50 years after helping to lead Cuba's revolution, Che Guevara is still everywhere in Latin America. Well, at least his image is. The BBC's Daniel Schweimler reports from Buenos Aires.
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MARCO: Cuba marks the 50th Anniversary of Fidel Castro's revolution this week. Fidel Castro himself is too ill to take part in any of the ceremonies; his brother Raul led the official celebrations yesterday. He predicted that the Cuban revolution would survive another 50 years, but he also warned that the next half century would be one of permanent struggle. That sounds like something Che Guevara would've said. The Argentine rebel helped lead the Cuban revolution then worked to spread revolution elsewhere and that's what he was up to when he was captured and executed in Bolivia in 1967. Yet Guevara's image endures, today more than ever as the BBC's Daniel Schweimler reports from Buenos Aires.
DANIEL: Well, there goes another march through the center of Buenos Aires, this one celebrating 25 years since the end of military rule and the return of democracy. And if I look, yes there it is, someone waiving a flag bearing that famous Alberto Korda photograph of Ernesto Che Guevara. Look a little further and some are wearing Che t-shirts. There are protests almost every day across Latin America by trade unions, indigenous groups, human rights campaigners, shanty town residents and more. And you can pretty much guarantee it, some demonstrators will be wearing Che's image in some form or another.
Buenos Aires-based journalist Michael Casey has just written a book called Che's Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image.
MICHAEL: It's much easier to put on a t-shirt and say that, "I am dedicated to the self-sacrifice and, and the hard slog of revolution that Che himself, the man, pursued," than it is to actually do it yourself. He, he would be demanding a lot of people. And I don't think that the revolutionary fervor that drove people to imitate him, in a quite real way certainly here in Argentina and across Latin America is quite there.
DANIEL: In Europe and North America his image is used to sell everything from vodka to baby clothes to t-shirts, while in Latin America it still carries a revolutionary appeal. However, he died defeated and with little support in a remote Bolivian village in October 1967. How has he made this stunning comeback? How is Che the message he carried with such success in the Cuban revolution relevant to 21st Century Latin American politics? Well, this man has certainly helped. The president of Venezuela Hugo Chavez recently celebrated ten years in office and he wants to stay a lot longer to implement what he calls his brand of 21st Century socialism. As he spreads his message throughout Latin America lubricated by his country's vast oil wealth he often talks of the advice he receives from the former Cuban leader Fidel Castro and the inspiration from Che Guevara. But it's perhaps here in Bolivia, the country where Che Guevara's plans to spread revolution failed so dramatically that ironically his image and ideals are most prevalent. Indigenous leader, coca leaf grower, and now president, Evo Morales speaking on a windy hilltop just outside Valle Grande in Eastern Bolivia, the town where 41 years ago Che's body was displayed to prove to the world that he was dead. At the height of the cold war his CIA-backed killers hoped his revolutionary zeal was dead too. They were wrong. Ecuadorian writer Maria del Carmen has written extensively about the venerated beret-wearing Argentine.
MARIA: Is a lot of people's fear that he represents many of our deep needs politically, uh, speaking. So I really think that is the main point about the growing of his, uh, popularity all over Latin America, because this is growing all the time.
DANIEL: Hilario Gonzalez used to run the only Che Guevara museum in Buenos Aires. It's closed now, but his shop filled with Che memorabilia acts as a kind of shrine for visitors in search of whatever they feel the Argentine revolutionary can offer them.
HILARIO: Guevara is everywhere. He is re--is being reborn for example in Bolivia. I am very, very, very happy that, uh, the seed that Guevara put in this earth in Bolivia has grown and, and we are, uh, seeing, looking at, at this new roots. And nowadays he has won. Guevara has won.
DANIEL: Few in Latin America it seems want to turn their countries into new Cubas, but the spirit of the Cuban revolution and all that it promised is still burning strong, at least in the image of Comandante Che Guevara. For The World, I'm Daniel Schweimler in Buenos Aires.
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