Michael Casey | The Image Mirror

Moving a family from one hemisphere to another is a time-consuming exercise.

But that’s a poor excuse for the long hiatus in updates to the blog. I think it’s best that I publicly acknowledge the influence of one of my favorite Aussie bumper stickers. In bold, colorful, all-caps, it read “PROCRASTINATE NOW!”

So, without further ado…Live from New York, it’s … The Image Mirror?

It’s funny how the world continued to go on without me or my blog during these past two months - including, it seems, book reviews. Some of the more notable ones to weigh in on Che were The Nation, The L.A. Times, Curled Up With a Good Book, The Learned Fan Girl. Mostly good, I’m very happy to say.

One review, however, begs comment. But before I do, a warning: Writers who tell you they are happy to read criticism of their work are lying.

Anyway, I was oddly satisfied to find Maurice Isserman’s review at The Nation segue from a mostly very positive analysis into a critique of my dehistoricizing of Che. Besides the fact that he misses the whole point of the book – i.e. the central premise that it’s possible to view Che not as a historical figure but as a socially-constructed icon – I can at least now feel confident that I’ve been hit from both the right and the left. I was worried there for a while. All I had was Roger Noriega and the loonies in Miami to go on. Would I forever be labeled as a commie Che lover? Now at least I’m also a guy who – unavoidably, apparently, due to his business journalism background – is “overly enamored with the language of advertising and consumption.” As proof of how I’ve purged the distorted image presented by Noriega et al, I can now happily report that one poor, misguided conservative has defended me against Isserman by – wrongly, of course – describing my work as an “anti-Che book.” A golden rule of journalism holds that if you’ve pissed off both sides you’ve done your job. I hope that means I can rest easy.

REBRANDING AMERICA

Credit: W+K12 ad, Wieden + Kennedy

Paper Magazine has published 15 eye-catching contributions from advertisers to a project it called Rebranding America, all of which are laid out here at Adweek mag’s AdFreak blog. Before I give them my thumbs up, a caveat: The admen who delivered them are among the most influential and well-paid in the country. As a true believer, I like the way the “Obama-equals-hope” concept is conveyed - even by the somewhat disturbing image of the Statue of Liberty giving birth to our new President - but I am not so naive as to view these graphics as pure expressions from the heart. I know that Saatchi & Saatchi, to name one of the participating agencies, would not turn down a multimillion-dollar contract from the GOP, for example. (In fact, whereas the Paper Mag proposal is really just a bit of hypothetical fun, the Republicans are openly rebranding themselves, although that effort is so far focused solely on diminishing the formidable brand of its primary competitor.) These ad agents are businessmen, not politicians - and so it should be. So yes, this is mostly a shallow exercise in showing off Madison Avenue’s cleverest rather than a serious effort to promote a new America.

But now let me ride to the admen’s defense. To me, the backlash against these “ads,” as found in the lengthy comment sections below AdFreak’s image display, and separately in response to its article on the same, is way overblown. I’m not bothered by the sadly predictable tit-for-tat between someone called “L NINO” and another using the moniker of - wait for it - “Che was a homicidal maniac,” but by the more serious analysis of the ads themselves. I can’t disagree more with “Cookiepuss,” who argued that there is no worse way to rebrand something than to say “we used to suck but we’re so much better now.” That might be so for most commercial brands, but in this case recognizing recent failures is an unavoidable necessity. There is no getting around the fact that Obama’s election was so warmly welcomed by the rest of the world because of what preceded him. Justified or not, non-Americans utterly loathed George W. Bush and what he stood for. Any attempt to rebrand America – whether in an intellectual exercise such as this one or a real, full-blown PR strategy hatched in Washington – must deal with that fact. And these mock ads do so with great eloquence.

Below, with Alex Bogusky’s mixing of Korda’s image of Che with Shepard Fairey’s of Obama, we find the most provocative offering of the lot, and not just because it was certain to get a rise out of “Che was a homicidal maniac” and his ilk. Comment posters are apt to ask what the political message is here. Is it that Obama offers a peaceful solution to the problems that Che sought to resolve through violence? Does it speak to U.S. hopes for rapprochement with Cuba, and with the Latin American left in general? Or, as a kneejerk conservative might have it, is the artist a radical leftist who believes Obama is delivering a communist utopia? (Sad but true: that’s exactly how some would overinterpret this.) But aside from its ambiguous primary message and its capacity to get right-wingers’ knickers in a twist, this “ad” contains a powerful secondary message on the communicative power of cultural icons. It’s a meta-commentary on how the juxtaposition of political icons and images is used to simplify our otherwise complex reality into elegant little stories. In this case it addresses how Obama’s supporters are subsuming an extremely difficult political rejuvenation into a single, appealing representation of the president’s African-American face while the right plays the same simplification game by drawing far-fetched associations between Obama and extreme Marxism. (As readers of my book will know, the same thing happened to Ernesto “Che” Guevara, a complex human being if there ever was one, when his face became a ubiquitous icon and brand.)

