Che Guevara devoted his life to the destruction of the capitalist system, which he denounced as unjust and exploitative. But in death, it is Che who has been exploited by capitalism. His image, marketed in recent decades as a symbol of something vaguely cool, has been replicated on a dizzying array of mostly doubtful products, including t-shirts, neckties, children’s socks, cigarettes and beer labels, surfboards and even women’s underwear.
Out on DVD, Chevolution is a fascinating documentary on the morphing of a revolutionary into a branding opportunity for the very corporations he despised. Filmmakers Trisha Ziff and Luis Lopez avoid pat conclusions by presenting a spectrum of interviews with Guevara’s fans and foes of Guevara, along with the mindless boobs who think he was a ‘60s rock star and the defenders of his legacy.
At the heart of the story is the famous 1960 photograph of Che in a black beret, ragged haired and bearded with eyes fixed on the far horizon, taken by Alberto Korda. An intriguing figure in his own right, Korda was a fashion photographer and bon vivant in 1950s Havana, the life of every party and just the sort one can imagine on the first boat to Miami after Fidel (and his sidekick, Che) seized power. But Korda stayed on, photographing the revolution. An aesthete, not a reporter, he cropped history from his photograph, abstracting Che from space and time into an image of bold revolutionary fervor.
Temperamentally suited for overthrowing governments rather than running them, Che soon left Cuba on a mission to export the revolution. He failed, but by the time of his battlefield death in 1967, his tracts were inspiring the tumult that swept the world in the ‘60s and the Korda photo assumed iconic resonance among revolutionaries. As Che’s image spread virally on posters circulated by radicals from Berkeley to Belfast, Paris to Prague, it was already beginning to slip the bonds of his Marxist ideology and assume whatever meaning its users intended. Before too long it would be left with little meaning at all.
During the heady years of the ‘60s and ‘70s, Korda was pleased to allow his most famous photograph to be the common property of any revolutionary anywhere. When large corporations began expropriating Che to sell products, he became a belated advocate of intellectual property rights. Since the ‘90s, Korda and his estate have successfully sued Smirnoff, Swatch and even Rage Against the Machine, pursuing the exploiters with armies of lawyers rather than the guerilla cadres beloved by Guevera. And yet a slew of Che merchandise continues to find its way to market. The capitalist system proved more resilient than the revolutionary imagined, embracing the symbols of its enemies in pursuit of profit.
