A Sad Irony

His face is seen everywhere: t-shirts, coffee mugs, cigarette lighters, bumper stickers, with movies and entire websites dedicated to him. Who is this man? Is it Barack Obama? An actor? A musician? Some other celebrity? He was none of those people. His name was Ernesto Guevara de la Serna. Born into a middle class Argentine family in the late 20’s, Guevara grew up living a normal life. Then, as a young man who had received his training as a physician, he set out on a motorcycle journey across the South American continent (while keeping a diary which would be made into a movie). Whilst on this journey, the young man, who had been given the nickname “Che” saw people living in destitution and poverty. After coming to the realization that this poverty was caused by the evils of capitalism, Che made it his mission in life to destroy the capitalist machine and bring communism throughout the world.
He studied the works of such people as Marx, Engels, and Lenin as he tried to gain a better understanding on how to help the troubled proletariat working class. While doing this, he met two brothers named Fidel and Raùl Castro from Cuba. At this time, the Cuban people were living under the American-backed military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Che and the Castro brothers worked in collaboration to train and lead guerilla armies in a revolution, starting with their famous Movimiento de 26 Julio (26 July Movement). In the year 1959, the revolutionary comrades were able to fully overthrow the Cuban government and install a communist regime.
After doing this, Che went on to help in other countries to try starting revolutions in order to spark the world-wide revolution that Marx had discussed in his Manifesto of the Communist Party that would bring about global communism. After his brutal execution-style murder at the hands of US backed Bolivian soldiers, Che became a sort of martyr for communism, and a gimmick for the capitalist machine that he sought to destroy. Alberto Korda’s famous photo of Che, called Guerrillero Heroico quickly became a fixture on college dorm posters. Young adults flocked to stores selling t-shirts bearing his image as they identified themselves as being “off-beat” or of a new generation against the “establishment” (even though they were just creating a new establishment).
Acknowledging that he was a communist guerilla revolutionary who hated nothing more than the capitalist machine, is it not a sad and almost cruel irony that his image (just one photograph) has been seen on a wide range of consumer products (conveniently found on www.chestore.com, for all your revolutionary needs)?