Che Won't Go Away
By Mick Farren
The kid waits for a bus outside Fairfax High School. A bearded face, a red star on a black beret, stares from the boy’s oversized T-shirt. The proudly worn image is neither musician nor movie star. It’s the legendary photograph by Aberto Korda of Argentinean-born guerrilla fighter and Marxist visionary Ernesto Guevara de la Serna – commonly known as Che. The same image of Che has appeared across the entire world on the shirts of antiwar activists, WTO and G8 protesters, punks, rock & rollers, and striking agricultural workers.
How much the kid on his way home from school really knows about the man on his shirt is anyone’s guess. Maybe he’s read the books, watched the TV documentaries, downloaded The Motorcycle Diaries, and is wholly up to speed on his icon, or maybe the screen print is just a romantic symbol of non-specific revolt. (“What are you rebelling against, kid?” “What have you got?”)
In the case of Che Guevara, the level of perception hardly matters. In the 40 years since his murder by the CIA and elite Bolivian Rangers, Che has been fashioned into a unique bridge between radical politics and popular culture. In a paradox that would baffle Leon Trotsky, Che is simultaneously a universal symbol of resistance and an object of commercial merchandise. As the trademark of revolution, his face appears on belt buckles and lip balm. Tourists from everywhere except the USA flock to Cuba for low-cost Havana vacations, and few go home without a Che souvenir. Parodies/copies of the classic black on red Che emblem have featured Osama bin Laden, Jesus Christ, Alfred E. Neuman, Manuel from Fawlty Towers, and Peter Griffin on Family Guy.
A newly released documentary, Che Guevara – Hasta La Victoria Siempre, directed by Clark Green, although earnest in intent, clearly bends in the direction of moving the merch with promotion that makes it clear it contains “rare and previously unseen” photographs and film footage. The pitch is very close to selling newly discovered live footage of Jimi Hendrix or the Ramones, or a lost section of The Godfather, and the effect on the viewer is not dissimilar.
Hasta La Victoria Siempre is little more than a mundane retelling of the basic Guevara biography, from his bohemian upbringing in Buenos Aires, his experiences during the CIA coup in Guatemala, his meeting and subsequent devotion to Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution all the way to his death while attempting to ignite insurrection in Bolivia. And yet the visuals are mesmerizing, as one watches the wealth of newsreel footage and amateur clips of this infinitely charismatic young man going about the business of actually creating a revolution – Che in combat, Che the orator, Che bringing in the sugar harvest, stripped to the waist, and finally Che the corpse, displayed like a trophy. Clearly much of the material is staged for the camera, but a knowing twinkle and semi-cynical grin makes clear that Che himself is well aware that he’s being exploited. His product is revolution and he’s selling it.
Che, like (say) James Dean, had the advantage of dying while still young and glorious. He never aged, he never compromised, and he never disappointed. Four decades after his death, his screen presence is still vibrant and vital, and that has surely to be why we still embrace him as a graphic affront to the raw greed of a ruthless status quo. Guevara is not an actor or a spot-lit rock star, but he generates the same energy and fascination. He was the real thing; he fought in the Sierra Maestra, he rode from Santa Clara to Havana in ecstatic triumph, and he died for a cause that was both lost and betrayed almost before it started.
In the West, we may never see the like of Che Guevara again. Perhaps this is instinctively understood by the kid from Fairfax High, and his Che T-shirt really celebrates that such a time, and such men, did exist, not all that long ago. Maybe he also wonders, with a youthful romance, if those times might come again.
Che Guevara – Hasta La Victoria Siempre is released on DVD by Kultur.
Mick Farren blogs at Doc40.blogspot.com.
Published: 05/14/2008
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