The real Ché Guevara

The sick, deluded, misinformed hero-worship of Fidel Castro's chief executioner is on full display this week at the International Center of Photography in New York. The description of the exhibit, "¡Che! Revolution and Commerce," and of how all things Ché still have cachet, is enough to make you wonder whether these people have ever read a history book.

The Washington Post reports:

It's the story of a single photograph and its flukey journey from contact sheet to international ubiquity and then into the farcical maw of commercial kitsch. Shot by a onetime fashion photographer named Alberto Korda, it might be, according to the show's curators, the most reproduced image in the history of photography.

The exhibit works, too, as an object lesson in the power — and on some level, the formidable beauty — of market economies, which can absorb and commodify anything, even their bitterest enemies. Today, there are dozens of Web sites selling stuff with Korda's Che shot emblazoned on it. Places like (Web site addresses deleted by Uncommon Sense) mostly target young people who, one assumes, aren't actually gearing up for armed insurrection.

"Our other big seller is beer pong shirts," says Shayn Diamond, a college student in London, Ontario, who a few months ago started selling Che-wear with some friends at (Web site address deleted). "He's a rebel, and along with rebel comes the cool factor and trendiness."

Translation: Viva los fashionistas!

Any money spent on T-shirts, posters or admission to the exhibit is blood money. Naiveté or ignorance are no excuses. The purveyors of this filth are making money from the deaths of thousands.

The Ché Guevara NOT on display in the exhibit is the Ché Guevara who personally executed or ordered killed thousands of Cubans from 1957 to 1962, and whose legacy of repression continues today. One of Ché victims in the first week after the rebels seized power was Cornelio Rojas, the police chief of Santa Clara and a cousin of my grandfather, who was executed Jan. 8, 1959. (See photos of his and other Ché-ordered executions here.)

To know the real Ché Guevara — the Ché Guevara that today's artists, students, film makers, commercial pitch-me and others either ignore or are ignorant about — consider Ché in in his own words:

"We will make our hearts cruel, hard, and immovable ... we will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood. Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of thousands; let them drown themselves in their own blood! Let there be floods of the blood of the bourgeois – more blood, as much as possible."

The cultural love affair that continues with Ché is not only sick in its own right. It also illustrates how far those of us working to change hearts and minds on Cuba and the true record of the revolution have to go.

But we must not give up. Yes, Ché is an icon, but the truth behind the picture being celebrated in New York this month must not be forgotten. Eventually, the truth will cause that icon, and everything associated with it — Fidel Castro, the "revolution," the Cuban gulag, etc. — to crumble.