Of course I’m biased, but I think Bogusky’s Che-Obama graphic is wonderful. It turns the mirror back on the admen themselves. It forces anyone seeking to “rebrand America” to reflect on iconic images and how they are manipulated for political purposes.

By Alex Bogusky, Crispin Porter + Bogusky

This looks cool: a picture book of 20th century political icons with some introductory text in which Andrew Roberts discusses how manipulated images mess with our minds, how they make us fall in rapture with their subjects. The book is entirely comprised of postcards.

Che is there, of course. Who else would be on the cover? But he’s far from the only one. Says Carolyn Kellogg, who reviewed the little book in the LA Times, “Everyone, it seemed — Hitler, Pope John Paul II, Emperor Haile Selassie — wound up on a postcard” last century.

Incidentally, Kellogg makes reference to my book and to a generally positive review by her colleague , David Ulin, which ran in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday.

Four words that are already becoming a cliche: Obama is a brand.

I like to think I was a bit ahead of the curve on this idea (and, admittedly, I haven’t stopped banging on about it, having most recently hit the issue in the tail end of a CNN interview.) We don’t even need the news from Spain that eight trademark registrations for the name “Obama” are currently pending there to prove we are dealing with a powerful presidential brand. Obama’s political campaign was very early on focused on the persuasive power of images and on the management of a branded concept of packaged ideas, one that encapsulated desirable notions:  “hope,” “progress,” “change.” Inevitably, I hurried to put references to this phenomenon into my book as the Obama juggernaut swept into office before it went to print. And now, as I do interviews promoting the book, I find that the Obama versus Che brand comparison is a question that pops up frequently.

Me? This Obama feelgood stuff makes me feel good. But now I find Chris Hedges warning me against being duped into “Buying Brand Obama” - this from the left, not from the whining right. Hedges is excessively morbid, which I find antithetical to my own excessive optimism - a mere glance at the cover of “War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” will tell you that the seminarian-cum-war correspondent-cum left-wing philosopher is a gloomy guy. But I admire his intellect. He’s an extremely clear-headed thinker with a rich repertoire of philosophical material to draw on. The problem is that he sometimes has too much of that thinking thing going on. In this case, his erudite unraveling of the nature of “pseudo spectacle” in politics go so far as to deny the existence of some fundamental elements of the human condition.

First, we find Hedges confusing the observation that Obama’s appeal is built around a branding strategy with the question of whether or not his policies are moving the country in the direction of true reform. Sure, there are reasons for progressives (myself included) to be skeptical of the Administration’s “progress: Obama is a long way from introducing universal health care and everything from Wall Street’s TARP to the Big Three auto bailout suggests that corporate lobbyists still rule Washington. But the truth is the ingrained structure of American power is such that dismantling it is not only politically difficult, it would be dangerously disruptive to do it in one fell swoop. Change has to come gradually. And for now I’d say that the gradual change is heading in the right direction. But to be sure, the Obama Administration deserves more than 100 days before I, Hedges, or anyone can pass judgment.

Still, an assessment of the Obama record is not what I most want to challenge Hedges on. Rather it is his assumption that images and brands are nothing but vehicles for distorting people’s perceptions of reality. Yes, they are abstractions from reality but, as semioticians habitually remind us, so too are words and language. We all communicate in stories, embellishing ideas so as to tap into our listener’s or our viewer’s emotions. Regular communication, I would argue, always contains a big emotional element in the same way that commercial branding strategies do. (Question: was Hedges’ choice of title for his new book “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” a random decision, without any mind to how it might influence the prospect of the book’s sale?)

Throughout history, images have been the most powerful means of communicating ideas. It starts with cave paintings and moves through the insignia and iconography of ancient religions and tribes to the national flags of the modern era. Just like modern brands, these symbolic images of old reduced something complex and difficult into a simple, appealing concept.  It’s how politics, religion and commerce has always been conducted. Branding is really a fancy new name dreamed up by U.S. business schools for a very, very old practice.

Even more important, I find it offensive to think that by letting my emotions be moved by an image or a brand I am necessarily being conned. Note: Nelson Valdes, another writer who occupies the same zone on the left as Hedges has criticized me (inaccurately) for treating the Cuban Revolution as a brand and for misrepresenting those who support it as dupes of a marketing plot. Not only does this criticism contradict Hedges, both miss the point. And they do so by wrongly assuming that the relationship between an individual and a political brand devalues the person. I can’t disagree more. Much of what makes us human, that which feeds our imagination and allows us to separate ourselves from our “inhuman” earthly existence is tied up in the emotional investment we make in images, art and brands.

This became clear to me when I encountered Jaquelin, a teenager in a destitute Argentine shantytown who told me that the reason she never, ever removed her Che T-shirt was because “he is beautiful” and because “I dream of him, always.” (Read about the encounter in the epilogue to my book, excerpted here.) The Che image - i.e. the Che brand - offers her a chance to escape the drudgery of her harsh daily existence through the refuge of beauty and imagination. More than anything, the Che image gives her hope. She deserves this “luxury” more than anything else I would argue, for to indulge in such imagination is what makes her human. The hope, dreams and imagination inspired by the brands and images that surround us are the foundation upon which humanity is built.

