A REAL Revolutionary.
Posted on 03/27/2005 3:03:46 PM PST by wagglebee
Thirty-eight years after Ernesto "Che" Guevara's death, the revolutionary and his familiar black beret, solemn face and burning eyes remain a surprisingly resilient fashion statement, reports the New Jersey Record.
Guevara's image, as drawn by illustrator Alberto Korda, still appears on caps, T-shirts, posters, key rings, books and documentaries. But his status as a cultural icon has grown even bigger after the release of the 2004 film about a young Guevara: "The Motorcycle Diaries."
Which is perplexing to those who knew the man - or simply know what he did.
In contrast with the image of the idealistic Latin American revolutionary leader, the Argentine guerrilla fighter was a cold-blooded killer - the man who ran Fidel Castro's firing squads.
"There is something wrong with a society in which people wear shirts with the image of someone who preached hatred and enjoyed killing," Armando Alvarez, a Cuban exile who now resides in West New York, told the paper.
Increasingly, when young people wear clothes bearing Guevara's image, the paper reports, Cuban Americans who survived dictator Fidel Castro's revolution get angry - and tell the fashionistas exactly what they think of Che Guevara.
One example is 73-year-old Carlos Barberia, who recounts waiting for a bus in New Jersey when he spotted a Guevara T-shirt on a sidewalk rack. He bought the shirt - and promptly set it on fire with a burning newspaper.
"Che Guevara killed my father," he told a police officer, explaining his outburst. "He had my father shot by a firing squad in Cuba."
Thankfully, the officer seemed to understand and let Barberia go, he says.
Cuban exile Teresa Dovalpage, a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, wrote an entire book - "A Girl Like Che Guevara -to "exorcise the omnipresent Che ghost." When she arrived in the United States in 1996, she remembers being perplexed by the Che's ubiquitous image on college campuses, trendy city streets and elsewhere.
But even writing the book produced no real answers to explain the Che phenomenon. "What makes a 37-year-dead Argentine guerrilla so appealing to today's Americans?" she asked in a recent opinion piece. "Frankly, I don't get it."
Jorge Posadas, a Mexican American owner of a trendy New Jersey boutique that sells Guevara paraphernalia, dismisses the controversy, saying most young people wear the shirts for their fashion value - not the political message.
"They tell me he was an assassin and I tell them that was his problem and I don't care," he says. "I tell them this is a store, not a political party or a government, and that I sell whatever people want to buy."
He even told The Record that if his clients were interested in Osama bin Laden shirts, he would sell them, too.
When the paper asked Cuban Americans about the Guevara fans, many of the older exiles described them as "useful fools" - a Communist term describing gullible people who conveniently fall for the romantic appeal of leftist propaganda.
"It's like wearing a Hitler shirt," said Alvarez. "Che always said that to be a good revolutionary, you had to hate. And so when they wear the image of Che, they wear the image of hatred."
Carlos Barberia, a popular bandleader in Cuba and in the U.S., told the paper about how he came to hate Guevara. It happened the day he was invited to watch the guerrilla's firing squads shoot four "counter-revolutionaries" while he and Guevara chomped on steaks.
"They brought four guys out, but when they shot the first one, I got up and I walked away," he told The Record.
Weeks later, when Barberia was warned by a friend that Guevara's people were investigating him, the musician went into hiding. "He knew I was against the regime and he was going to have me arrested," Barberia said.
"When they couldn't find me, they took my father and had him shot."
As far as the left is concerned, as long as he didn't put panties on anybody's head, there's no problem.
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
"As far as the left is concerned, as long as he didn't put panties on anybody's head, there's no problem."
They don't have any problem with killing people, either, provided that they are innocent, law-abiding civilians who might disagree with them politically.
pong
This lie of the idealistic revolutionary is more than forty years old. There is a group of aging former left-wingers in this country who will keep expounding the same fantasies they believed in the 60's until they draw their last breath. It's long past time reality caught up with these old fakers.
Sales expected to be explosive in Seattle.
I bought a "commies aren't cool" t-shirt which has the standard socialist realism face of 'Che' with a circle and a slash through it. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be holding up very well in the wash.
It's ridiculous enough when naive college kids wear this leftist crap. They aren't into doing due dilligence on history. But its the ones like Churchill and the ones over 25 that I can't figure out. I guess they get off on all the adulation of the young chickies and moron 20something wannabee revolutionary guys.
I remember when the college students all were wearing those Trotsky glasses and protesting. How ridiculous. didn't they know that Stalin had had Trotsky killed? I think they are on a pseudo Hemmingway trip about "revolution".
"--yes--a cold-blooded killer who was also one of the world's worst military strategists--"
I see little punks wearing his "gear" all the way up here in Cow Town. I RELISH the opportunity to educate them at every opportunity. Idiots!
As we all know, there is a legal concept called fighting words, meaning that if you call a black person the N-word, their punching you in the mouth may be justified. What if a Cuban-American, or someone who grew up in the Soviet Bloc, or anybody else who suffered horribly due to the countless crimes against humanity commited by leftists, were to beat the hell out of one of these morons with the che shirts? Would it be legally defensible?
Trotskyite Profs. are actually still very common on College Campuses. They think Stalin corrupted Communism and if Trotsky had come to power it would have flourished.
Che, Castro, Stalin, Chavez. The Left loves all the murderers as long as they promise the masses a chicken in every pot.
I bought a shirt that had a picture of Lenin of the front, along with golden arches, and it read "McLenin's." On the back it had a crumbling hammer and sickle with the words, "The Party is Over." After 1 trip in the wash, it shrunk to comically-small proportions.
Well, I certainly wouldn't have a problem with it. If I were on a jury, I would be voting not guilty for certain.
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