, Christlike. "He is a redeemer figure," says art historian David Kunzle, the curator of an upcoming exhibition of 150 Che posters at the University of California, Los Angeles. "In Havana, you no longer see images of Che with a gun." Indeed, the Cuban government so carefully guards the official Che myth that it is taboo to talk about the executions, the rifts with Castro or the folly of the Bolivian campaign. "The Cubans don't allow even a hint of criticism," says Argentine screenwriter Jose Pablo Feinmann. "Che is sacrosanct." Feinmann should know: he was recently sacked from an ongoing Argentine film about Che's life, in part because Cuban consultants didn't like the fact that he included executions in his script.

It's hard to reconcile Che's legacy with Cuban reality. "Che is well loved here," says Carlos, a 29-year-old Havana mechanic who avidly reads the excerpts from Che's "Diary of War" printed in the official newspaper, Granma, everyweek. "But it's impossible to be like him, especially these days." Carlos owes his health and university education to the socialist system, but his salary is barely over $10 a month. The only way his family survives is by renting out its old Lada to tourists for $25 a day, driver included. With salaries so low, he says, nearly everybody has become "metalized"— Cuban slang for the scramble after hard cash. "I look at Che now as a romantic," he says. "Life has taught me to be more practical."

At the market in old Havana's Cathedral Square, Che's image is everywhere: on coins, mugs, ashtrays, shirts, posters, beaded wall hangings and ghastly red oil paintings. And everywhere it is the same image: a glamorous, youthful Che staring out from under his black beret with a look of unbending determination and idealism. This mystical image, known the world over, came from a single photograph taken at a public funeral in March 1960. The photographer, Alberto (Korda) Diaz, never got the original copyright. Days after Guevara's death in the Bolivian mountains, printers used the photograph to make posters—and millions were reproduced before Korda could cash in.

Cuban revolutionaries, including Che, used to scoff at international copyright laws as prejudiced against poor nations. But now Cuba is opening up to the global marketplace, and Che's image is being promoted—and protected. Che's widow, Aleida, has opened up a research center in their old Havana home, La Casa del Che, while their daughter, Aliusha, has emerged as the most vocal defender of his legacy. Meanwhile, Korda, now 65, is starting to capitalize on his famous photograph. He has won a few lawsuits, and now he is busy setting up exhibitions in France, Italy, Mexico and Argentina. How much does he charge for a print of the photograph? "That would be $300," he says, "and another $300 if you want an interview." Expensive, yes. But these are the days when even an old socialist legend can be a hot commodity.

With ROD NORDLAND in Home and JOSHUA HAMMER in Vallegrande

Newsweek july 21, 1997, p.17-23

English | Biography | Library | Gallary | Multimedia | Links | Guestbook | Russian | Espanol