Letting people believe in Obama and the change he represents is a positive thing in its own right. Whether or not the real world still sucks is another matter altogether.

No Caption Needed, a blog connected to a book of the same name on photojournalism and culture, offers some superb insights into how images shape our world. Great pics, sharp analysis, unique insights. By Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites.

http://www.nocaptionneeded.com/

Look at these pages from a feature in the South African magazine Design Times and you get a pretty good idea of how rapidly the current President of the United States’ face has has become a mega-icon. It’s a good sign that a person’s features have been firmly implanted into the public store of pop cultural consciousness when designers start playing with it and morphing into other iconic faces, such as that of Lincoln.

All this - from the Pop Art bleach-out abstractions such as the Shepard Fairey “Hope” poster and its various imitators, to the sixties black resistance aesthetic in others, as well as the folk art imagery that accompanies them -  - are so very reminiscent of the explosion of Cuban and other art that rapidly began to obsess with Che’s face after the Korda image took off in the wake of Guevara’s death in 1967.

And as with the Che phenomenon, it’s very hard to separate the part of the Obama icon that has organically arisen out of the raw enthusiasm of the masses from that which is encouraged through marketing or propaganda. The Che icon was actively promoted by Cuba and its Brand Manager in Chief, Fidel Castro, to paint his “Revolution” with a sexy image that didn’t match its harsh inequitable reality. Give me Obama over Castro (and Guevara, the armed revolutionary) any day, but look at the output from the “Designers for Obama” group, whose work is featured in the Design Times article, and it’s easy to see a parallel in the way that Obama’s image is being “managed.”

CNN DOES CHE

Argentina-based journalist Brian Byrnes put this great video together for CNN based on my presentation at the Buenos Aires Book Fair in April 2009. Check out more of Brian’s work at his site, www.brianbyrnes.com and its accompanying blog, As Belgrano Byrnes.

FLYING PIGS AND OTHER GLOBALIZATION MYTHS…

In the search for the ultimate bad guy in this scary pig flu thing, some pundits are, understandably, taking shots at globalization.

Laura Carlsen from the Center For International Policy is leading the charge. Her argument is an appealing one: Mexico, the NAFTA-sponsored epicenter of globalized production was almost destined to also become the epicenter of a new global disease. These people outline a perfect storm. They blame companies like Smithfield Foods - whose Veracruz-based Carroll Farms hog facility, with its ominous sounding “manure lagoons,” lies in the vicinity of the first cases found in Mexico - for escaping developed world health standards by outsourcing production to the developing world and they point to air travel and increased trade as the reason why diseases hatched in these polluting capitalists’ cesspools are now arriving on our doorsteps. Globalization, it would seem, has made disease-carrying pigs fly.

Now, I’m not going to charge that this theory is wrong. I’m not a scientist and I’ll defer to the experts on whether Smithfield had a hand in this. (The company strongly denies any link, noting that none of its pigs were infected - and it’s not even clear that the outbreak began with a Mexican pig at all.)  Whatever the cause, you can’t argue that increased global interaction has NOT exacerbated this crisis. But if we’re to have a go at poor old, much-maligned globalization, let’s look at the really big picture. There’s a hell of a lot more to globalization than outsourcing pig farms and shifting Spring Break from Florida to Cancun.

First, let’s look at the Mother of all pandemic diseases, the one that is so ingrained in public consciousness seven centuries after it occurred that media outlets immediately reach for it when searching for a metaphor in the swine flu story: the Black Death.

That especially pernicious outbreak of the bubonic plague occurred during the very much unglobalized Middle Ages. And yet it is thought to have traveled from China to Europe, where it wiped out around 75 million people in four years, cutting world population by a fifth. The disease traveled across the world rapidly despite the comparatively fewer global connections. Now, in the 21st century, the reason why we are so far away from repeating such an appalling scenario is, I would argue, the result of globalization’s good side.

Far from blaming Mexico for this outbreak, we should be applauding it for its sensible policy responses, especially the moves taken to limit large gatherings of people, which now appear to be paying off as the rate of case increase encouragingly shows signs of slowing. Such policy response are themselves a product of globalization, of the possibility it offers for a massive, immediately accessible pool of shared knowledge and coordinated international reaction. The World Health Organization is in the eye of the storm right now, but if this scare subsides - which it probably will - the body will rightly deserve applause for the multilateral coordination it has fostered. This too is an outcome of globalization. Margaret Chan’s experience in handling the 1997 bird flu outbreak in Hong Kong and then the SARS scare a few years later represents an invaluable background of experience to bring to the table in this case. If only those 75 million Europeans could have had a Chinese bubonic plague expert at their avail 660 years ago.

