Che Guevara--Still Popular as a Handy Symbol of Cool

Brett Sokol, in miaminewtimes.com (Feb. 5, 2004):

While it's certainly true that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter , with Che Guevara that maxim has become downright surreal. Today the revolutionary icon's writings are simultaneously admired by teenage Howard Dean volunteers in Burlington and Taliban leaders in the Afghan countryside; they are parsed for strategies by narco-guerrillas in Colombia as well as counterinsurgency experts at the U.S. Southern Command.

Meanwhile the same Che T-shirt spotted on several masked anarchists cavorting through downtown Miami during November's FTAA protests was also sported by actress Elizabeth Hurley as she club-hopped across London. Hurley, though, chose to accessorize her sartorial ode to class struggle with a $4500 Louis Vuitton handbag. And just to add a further dash of the ridiculous, consider the recent sight of supermodel Gisele Bündchen strutting down the catwalk in a Che bikini, Madonna's Che-inspired CD cover, or Smirnoff vodka's Che ad campaign.

For many local Cuban exiles, however, Guevara's current cultural moment is hardly a laughing matter. To them the very mention of Guevara -- let alone the thought that his visage adorns countless dorm rooms -- is deeply disturbing. The Argentine-born rebel, after all, was Fidel Castro's right-hand man during Cuba's 1959 revolution, personally presiding over several key events that forced so many to flee to South Florida: commanding scores of firing-squad executions of political opponents inside Havana's La Cabaña waterfront fortress; managing the wholesale nationalization of private businesses and homes; hunting down anti-Castro groups in the Escambray mountains; even demanding that the Soviets launch their island-based nukes at Washington, D.C. , during the 1961 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Accordingly el exilio had best steel itself. Guevara's public profile is about to rise even higher in 2004. No fewer than four separate major-studio films based on Guevara's life are in the offing. First up is Central Station director Walter Salles's The Motorcycle Diaries , based on Guevara's own account of his extended road trip through Latin America, a journey that resulted in his self-transformation from a skirt-chasing, middle-class dilettante into a devout quoter of Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao (albeit one who still spent a great deal of time hooking up with female comrades). Starring Latin heartthrob Gael García Bernal , The Motorcycle Diaries was the toast of last month's Sundance Film Festival. Critics are already raving, as is Fidel himself, who dropped in on the picture's co-producer, Robert Redford , during a recent Havana visit to screen the film for Guevara's surviving family members.