WHAT SORT OF MENTALLY-CHALLENGED PERSON WOULD WANT TO WEAR A CHE GUEVARA TEE-SHIRT?

Che Guevara (1928 - 1967), the Argentinian medical student cum Latin American revolutionary, is one of the banal, tired icons of the mindless left.  How many times I have seen his likeness on tee- shirts I would hate to guess.  Over the years, I have often wondered if those sporting the tee shirts have any idea about the man, or are they simply manifesting what they have been taught to believe by leftist propagandists?

Born into a middle class home with intellectual pretensions, Che entered medical school in Buenos Aires, but his affinity for leftist causes and his sympathy for the poor and downtrodden soon overtook his zeal for medicine.  After various treks throughout Central America and South America, Che determined that his destiny would be that of opposition to capitalism and, in particular, to American-style capitalism, which he saw as having free rein in establishing oppressive regimes in the Southern Hemisphere.

Che's role in joining the Cuban Revolution is well known; and, from that experience he emerged as an authority on guerrilla warfare.  With the successful outcome of the revolutionary campaigns in Cuba, Che for a time was the administrator of la Cabana Fortress prison, where he became an extremely hardened man, personally taking part in the many executions of Batista loyalists.

CHE AS EXECUTIONER

Later serving in Cuba as finance minister, head of the Cuban national bank and minister of industry, Guevara climbed quickly to the highest echelons of the Cuban communist government.  In addition, it was Guevara who played the leading role in bringing to Cuba the nuclear missiles from Russia which nearly propelled the world into nuclear war during the fall of 1962. Eventually, he would be recognized as second- in-command to Fidel Castro himself.  However, in a split with Castro over Russian communism versus Chinese communism, Guevara resigned his elevated positions and even his Cuban citizenship, preferring to become an itinerant revolutionary in Africa and, finally, in Bolivia, where he was captured and killed in October of 1967.

CHE "IN EXTREMIS"

Despite his vaunted status in the hagiography of leftist sainthood, there is a side of the man which seems to have eluded all those who model the Che tee shirts. Many who survived the depredations of the Cuban revolution speak of Che in terms of his hatred, extreme cruelty and Robespierre-style determination to uproot and destroy all who were in opposition to the Cuban revolution.  As such, he seems totally enamored of violence for its own sake. In essence, he was a fanatic whose penchant for bloodshed overpowered reason.  In effect, it was his dogmatism that condemned him to the same fate that he had visited upon others, a nasty little execution in the dirty little village of Higuera in Bolivia.

If today you seek Che Guevara - for what ever reason, I might only guess - you may find his remains resting in a mausoleum in Santa Clara, Cuba.

Like so much of the rubbish of the left, the Che Guevara tee-shirts are merely faddish relics of a failed socialism.  In many ways, I suppose, we are fortunate to have only the tee shirts in our midst and not Che himself.  As for the "dudes" who sport the tees, I can almost guarantee that if you should ask one of those fellows about the historical chronology and legacy of Che Guevara, you would be met with a rather blank stare.