In fact, the rise of global quasi-regulatory bodies such as the WHO - and the anti-global capitalism activists’ favorite bogeyman, the World Trade Organization -  is a central element of globalization. It is the expanded reach and application of the international norms and treaties upon which these bodies are founded that has facilitated global capitalism, not the other way around. And when global capitalism - in this case, outsourced pig farming and air travel - creates a problem, these international bodies, these stewards of globalization, step up to the plate. We are of course seeing exactly the same with the G-20 summits and other multilateral efforts to confront the global economic crisis.

Some countries are not sticking with the program, of course. Rather than keeping the lines of communication and human interaction open in the face of this scare, they’re closing their borders. But notably, the only two that have ignored expert opinion that stopping air travel from Mexico would be ineffective against the swine flu scare (and counterproductive to the global economy) are two countries whose governments make a habit of railing against global capitalism: Cuba and Argentina. Coincidentally, both countries have also done a terrible job handling outbreaks of dengue fever in the last two years.

Nowhere has globalization produced better benefits from international knowledge sharing than in the field of medicine. And so it is that we don’t just hope that a vaccine will soon come for this strain of flu. We expect it. The WHO is trying to downplay expectations, warning that a vaccine may take months. A couple of months? But let’s put that into the perspective of 1347, the start of the Black Death. Given that the rate of deaths increased exponentially as the four-year plague dragged on, a vaccine in two months would have reduced the total eventual number by tens of millions.

Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.

Oops. I started an international incident.

For those new to the story, I wrote yesterday about the spectacular overreaction in South Florida to the extremely low-key little presentation of my extremely non-ideological book at the U.S. Embassy’s extremely small authors’ reading booth at the Buenos Aires Book Fair on Friday. Far from being a big taxpayer-funded “forum” on Guevara, as some readers of the Miami Herald saw it, the embassy just provided the space for two separate 2o-minute reading and discussion sessions. I provided the vocal chords.  I was one of many other U.S.-associated authors who were given a chance to showcase their work to visitors of the fair.

My talk was a little different from the typical book reading, simply because I used a projector and talked about images, icons and myths. But if it was at all provocative it would have been far more so to Argentine lefties, who would not have liked my thesis that Castro manipulated the image of Che to sell a false romantic idea of his revolution, than to right-wingers. And yet now I read that Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Florida congresswoman and longstanding Washington kingmaker for the Cuban-American lobby, has formally complained to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the “deplorable” use of taxpayer funds to “praise Che” during an event that ended up “venerating” a “ruthless murderer.” (Total cost to U.S. taxpayers would by my estimation be about $1.50 - you’d have to pro-rata the three-week lighting cost for the stand for that which was relevant to my 40 minutes in one corner of the stand, so I apologize for not having a more accurate figure available.  As for venerating Che, well, read the book and judge for yourselves.)

Hey, I was just thinking: with pig flu, Afghanistan, the global economic crisis, and all that heavy stuff, maybe Hillary Clinton has better things to do than worry about my book reading. But I might be wrong. And the Congresswoman clearly believes her voters need to be heard on this matter. So to be fair I’ve included her press release in full below. (It is not yet up on her web site.)

But before I go there, a little bit of fun. This shot was taken after Friday’s event at the fair:

Photo by Daniel Garcia.

Here’s the press release.

NEWS

House Foreign Affairs Committee

U.S. House of Representatives

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Ranking Republican

CONTACT:     Brad Goehner, (202) 226-8467, April 27, 2009

Alex Cruz, (202) 225-8200

http://foreignaffairs.republicans.house.gov

For IMMEDIATE Release

Ros-Lehtinen Comments on U.S. Funding of Che Guevara Event

Condemns Use of Taxpayer Funds to Praise Brutal Che

(WASHINGTON) – U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Ranking
Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, commented today on
U.S. sponsorship of a Che Guevara event at the Buenos Aires 35th
International Book Fair this weekend.  Statement by Ros-Lehtinen:

“Che Guevara was a ruthless murderer and enthusiastic enemy of the
United States.  It is incomprehensible that the State Department would
use American taxpayer funds to sponsor an event venerating him.

“Partnered with the Castro brothers, Che directed the execution of
hundreds of Cubans who would not bow to his violent revolutionary
agenda.  But Che had more than Cuban blood on his hands.  His campaign
led to the murder of countless victims throughout Latin America.

“It is bad enough that tyrants throughout the region idolize him and
use him to justify their dictatorial ways.  Now, the U.S. is going to
prop him up as well?

“The U.S. Embassy’s support and funding of this event is deplorable
and goes against the very ideals our country stands for.

“U.S. taxpayer funds are to be used to advance U.S. national security
interests.  Instead, the U.S. Embassy in Argentina is using American
tax dollars to advance the radical agenda of those working feverishly
to threaten regional stability and undermine critical U.S. foreign
policy priorities in the region.

“I have contacted the Secretary of State on this matter and will be
using our Committee’s role in the State Department budget process to
ensure not one more cent goes to fund these types of activities.”

BACKGROUND: On April 24th, the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires sponsored
an event at the Buenos Aires 35th International Book Fair titled “From
Image to Icon: El Che.”  According to reports, this event included two
readings of Che’s Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image, by journalist
Michael Casey.

