I had a kid in my class wearing a Che Guevara shirt last week. He didnÂ’t know anything about the man whose face he was displaying, or the fact the man was a part of spreading and perpetuating the ideology that killed more people than any other in the 20th century.

Now the famed commieÂ’s family wants to control marketing of the iconic photo that turns up just about everywhere.

With his picture on rock band posters, baseball caps and women's lingerie, Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara is firmly entrenched in the capitalist consumer society that he died fighting to overturn.

The image of the Argentine-born guerrilla gazing sternly into the distance, long-hair tucked into a beret with a single star, has been an enduring 20th century pop icon.

The picture -- taken by a Cuban photographer in 1960 and printed on posters by an Italian publisher after Guevara's execution in Bolivia seven years later -- fired the imagination of rioting Parisian students in May 1968 and became a symbol of idealistic revolt for a generation.

But as well as being one of the world's most reproduced, the image has become one of its most merchandised. And Guevara's family is launching an effort to stop it. They plan to file lawsuits abroad against companies that they believe are exploiting the image and say lawyers in a number of countries have offered assistance.

"We have a plan to deal with the misuse," Guevara's Cuban widow Aleida March said in an interview.

"We can't attack everyone with lances like Don Quixote, but we can try to maintain the ethics" of Guevara's legacy, said March, who will lead the effort from the Che Guevara Studies Center which is opening in Havana later this year.

"The center intends to contain the uncontrolled use of Che's image. It will be costly and difficult because each country has different laws, but a limit has to be drawn," the legendary guerrilla's daughter, Aleida Guevara, told Reuters.

Now let’s wait just one minute here. This is no different than the bin Ladens trying to profit off of pictures of Osama, or of the Hitlers trying to ensure that Adolf’s image is used only in ways consistent with his principles. So while I would be thrilled to never have to look at some smug middle class brat in Old Navy jeans and a pair of Air Jordans ignorantly displaying the visage of an old commie who would have gladly executed the kid as a class enemy, I would don’t want to see the family succeed. After all, allowing th4 family to make money off of Che would be a repudiation of the very principles they seek to uphold – and the fact that the face of the revolution is so commercialized is the ultimate in ironic rejections of the hell-spawned ideology of communism.

Posted by: Greg at 10:21 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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