June 15, 2003	Sunday	Rabi-us-Sani 14, 1424

MEXICO CITY/HAVANA: Although he fought against capitalism, his face has became a very marketable item. Today, a 1960 portrait of Argentine-Cuban revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara appears on T- shirts and telephone cards, watches, lighters, bottles of red wine, cigarette packets and even business advertisements.

Nonetheless, in this era of anti-globalization protests, the image of the man who was once companion-in-arms to Fidel Castro retains a powerful political symbolism, even as that of Castro begins to wane. Were he still alive, “Che” as he is known, would turn 75 years old on Saturday.

The famous photograph by Alberto Korda showing Guevara with a whimsical expression and wearing his trademark black beret with a red star on his head, has circled the world thousands of times over.

When the snap was taken in March, 1960, Guevara was 31 years old, and it is that image that has prevailed for posterity. The communist Latin American revolutionary will always be remembered as a handsome young man posing like James Dean.

Ernesto Guevara was born on June 14, 1928, in the Argentine city of Rosario. He was said to have a strong will and an abiding sense of justice from a child. He studied medicine but never practiced it, preferring to travel throughout Latin America, which took him to Mexico, where he met Fidel Castro in 1955.

Castro and his brother, Raul, and other Cuban exiles in Mexico were preparing to return to Cuba to battle dictator Fulgencio Batista. Guevara joined them and they gave him the nickname “Che”, which comes from an Argentine expression used to catch a person’s attention.

In November, 1956, 82 men, among them the Castro brothers and Guevara, boarded a yacht called “Granma” in the Mexican port of Tuxpan and left for Cuba, arriving on its eastern coast on December 2.

There were only 12 survivors from the first clashes with Batista’s army. But other Cubans joined rebel ranks in the hills. The movement against Batista swelled, and early on January 1, 1959, he fled Cuba. A few days later Castro and Guevara entered Havana.

Applauded by the large numbers of poor in Cuba, the revolutionary chiefs began to carry out socialist reforms, nationalizing lands, mansions and factories.

Guevara was granted Cuban citizenship and named to head the Cuban central bank and later industry minister, although he knew hardly anything about economics. The Cuban economy began to plummet.

Guevara like to speak of the “new man”, a citizen seeking to build socialism based solely on moral incentives without any material interest. But experts at the Cuban central bank whose salaries had been lowered by Che were not enticed by his views and preferred to depart for the US who wanted nothing of Castro’s “tropical socialism”.

In 1965 Guevara resigned as minister. Many historians believe Castro had pushed him aside because his ideas were too unrealistic. Whatever the case Che left Cuba in order to try to set off revolutions in other parts of the world.

Guevara was convinced that the success of the Cuban revolution could be repeated elsewhere in the Third World and decided to try his luck in Bolivia. Not a single peasant joined his tiny rebel army that wandered for months through the Bolivian jungle. Eventually, somebody snitched on him, and Guevara was captured by the Bolivian army and shot to death on October 9, 1967. It took 30 years for his remains to be found, unearthed and taken to Cuba.

Through the years, many middle-class youngsters across Latin America have espoused the “Che” ideal of revolution, taking up arms in guerrilla wars doomed to failure and getting tragically killed.

Former Mexican foreign minister Jorge G. Castaneda wrote a controversial biography about Guevara in which he said that “Che” was at “least partially” to blame for his erroneous revolutionary ideas having sparked the dire consequences that befell his followers.

That Guevara became a legend, is, according to Castaneda, not so much because of his extraordinary life and violent death, but rather because he embodied the spirit of an era and died just before the 1968 students protests that rocked the globe.

In Castaneda’s opinion Che might have gone unnoticed in another less idealistic and less turbulent time, but his martyrdom assured him the place in history he always sought.

“Che Guevara’s death gave meaning to his life, and life to his legend,” Castaneda wrote.—dpa