####

A Reply To Bush’s Latin America Man

Author friends warn me against responding to critical reviews, but this one in the conservative biweekly The National Review is too tempting let pass. It is, after all, the first negative review that Che’s Afterlife has received. (Find links to a string of positive ones here). More important, it was written by Roger Noriega, who during his stint as Bush’s appointment as Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere affairs was a highly polarizing figure in Latin America on account of his close ties to the Cuban-American lobby. It’s hard to allow a man with such conflicts of interests to confidently (and yet completely wrongly) assert that “the author’s own bias [as a Che worshipper] is clear.”

The review also coincided with a story in The Miami Herald about the presentation of my book at the U.S. Embassy’s stand during the Buenos Aires book fair on Friday – a harmless little affair that was spectacularly misinterpreted by the anti-Castro opinionators of South Florida. They saw it as a sign that the Obama Administration was openly promoting Che Guevara’s violent prescriptions for the world. One person who went by the name “Toni” let fly on the The Herald’s web site with this comment: “I can’t believe the US [is] sponsoring one of the worst assassins in the history of Latin America.” I’m quite sure Toni knows that Che was not there in person, in which case it would seem that the “assassin” to whom he refers is me. Now that’s a bad book review! A comment-poster at another widely read Cuban exiles blog called me a “bitch.”

The good news is that I can use this as another moment to investigate the fraught political culture of Miami-Cuban politics and examine how it helps sustain the ire of those on the left who support Castro and revere Che.

Mr. Noriega’s main beef is that I should have written “a valuable history” of a violent thug that detailed his extensive record of killings but that I instead “plumbed the depths of a ubiquitous two-dimensional image — the famous photograph of Guevara by Alberto Korda — and made an exhaustive examination of the origins and propagation of a caricature.”

Well, um, yes. That was the point.

There have been countless books about Ernesto Guevara and I cite many of them in the book to discuss the elements of his life that I believe are relevant to the development of Che’s posthumous iconic status, including frequent references to his violent record and the tragic loss of life among Latin American students who launched failed guerrilla insurgencies in mimicry of him. But, yes, I deliberately chose as my central subject a single photographic image and the reasons why people are drawn to it, not the complex and, indeed, very difficult, problematic life of the man behind it. So apparently my fault lies in the choice of topic. I should have written about what Mr. Noriega wanted me to write about, not what I wanted to write about.

One way to frame my book’s main question is: How did a picture of such a violent man ironically become a stand-in for a range of often pacifistic left-wing ideas and concepts. In pursuing it, I discuss in quite some detail Guevara’s record of violence, attempting to demonstrate how Cuba has distorted the myth of Che. On that and other matters to do with Cuba, Mr. Noriega supposes that I would agree with him that “thanks in large measure to Che Guevara, [it] is not like any other country in Latin America” but that I “prefer” not to go there. This is flat out wrong. He need not have made a supposition about my views on Cuba and Che’s role in its failure: I overtly state it in different parts of the book. More broadly, it has to be said that anyone who believes a book that demonstrates how the Cuban government encouraged and manipulated the myth of Che to patch over its own colossal screw-ups and maltreatment of its citizenry represents an endorsement of that system either gave it an extremely sloppy reading or is deliberately choosing to misrepresent its contents.

Whether the root cause of this flawed review is poor comprehension or deliberate distortion, it was quite probably motivated by the umbrage felt by Mr. Noriega and the Cuban-American lobbyists whose cause he upholds over my admittedly less-than-glowing account of their role in the Che story. (I describe them as foil characters who help burnish the mythical narrative of Che that is absorbed by his supporters.) Mr. Noriega played as big a part as any in giving the Latin American left stuff to be passionately angry about: In 1996, when he was working as a senior aide to Senator Jesse Helms, he helped draft the notorious Helms-Burton Act, an excessive piece of anti-Cuba legislation that did nothing but reward Fidel Castro with a tool for propaganda and thus probably did more than anything else to help in overcome the resentment that was building against his regime in Cuba in the chaos after the fall of its Soviet benefactor.

Like other tribes who feel under threat from a reviled “other” and who resent the lack of sympathy for their cause – orthodox Jewish settlers in the West Bank, for example, or the Serbs – hardline anti-Castroites in the Cuban-American community are so caught up in how they have been wronged that they fail to see how their own extremist actions are negatively perceived by others and provoke an ongoing backlash. Cuban exiles collectively share a long, sad story of loss – loss of loved ones, of property, of homeland – and many have accounts of suffering at the hands of Che Guevara himself. But as I point out in the book, they struggle to have these stories heard because they are drowned out by accounts of all the violence and corruption associated with the community’s political leaders over the past 50 years.

