IF YOU had told the Bolivian soldiers who finally captured Ernesto “Che” Guevara in 1967 that they were about to forge one of the world’s most potent myths, they would have snorted with derision. Che was caught near the Bolivian village of Villagrande, dishevelled and defeated, the final act of a doomed attempt to foment revolution in a country that did not want one. He was tied up, shot four times, then arranged on a grimy sink and photographed to prove he was truly dead. Finally the soldiers cut off his hands, and buried him in an unmarked grave. Another failed revolutionary, dead at 39.
Thirty-seven years later, Che lives — nay, thrives — in posters on student walls from Bolivia to Bulgaria to Belgravia, in novels, films and musicals. The famous Warholised Korda image of Che in red-star beret is used to flog everything from beer to jeans to fridge magnets. Madonna and the rapper Jay-Z have both dressed up as Che for their album covers; Liz Hurley, that celebrated anti-capitalist revolutionary, sports the T-shirt; Mike Tyson has the tattoo.
Next week, the Edinburgh film festival hosts the premiere of The Motorcycle Diaries, based on Che’s account of his journey with a friend through Latin America at the age of 23. The film stars the art-house idol Gael García Bernal, and offers a gauzy, romantic image of the pre-revolutionary Che. In some ways, this is the ultimate expression of the Che myth: there is little hint of the violent revolutionary to come, let alone the repressive communist state that Che helped to create. He is simply a romantic rebel, an idealistic hunk on a motorbike.
At this point it is worth remembering who Che was: born into Argentina’s aristocracy, he evolved into a totalitarian guerrilla with a fondness for Stalin, who authorised death with the easy conscience of the unimaginative revolutionary. Peasants lacking the necessary zeal were expendable. His rhetoric was straight out of the Marx-Lenin handbook of approved cliché. “I believe in the armed struggle as the only solution.” He was handsome, vain, splenetic, confused, media-obsessed and ruthless. As an administrator in his adopted Cuban homeland, first as director of the national bank then as Industry Minister, he was useless. The revolutions he tried to spark in Congo and Bolivia failed utterly; the one that succeeded, in Cuba, left behind a failed and oppressive state, the residue of a discredited idea.
There is only one comparable example of a revolutionary whose image among a vast swath of people is so utterly divorced from reality: and that is Osama bin Laden. Across the Islamic world, Osama’s image is pinned up as an icon of rebellion, but most of the young Muslims who voice support for Osama have as little idea of what he really stands for as the companies that market Che to sell their wares. Osama may not have Che’s pin-up looks to Western eyes, but as Jonathan Randal observes in his new book Osama: The Making of a Terrorist, to young, angry Saudis and millions of other Muslims, he has genuine “pop star” appeal, with all the superficiality that that implies.
Che and Osama, the atheist anti-capitalist and the capitalist theocrat, would not be comrades in politics, yet the parallels between them are striking, and chilling. Both were children of privilege, deriving credibility from their rejection of the world they were born into, preaching hatred and moving restlessly from place to place; both espouse a violent, global revolutionary creed; both combine physical infirmity (asthma in Che’s case, kidney disease for Osama) with the image of the fighter immune to physical hardship. Both men were radicalised by observing the work of the CIA: Osama as a Mujahidin volunteer fighting to oust the Soviet Union from Afghanistan; Che by witnessing the CIA-backed coup to overthrow the socialist Government of Guatemala in 1954.
As Lawrence Osborne observed in The New York Observer, both men share the same hackneyed revolution-speak: “Our every action is a battle cry against imperialism, a battle hymn for the people’s unity against the great enemy of mankind: The United States of America.” That was Che Guevara, but it could just as easily have come from the soundtrack of one of Osama’s videos. Like Osama, Che was prepared to countenance the death of unnumbered innocents in pursuit of his ideological ends: at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, Che was in favour of unleashing Soviet missiles on the USA.
But in nothing are the two revolutionaries more alike than in their shared determination to forge and sustain an iconic public image. Che appreciated the value of photography and media coverage as much as any modern celebrity; he once remarked that having a journalist on hand during the fighting, preferably an American, was more important than military victory. Osama has been just as assiduous in turning himself into a poster-boy for a different audience, with the appropriate symbols of revolution: for Che these were the cigar, the beret and the wispy beard; for Osama they are the turban, the Kalashnikov, and the wispy beard.
Che’s after-life was sanctified by the manner of his death: shot down for what he believed in by a grunt in uniform, a fate the passes for heroism in the adolescent romantic mind. All Osama needs, to ensure permanent pin-up status among radical Muslim jihadis, is the right sort of death. Al-Qaeda itself is predicated on explosive self-sacrifice, and as Randal observes, “for years Osama has honed his hero-cum-martyr image”. A violent martyr’s death will crystallise his myth, and Osama knows it. Many analysts expected him to choose Tora Bora as his own Villagrande, the site of hopeless last stand that would send him straight into the arms of the 72 maidens that await Islam’s martyrs. Instead, Osama slipped away to the fastness of the Afghan-Pakistan border.
As the US election approaches, the Americans are probably closing in on Osama; he probably knows it, and his final photo opportunity may turn out to be his most powerful weapon of all. As Che demonstrated, in life and in death, the click of a shutter may be all that separates a grubby and violent terrorist from a hallowed freedom fighter.
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