20 April 2009 | 8:10 pm
6 Comments
This one still hasn’t sunk in:
The New York Times lead book critic, Michiko Kakutani, has given Che’s Afterlife a very favorable review.
Ms. Kakutani is not always so kind to authors: No less figures than Norman Mailer and Salman Rushdie have complained about the harsh line she sometimes takes. So it is enormously satisfying to read her calling my book “fascinating” and “bracing and keenly observed,” while noting that “it is a book that is not only a cultural history of an image, but also a sociopolitical study of the mechanisms of fame.”
Peter Byrne said, April 4,2009, 08:55
In Michael Casey’s first chapter, reproduced in the N.Y.Times, I find no reference to Giangicomo Feltrinelli the Italian publisher who reprinted and distrubted the photo of Che widely in Europe in 1967. It was Feltrinelli who found the photo in the photographer’s Havana studio in 1960. Is Feltrinelli mentioned in the subsequent chapters that I have not yet been able to read? If not, why not?
Peter Byrne said, April 4,2009, 08:57
But today is April 21st in my universe.
michael said, April 4,2009, 15:49
Hi Peter,
Firstly, I apologize for not approving this comment earlier. This site is new to me, as is the habit of checking its email account for outstanding issues. I’ll try to be more prompt in the future.
As for Feltrinelli, there is a great deal of material about him in Chapter 5 - a fascinating and very important character in the story of the image. However, it is not correct to say that he discovered it.
He was indeed one of the first people to take it out of Cuba after obtaining it from Korda in his studio (in 1967, not 1960 - seven years after the photo was taken), and for many years it was thought that until he did so, the photo had never been published. Recent research, however, including some of my own, has shown that that story - one fashioned by Korda himself - is inaccurate. There were numerous low-profile appearances in Cuba in the interim years between the photo being taken and Che’s death, which was the moment in which Feltrinelli turned it into a poster. And in August 1967, it appeared in Paris Match magazine, two months before Che’s death and Feltrinelli’s poster. Still, Feltrinelli - who died his own violent death in 1972 as a result of his efforts to foment revolution - was one of the many interesting characters who played catalytic roles in creating the Che phenomeon.
Thanks for your interest in my book.
Regards, Michael
michael said, April 4,2009, 15:49
And I’ll see what to do about that strange date confusion in the comments.
Darrel Couturier said, April 4,2009, 01:02
In one of the interviews I conducted in Havana, with photographer Roberto Salas for the making of the feature documentary “Chevolution,” he spoke of seeing Korda’s image in Viet Nam in 1965. For this particular image to have made it to Asia at that time only indicates that by then it had already acquired some status.
michael said, April 4,2009, 14:52
Thanks Darrel. I make a brief, fleeting reference to Salas’ Vietnam sighting - without more evidence I could not give it the weight that it may well deserve. But I think it’s highly possible that it did make it to Vietnam somehow, perhaps carried by one of the Viet Cong soldiers who were feted by Fidel in those days - and yes, that would suggest it was already imbued with some significance. The fact that I recognize that possibility is a testament to the work that people like yourself, Trisha Ziff and Rey Almira have done in discovering all the pre-1967 publications, discoveries that have unraveled the myth of its seven-and-a-half-year hiatus in Korda’s studio.
I’m of the opinion, however, that the promotion of the image and of Che as an iconic symbol of the Cuban Revolution in general moved to another level in mid-1967, months before his death in Bolivia. It was visible at two key international events in Havana at that time in which Fidel was trying to revamp Cuba’s image as a sexy, revolutionary state (perhaps to mask the truth of its more conservative shift into tighter Soviet control): the Salon de Mayo artists festival and the OLAS gathering of socialist organizations. And, as you know, in the caption to the August ‘67 Paris Match appearance, Guy Larteguy called it the “official” image of Che. Fidel Castro played a big hand in preparing the way for the Che image’s explosive arrival onto the world stage after October 1697.