The vast majority of Cuban-Americans are decent, hardworking, peace-loving people. But they are not the ones who make the headlines. It’s people like admitted terrorist Luis Posada-Carriles and ex-CIA agent Felix Rodriguez, who was involved in the Bay of Pigs, Che’s execution and the Iran-Contra affair, along with many other Cuban-Americans who engaged in some of the dirtiest work of the Cold War – the Congo mercenary war, the 1976 car bomb that killed former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier in D.C., and the Watergate break in – who have unfortunately become its poster children. Sadly, that record diminishes outsiders’ capacity to reflect on the very real injustices suffered by this proud community.

My point – highlighted in a remark to Miami Herald reporter Vinod Sreeharsha about how Miami’s hyper-passionate “freedom fighters” often sound a lot like Che fanatics, and which riled readers of a prominent anti-Castro blog on Saturday – is that both sides in the tiresome left-versus-right Cuba conflict exploit distorted versions of the truth to discredit the other’s claims to own it. Mr. Noriega takes offense at my use of quotation marks around the word “true” to qualify the accounts that Cuban-Americans give of Guevara’s violent record. But rather than being “sneer quotes” as he would have it, this was to reflect the extremely wide-ranging estimates that these people use in tallying the number of lives that the Argentine revolutionary took and their treatment of intrinsically dubious information as if it were irrefutable fact. Case in point: Humberto Fontova and other Che iconoclasts’ claim that Guevara cowardly appealed to his Bolivian captors to spare him because he was “worth more to them alive than dead.” The third-hand source of those words can hardly be trusted: they were recounted in a press conference by officers from the Bolivian high command, men who were not present at the moment of Che’s capture and who days later would be shown to have made a clumsy, devastating lie that Guevara had died of his battle wounds and not in the cold-blooded, point-blank execution that they ordered. At the same time, I go to great lengths to show how the left, which goes to the other extreme and puts heroic dying words into Che’s mouth – “Shoot coward, you are only going to kill a man” – is equally capable of arguing their political position with the aid of apocryphal stories.

In her cutting-edge work on the two Cubas, Ann Louise Bardach has demonstrated that the cross-Florida Strait battle has the dynamics of a bitter family feud, an acrimonious divorce in which each side feels so passionately about the other’s flaws that they can’t step back and recognize their own role in perpetuating the fight. (One might have hoped, however, that a former senior member of the U.S. government like Mr. Noriega would be capable of just a little self-reflection.) To fix the Cuba problem, gestures of magnanimity are needed. Nothing big: no total cave-in to Castro, merely an attempt to understand why the left, however deluded it might be, continues to hold this negative view of the Miami “gusanos” and why Che, as a contrast to the image they represent, is so appealing to them. (Here, again, I’m talking not about the appeal of the real Ernesto Guevara, but of the idealized, myth-enriched story of a man who sticks to his convictions and dies a martyr fighting for a just cause.)

Obama is at least trying to learn from the other side and see things, however modestly, from their point of view. But some of those in Miami now attacking my book see such gestures, absurdly, as a move toward Castro-like totalitarianism in the U.S. It’s a pity that a group of Americans with the most to gain from a thaw in the bilateral relationship are so determined to keep it in the freezer

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.”

THE VULTURES ARE A CIRCLING, BUENOS AIRES

I found this picture on a site that contained some wonderful photos of Buenos Aires, the city I live in, which despite being a bit rough around the edges, retains much of its former architectural glory. Compared with the rest of the site’s rather large portfolio of appealing images, a collection that photographer Gastohn Barrios put together to show visitors “why I love [this city] so much,” this one is different.  But it has me wondering: is it the choice of foreground, the wing-like portion of a bronze statue in the plaza facing the Congress, that makes me see the birds in the sky as vultures, or is it my own point of view, one that’s informed by my journalistic immersion in Argentina’s brutal political culture? Most likely, the birds are simply pigeons and are within a relatively short distance from the camera. But that’s not what I see: I see vultures circling high above the Congress. We view images with a consciousness shaped by our previous thoughts and experiences.

The date on the web site suggests Barrios took this shot before October 9, 2004, and yet with my reading it becomes a clear comment on the country’s forthcoming legislative elections. In preparation for the June vote, with the local economy falling precipitously into yet another crisis, the government-allied majority is pulling out all the Machiavellian tricks in the book to save itself. And still the prognosis for their survival is not good. If the ruling party loses control, as some polls suggest, it could also sound the death knell for the populist, scandal-prone administration of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and the political career of her husband, ex-President Nestor Kirchner. The vultures in the opposition, by no means a dignified flock of birds, are hungrily waiting…

COUNTRY PUNK, BORGES POETRY, CASEY ON CHE - THE SILVER CHAIR PODCAST

Check out this podcast from the quirkily enticing Silver Chair online bookstore, which intersperses alternative country band the Waco Brothers with a Borges poem and a comprehensive interview on all things Che with yours truly. Now there’s some odd bedfellows for you:

Silver Chair Podcast 04-16-09

CUBA AND THE BATTLE OF THE BRANDS

The Obama Administration’s modest lifting of sanctions on Cuba – ending a ban on Cuban-American travel and smoothing the way for telecommunications links – is best viewed as a marketing maneuver.

