Debating Che, 40 years later

What happened

Acting Cuban president Raul Castro presided over a ceremony Monday to mark the 40th anniversary of the execution in Bolivia of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, calling the bearded Argentine-born revolutionary an “exceptional warrior.” But the mere mention of his name stokes anger in the U.S. among Cuban exiles, who remember Guevara as the man who presided over a prison where hundreds of opponents of the Cuban revolution were executed.

What the commentators said

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The irony, said Mark Lacey in The New York Times (free registration), is that “even in Cuba, one of the world’s last Communist bastions, Che is used both to make a buck and to make a point.” His dreamy, faraway stare has been stamped on T-shirts and key-chains, making one of the world’s best known rebels “as much a marketing tool as an international revolutionary icon.”

Guevara has been so “romanticized and corporate pimped” that he’s hardly recognizable, said John Ridley in The Huffington Post. His after-life as a revolutionary poster-boy stamped on T-shirts, fanny packs, and “apparently even a soap with the slogan "Che washes whiter," has fueled the myth that he was a “wide-eyed do-gooder” out to “right social wrongs.” In reality, “Guevara was a brutal, egotistical killer.”

And that is precisely why it’s worth remembering the day he died, said the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Sun-Sentinel in an editorial. It doesn’t matter whether you see Guevara as a “selfless, romantic” champion of the poor, or as a “sinister zealot.” His violent life and death showed that “using force to achieve ends, whether on the right or left, ultimately costs everyone a steep price. And it leaves a troubling legacy, even if it sells T-shirts.”