Poster killer

According to Jean Paul Sartre, he was ‘the most complete man of his age’. John Berger likened the photograph of his corpse to Andrea Mantegna’s ‘Dead Christ’. When I went up to university, in the month of his death, October 1967, the walls were quilted with his image — the famous Korda photograph of the implacable revolutionary, with the beret, the Comandante star, the wispy hair and beard. I remember particularly a sickly poster version in psychedelic colours — mauve and turquoise and green — taped to the wall of a friend’s room. Even then, I thought, Che Guevara was unlikely to have had much to recommend him, a mythic fanatic adulated by ersatz revolutionaries in Cambridge. Hardly anything was known about him, but that was one source of his iconographic ubiquity: ignorance is bliss, where heroes are concerned.

Over the past 30 years or so, Che has become an industry, appearing in ever more absurd and ironic guises, on T-shirts, scarves, baseball hats, key rings, even in the form of ‘Che’ brand cigars and beer.