Che Guevara Fashion

Chris Blattman recently had a piece about the fashion trend of Che Guevara clothing items and posters. I don’t have a knee-jerk negative reaction to seeing a Che Guevara decorated shirt. I think that shot of him in black and red that you usually see is a pretty cool looking image. Generally the people who display it will say it stands for some form of idealism and rebellion, which I am sympathetic to. I think it does stand for that to them and to most people, and that’s how I interpret it when I see it.

However, when you invest some thought in Che Guevara, I think it quickly becomes untenable to hold him up as an icon. He’s basically a fashionable Stalinist. I’m not an expert on the history of the Cuban Revolution, Castro’s Cuba, and Che’s adventures in Latin America. However, there seems to be a consensus that Che led death squads, imprisoned dissidents, prosecuted homosexuals, and executed many innocent people in Castro’s quest to create the Cuban "new man." This column by Paul Berman at the time of The Motorcycle Diaries gives a good overview of his regrettable actions.

If most of them knew all the facts, and saw Guevara as I and many other do, they would run from using his image. While we are living through this Che Guevara phase, we don’t see how ridiculous it should be. I think this is something that will eventually die out and then we’ll all be disgusted in how it was able to persist for so long. I view it as somewhat like wearing Confederate flags, which fortunately has become much less acceptable in the last ten years. But a flag is generally more vague; I think this is more like a fad of wearing Nathan Bedford Forrest shirts.

Again, I don’t think that people who wear Guevara’s image are hateful (only a very small percentage). But I do think that everyone should definitely stop doing it.