In terms of substance, it was thin. In letting Americans of Cuban descent – but not anyone else – visit the island, Obama had taken “just one step” toward improving bilateral relations, said Reuters. And as The Wall Street Journal noted, permitting U.S. telecoms to pursue links with Cuba would be “mostly symbolic,” at least for as long as Havana continues to limit incoming satellite, radio and fiber-optic traffic.

But as The Times wrote, although the move eased relations “only a crack,” it nonetheless constituted “the most significant shift in United States policy toward Cuba in decades.” That such a minimal change can be described so effusively in part reflects what economists call “coming off a low base” - the preceding, Cuban-American dictated policy posture was so rigid that any move in the opposite direction stands out. But it’s also because the endless trans-Florida Strait battle has long been defined by symbols. It’s a battle of brands, and Obama has just fired a salvo in it.

For years, Fidel Castro – and now his brother Raul – have made mileage out painting the U.S. as a heartless bully more interested in the narrow demands of a minority in Miami than in the well being of Cubans on the island. With its disingenuous sanctions, the U.S. has turned itself into a foil character in the Cuban Revolution’s myth-laden narrative, a story in which an heroic underdog stands up to an evil empire and with which the Castro regime builds a positive image, a marketable brand. But the truth is, it’s a constant struggle to prevent that idealized picture from being tarnished by the harsh reality of Cuba’s inequitable dual currency regime and its failed hybrid socialist-capitalist economy. The Cuban Revolution’s brand cannot stand on its achievements; it relies almost entirely on differentiating itself from its principal competitor. No wonder Cuban news agency Prensa Latina was quick to remind people in a statement attributed to the ailing Fidel Castro that Obama had said “not a word” about the “harshest of measures: the blockade.” (Official Cuban parlance prefers this militaristic depiction of the U.S. trade embargo.)

So, now, with this small change, Obama is following Cuba’s own strategy. He is fighting symbolic fire with symbolic fire. In the information age, gestures like this have the potential for great effect, albeit over time. They can ease deeply ingrained negative opinions of the U.S., not only in Cuba but in Latin America more broadly. As Richard Walden wrote in the Huffington Post, Cuba policy reform is “low-hanging fruit” for Obama – with popular opinion in the U.S. now strongly in favor, he has little to lose politically and much to gain.

What’s more, the target market for this tweak in the U.S. branding strategy goes far beyond 10 million Cubans. It encompasses 570 million Latin Americans. And by that standard, it has so far been a success. The announcement made front page news across Latin America Tuesday. Silvia Pisani of La Nacion in Argentina called it a “gesture for the region,” while Crítica, another Argentine daily, ran a doctored picture of Obama decked out in a beret with a red star under a red font, large-cap banner headline, “REVOLUTION.”

As if it weren’t any clearer that Obama is, like Castro, an adept brand manager, it’s noteworthy that he departed from his hitherto hands-on, commander-in-chief approach to news-making to let the relatively junior Dan Restrepo, senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs, announce the policy change. What was Obama doing at this time? Letting himself be photographed playing with the new White House resident, Bo the Portuguese Water dog. Joyful, vibrant images of the adoring pooch running alongside a smiling American president were dutifully picked up by the Latin American press (as well as by the U.S. media).

Still, it is way too early to pronounce a major improvement in the United States’ regional image. Too much negative image-building has been done over the past five decades, a history marked by such PR disasters as Washington’s support for corporate behemoths like United Fruit and Standard Oil, the CIA-backed 1956 Guatemala coup, Kissinger’s ties with South American dictators, the Iran-Contra scandal, and so on.

And Obama doesn’t have the Castro-like luxury of being the only figure dictating how the U.S. brand is perceived. That can pose problems, as was left plainly evident in the competing, above-the-fold story seen in various Mexican newspapers Tuesday: the Mexican Foreign Ministry’s objection to a Burger King campaign in Europe. The TV spot for a new “Texican Whopper” features a tall, cowboy hat-wearing man and a short WWF wrestler figure draped in a Mexican flag, his face covered by a matching mask. Its slogan, “United by Destiny,” seems a blatant whitewashing of Texans’ long, conflicted history with their neighbors across the border. There’s a long way to go.

IT’S TIME TO PLAY SPOT THE PUBLISHING BLOOPER!

       During my book’s meandering journey from manuscript to final edition, an inconsequential but somewhat irksome mistake was inserted into an early draft and then subsequently missed by every single one of the dozens of eyeballs that passed over it before publication. It can be found on the first page of the first chapter. As far as we know, there are no other errors in the book and this is not an invitation to tear the text apart in search of others. But I am interested to find out how many people easily spot this one. 
 

       It’s an immaterial error; it changes nothing in terms of the meaning of the work. I bear no ill will toward the very talented and otherwise extremely thorough team at Vintage for not catching it. After all, they were the ones who ultimately alerted me to it, not the various reviewers or numerous other outsiders who have since read the book. And of course I also never caught it. In fact, I’m indulging myself in regarding our collective failure to spot this flaw in terms of a key theme of Che’s Afterlife. One could argue that it reflects the same thought processes through which human societies create idealized icons like Che’s. In focusing on the elegant essence of a broader idea - on the big picture instead of the minutiae - whole communities become blind to the imperfections of the reality behind it. To put a twist on a common expression, we often miss the trees for the forest. So, tell me, who can see that felled pine within the lovely stand of conifers on page 25?
 
