`A Tourist Destination'

A shameful confession: In 1968, not yet 16 years old, I cut from the pages of Ramparts magazine a painting of Ernesto “Che” Guevara based on the photograph by Alberto Korda. I glued the picture to a long sheet of butcher’s paper I had covered with red paint, and added Guevara’s birth and death dates: June 14, 1928 – October 9, 1967. The resulting poster I hung on my bedroom wall, despite the fact that I had used slow-drying oil paint stolen from my father’s garage. It dripped down the wall and onto the floor like a scene from an abattoir – a symbolically acute tribute to Guevara’s bloody accomplishments.

I’m not certain what I was thinking at 15, but Guevara, 40 years after his long-overdue execution, remains a hero to misguided adolescents everywhere. My goal was probably no more sophisticated than wishing to irk my parents. About Guevara I knew only what the headlines had told me. Now we know all about the good doctor’s enthusiasm for his job as Castro’s chief executioner and architect of Cuba’s labor-camp system. Despite this, the hagiography continues. Last year, at a party here in Houston, a man wearing a Che T-shirt and a black beret held court in the hosts’ garden. He was 60-ish, the sort of man who talks softly and slowly because he knows some people think that makes him sound wise. He added another layer of irony to the scene by pontificating against capital punishment. In a letter to his wife on Jan. 28, 1957, not long after he and Castro arrived in Cuba from Mexico aboard the Granma, Guevara wrote: “Here in the Cuban jungle, alive and blood-thirsty.”

Our capacity for dissociation from reality is bottomless. In 1968, within months of Guevara’s death, a band called the United State of America put out a self-titled album with a cut called “Love Song for the Dead Ché.” Sung by a woman, it was slow, worshipful and oh-so-sensitive. The lyrics began, “On the dawn of an ordinary Sunday….” Little has changed. I remembered the 40th anniversary of Guevara’s death only because I heard a story on the radio Monday morning reminding us that “Che’s spirit endures.” Later, in the university library, a young man seated at a computer wore a red T-shirt with Che’s image on the front – more Che-chic. From blood-thirsty sociopath to capitalist brand name in 40 years. In 2004, Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple) examined the marketing of Che in The New Criterion:

“…if we analyze Guevara’s popular appeal more than a third of a century after his timely death, we can see that it is the result of aesthetic and emotional responses rather than rational reflection, responses that are now kept alive by a good dose of commercialism. On one website dedicated to his memory, for example (www.store.che-lives.com), I found twenty-seven different varieties of Guevara T-shirts for sale, including a distressed olive-green one, one with reflective ink, a black one with glitter, and a black one with red glow. New berets were also available, the site announced with an exclamation mark, as if we had all been anxiously waiting for them, as well as baseball and trucker hats, bandannas, keyrings, Zippo lighters, desk clocks, and brooches. In short, Guevara is not so much an historical figure as a tourist destination. And most tourists don’t read too deeply into the history of the places they are going to.”

Here’s some good news: Another web site offers a T-shirt that thoughtfully suggests: “Ché is dead. Get over it!”