Why Che Guevara is not a hero

The cult of Che Guevara has often intrigued me. His unsmiling face is on millions of T-shirts, hats, cups, posters and just about anything that you could put an image on. Countless people cite him as their hero and an inspiration to the world. His rugged idealism is contrasted with the modern world with its consumerism and senseless violence. He was a man who seems to appeal to everyone- a communist who was admired by capitalists, a guerilla fighter who was admired by pacifists.
But in my opinion, this cult of Che Guevara is a disturbing sign of a world which picks heroes almost at a whim because Che Guevara was no hero. His struggle to liberate his country from a dictator might have been more noteworthy if he had not presided over the first firing squads of supposed ‘enemies of the state.’ Guevara then went on to become the founder of Cuba’s ‘labour camp system’ where dissidents among others were incarcerated in horrible conditions. He was a totalitarian and a man ferociously opposed to the idea of democracy in any of its forms. A man of the people? One wonders precisely what people Che Guevara supposedly loved. He appears to me to have been someone with nothing but contempt for his fellow man despite his flowery rhetoric. Reading about his struggles, it strikes me that Guevara was at heart more of a man who was addicted to adventure and violence and not one who was set on ‘liberating’ the oppressed. Considering his actions in Cuba after Castro had taken power, one wonders if it occurred to him that he was behaving exactly like the men he had struggled against. Somehow I doubt that he cared. In the long run, his string of attempts to overthrow governments in Latin America (and he also had a cameo in Congo which was also an abject failure) set back the cause of democracy in the region by decades. And of course he was upholding a system that gave us such marvels as Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China and modern North Korea.
So why does he receive all this adoration? For all his faults, Che did not launch himself as the icon that people now perceive him to be. A lot of the blame appears to lie with a famous photograph taken by Alberto Korda- if you have seen any photo of Che Guevara it is almost certainly that one. It shows him looking to the side of the picture, unsmiling and defiant wearing a beret and looking like a man who could fight all day if he felt so inclined. It’s one of the most famous photographs of the twentieth century and helped to launch Guevara as an icon. Once he was a pop culture symbol on a million T-shirts, it’s not hard to see how this in turn transformed into an icon. Somehow his status as an icon was then transformed into his current status as a dashing hero. His brutal history did not matter once he was on all those T-shirts. Instead Che Guevara appears to have become whatever people wish him to be.
We all love heroes and we reach for them as often as we can, but people who cite Mandela, Gandhi and the like know a fair bit about them to base their opinion. Nobody loves Nelson Mandela because they happened to see a particularly good photo of him somewhere. Yet what do most people really know about Che Guevara? Aside from a famous photo and the fact that he was a communist, you would be hard-pressed to get more answers than that from people who consider him a hero. Judging at least by the conversations I've had with my friends, what they dimly seem to be aware of is that he was fighting for some greater good and for ‘the people.’ I’ve had a lot of conversations with people about Guevara and I’m struck by their ignorance on ‘the great man.’ How do we hero-worship people when we know only the barest facts about them? Hollywood recently attempted to jump on the bandwagon by releasing The motorcycle diaries and while this may win Che some new converts, it is far from an accurate portrayal because the film is based on his diaries. That would be like releasing a film on Adolf Hitler’s life based on his infamous book Mein Kampf.
And that’s what is really disturbing- the fact that so many people are inspired by a myth and more worryingly, complete ignorance. You could argue that it makes no difference as long as they are inspired, but I think if we value truth at all then it should matter to us. Che Guevara’s heroism is something that is more in tune with fantasy than reality. There are many more worthy heroes than Che Guevara in this world, but sadly the forces of mass marketing don’t appear to have been on their side.