I have seen it. It was very romantic........He still is a fucking pinko communist who got what he deserved. Damn good riddance.

no don't beat around the bush Kaya, tell us what you really mean...

I am not that bad raz.

i quess not...but you sounded like him for a moment

Kaya, beware the pinko commie under your bed....

Che Guevara
A modern saint and sinner
http://www.economist.com/world/la/displays...tory_id=9968985

Oct 13th 2007
From The Economist print edition
Why the Che myth is bad for the left

AFP

THE bearded face—eyes staring defiantly to infinity, the long wavy hair beneath the beret stirred by the Caribbean breeze—has become one of the world's most familiar images. Alberto Korda's photograph of Ernesto “Che” Guevara may be waved aloft by anti-globalisation pro-*test*-('")ers but it has spawned a global brand. It has adorned cigarettes, ice cream and a bikini, and is tattooed on the bodies of footballers.

What explains the extraordinary appeal of Guevara, an Argentine who 40 years ago this week was captured and shot in Bolivia (see article)? Partly the consistency with which he followed his own injunction that “the duty of the revolutionary is to make the revolution”. A frail asthmatic, he took up arms with Fidel Castro's guerrillas in Cuba's Sierra Maestra. After their victory, Guevara would fight again in the Congo as well as Bolivia. He fought dictators who were backed by the United States in the name of anti-communism when the cold war was at its hot-*test*-('"), and when Guevara's cry to create “two, three...many Vietnams” resonated on university campuses across the world. His renewed popularity in recent years owes much to a revival of anti-Americanism.

But it is semiotics, more than politics, that leads teenagers ignorant of the Sierra Maestra to sport Che T-shirts. Korda's photograph established Guevara as a universal symbol of romantic rebellion. It helps, too, that he died young, at 39: as a member of the Cuban gerontocracy he would hardly have become the James Dean of world politics. A second picture, that of the bedraggled guerrilla's corpse, staring wide-eyed at the camera, provides another clue. It resembles Andrea Mantegna's portrait of the dead Christ. It fixes Guevara as a modern saint, the man who risked his life twice in countries that were not his own before giving it in a third, and whose invocation of the “new man”, driven by moral rather than material incentives, smacked of St Ignatius Loyola more than Marx.

In Cuba, he is the patron saint: at school, every child must repeat each morning, “We will be like Che.” His supposed relics are the object of official veneration. In 1997, when Cuba was reeling from the collapse of its Soviet ally, Mr Castro organised the excavation of Guevara's skeleton in Bolivia and its reburial in a mausoleum in Cuba. Except that in the tradition of medieval saints, it probably isn't his body at all, according to research by Bertrand de la Grange, a French journalist.

The wider the cult spreads, the further it strays from the man. Rather than a Christian romantic, Guevara was a ruthless and dogmatic Marxist, who stood not for liberation but for a new tyranny. In the Sierra Maestra, he shot those suspected of treachery; in victory, Mr Castro placed him in charge of the firing squads that executed “counter-revolutionaries”; as minister of industries, Guevara advocated expropriation down to the last farm and shop. His exhortation to guerrilla warfare, irrespective of political circumstance, lured thousands of idealistic Latin Americans to their deaths, helped to create brutal dictatorships and delayed the achievement of democracy.

Sadly, Guevara's example is invoked not just by teenagers but by some Latin American governments. In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez wants to create the guevarista “new man” (see article), just when Cuba is having second thoughts. As Jorge Castañeda, one of Guevara's biographers, notes, Che's lingering influence has retarded the emergence of a modern, democratic left in parts of Latin America. Sadly, most of those who buy the T-shirt neither know nor care.

Razor is under Kaya's bed!??

I'm sure there's a lot about Che we don't know about, but one thing I know is that Cuba is a great place to spend a week in.

Im not paranoid, deman. I call it the way I see it. Communism is a failed experiment and a detriment to the human race. Show me one successful communist experiment without the elements of capitalism please. You can't. And if you entertain any thought in support of communism, then you are the hypocrit of the century. You and your support for democracy and human rights. Pol Pot was a communist too. He wasted millions of his people. Stalin was a communist who also wasted millions of his people. Che was a communist who got what he deserved. Tell me, what part of the Communist Manifesto appeals to you?

Che Guevara is a communist icon because of this pic



and not because of this one



I will give Che one thing, that he really believed in what he was doing. But his personality cult today has more to do with him being an alter-ego to many-a-armchair revolutionary.

BTW I agree fully with Kaya. Communism was simply an unworkable political idealogy that was finally exposed as a dud when put into practise.

hahaha

Well, we have born-again Christians and born-again virgins so why not born-again pinkos, right kaya.

Capitalism is to put a communist's face on a tshirt and make the new generation fork out their pocket money to make a political statement.

Poor sods lost before they even started.

"to each according to his mean, and according to his needs"...

in theory it was a good idea...the communist idea was not flawed Kaya...we as humans are...

Communism made a mistake in basing itself on the concept of altruism...the concern for others around you...ie a person giving some of his excess to another who lacked......BIG MISTAKE....man is not like this, he is competitive, greedy, individualistic, apathetic to the needs of his neighbours and fellow human beings...etc

this is why communism failed....this is why people can drive by in 250,000 mercs while on the sidewalk homeless eat out of garbage bins....

the rot is in man...

Razor is not pink but strictly RED....

nothing wrong with that....