THE OMELETTE MAKER

Che Guevara: the killing machine (Alvaro Vargas Llosa, The New Republic, September 20th, 2005)

Che Guevara, who did so much (or was it so little?) to destroy capitalism, is now a quintessential capitalist brand. His likeness adorns mugs, hoodies, lighters, key chains, wallets, baseball caps, toques, bandanas, tank tops, club shirts, couture bags, denim jeans, herbal tea and of course those omnipresent T-shirts with the photograph, taken by Alberto Korda, of the socialist heartthrob in his beret during the early years of the revolution, as Che happened to walk into the photographer's viewfinder -- and into the image that, 38 years after his death, is still the logo of revolutionary (or is it capitalist?) chic.

Che products are marketed by big corporations and small businesses -- such as the Burlington Coat Factory, which put out a television commercial depicting a youth in fatigue pants wearing a Che T-shirt, or Flamingo's Boutique in Union City, New Jersey, whose owner responded to the fury of local Cuban exiles with this devastating argument: "I sell whatever people want to buy."

The metamorphosis of Che Guevara into a capitalist brand is not new, but the brand has been enjoying a revival of late. This windfall is owed substantially to The Motorcycle Diaries. Beautifully shot against landscapes that have clearly eluded the eroding effects of polluting capitalism, the recent film shows the young man on a voyage of self-discovery as his budding social conscience encounters social and economic exploitation. At this year's Academy Awards ceremony, Carlos Santana and Antonio Banderas performed the theme song from The Motorcycle Diaries, Santana showing up wearing a Che T-shirt and a crucifix.[...]

Che's lust for power had other ways of expressing itself besides murder. In 1958, after taking the city of Sancti Spiritus, Guevara unsuccessfully tried to impose a kind of sharia, regulating relations between men and women, the use of alcohol, and informal gambling -- a puritanism that did not exactly characterize his own way of life. He also ordered his men to rob banks, a decision that he justified in a letter to Enrique Oltuski, a subordinate, in November of that year: "The struggling masses agree to robbing banks because none of them has a penny in them." This idea of revolution as a license to re-allocate property as he saw fit led the Marxist puritan to take over the mansion of an emigrant after the triumph of the revolution.

The urge to dispossess others of their property and to claim ownership of others' territory was central to Guevara's politics of raw power. In his memoirs, the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser recalls that Guevara asked him how many people had left his country because of land reform. When Nasser replied that no one had left, Che countered in anger that the way to measure the depth of change is by the number of people "who feel there is no place for them in the new society."

Che's obsession with collectivist control led him to collaborate on the formation of the security apparatus that was set up to subjugate 6.5 million Cubans. In early 1959, a series of secret meetings took place in Tarara, near Havana, at the mansion to which Che temporarily withdrew to recover from an illness. That is where the top leaders, including Castro, designed the Cuban police state. Guevara himself took charge of G-6, the body tasked with the ideological indoctrination of the armed forces. The U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 became the perfect occasion to consolidate the new police state, with the rounding up of tens of thousands of Cubans and a new series of executions.

In the beginning, the revolution mobilized volunteers to build schools and to work in ports, plantations, and factories. But it was not long before volunteer work became less voluntary: The first forced labour camp, Guanahacabibes, was set up in western Cuba at the end of 1960. This is how Che explained the function performed by this method of confinement: "[We] only send to Guanahacabibes those doubtful cases where we are not sure people should go to jail ... people who have committed crimes against revolutionary morals, to a lesser or greater degree."

The herbal tea is a nice postmodern touch.