       Now, the last thing I want is for people to remember this blemish and not the book as a whole. So don’t waste too much valuable reading time in this exercise. There’s no cash prize involved! Still, it might be fun to see whether now, by alerting readers to its presence, I’ve opened their eyes to a flaw that was missed by so many before them. So please let me know whether you can or cannot  find the mistake via email (michaeljcasey@gmail.com) or via private message on Facebook. (This same little social experiment will also run through the Facebook group page for Che’s Afterlife.)  If you do spot it, tell me whether it was obvious to you at first glance or whether it demanded a second or third read. I’ll publish the findings in due time. For those of you who have not yet bought a copy, here’s a great incentive to do so!

ALFONSIN: ARGENTINA’S LATEST MARTYR

It is universally human to remember the recently deceased in positive, idealized terms. Innately reminded of our common mortality at such moments, we incline toward respect and ignore the less favorable elements of the subject’s recently ended life - witness the polite treatment that Richard Nixon received in 1994.

But when the deceased is a public figure who was thought in life by large numbers of people to have possessed desirable qualities, this instinct can push to extremes. More than idealized, the subject becomes idolized. Because their qualities are perceived to have been “lost,” they take on the status of a quasi-martyr even if they die of natural causes late in life, giving rise to a mass emotional release that can pose a powerful challenge to those in power. When this idolized figure is presented in a contrasting light to the government of the day, the regime’s failings are given emphasis, with the effect being that of a foil character. Against an icon of perfection, the administration’s political brand is diminished. And because the deceased is beyond reproach, there is no counterattack strategy available, regardless of how excessive the adoration may have become among the grieving masses.

Such is the dilemma facing the Kirchner regime of Argentina – currently headed by President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, but more precisely embodied in the figure of her husband and predecessor Nestor Kirchner – with the recent death of former President Raúl Alfonsin at age 82, which has prompted a massive outpouring of public grief. Argentine political culture is obsessed with death: national holidays are celebrated on the dates the country’s independence heroes died; one left-wing activist movement calls itself the 26th of July Movement, named for the date on which the beloved Eva (Evita) Peron died in 1952; and of course the country gave the world Che Guevara, the ultimate martyr hero for doomed resistance movements.

As with Guevara’s failed attempts to stir revolution in the Congo and Bolivia, Alfonsin, who in 1983 led Argentina out of the darkness of its seven-year dictatorship, was in many respects a failed President. He was forced to end his term six months early in the midst of a crisis that saw inflation hit 2,500%. But just as Che followers who’ve built an icon around the ideal of a man who had the courage to die for his convictions are blind to his many faults, Alfonsin’s administrative record seemed forgotten, or at least irrelevant, as tens of thousands lined up to pay their respects to him last week. Instead, the focus was entirely on his reputation as an honest politician who treated his opponents with respect and who strived for democracy in its purest form. The very idea is a rarity in modern Argentine politics and, more importantly, stands in stark contrast to the adversarial, blatantly Machiavellian style of the Kirchners.

My colleague Taos Turner weighed in on this issue yesterday, with a blog that was illustrated with a local Noticias magazine cover showing Nestor Kirchner looking down on the body of Alfonsin as it rested in state last week and which bore the headline, “Argentina at the crossroads:”

“[Alfonsin’s] death represents an inflection point for Argentina, potentially a point of no return from which the bitter politics of the past will struggle to survive amid a renewed desire for civility and virtue. The Kirchners, who have delivered some of the most virulent speeches in modern Argentine politics, will now have to think twice about the Argentine appetite for rancor and incrimination. No longer will they so easily be able to engage in their traditionally firebrand accusations against the “oligarchs and coup mongers” who seek to overthrow them.”

Anyone with a connection to Argentina like mine should hope that Taos is right. But whether or not the statement proves true, I would describe the country’s current crossroads a little differently: as that of a ruling power that has reached a tipping point in terms of positive versus negative images. Its balance sheet of symbolic value is in deficit, a situation that’s graphically represented in the Noticias cover photo – the figure of a flawed, failing, dishonest politician juxtaposed against that of a untouchable model of integrity who has already passed to the next life.

During his stewardship of the gangbusters recovery from the 2002 crisis, Nestor Kirchner engendered strong popularity among Argentines, but as the economy soured and he and wife’s approval ratings plummeted, he has resorted to recklessly populist fiscal measures and has deliberately stoked civil conflict, pitting key sectors of society against each other to divide the opposition and force provincial leaders into financial and political dependency on the state. Weighed against the revered former leader, who belonged to the opposition Radical Party, this cynical brand of politics is now a net negative in terms of the political returns for Kirchner’s public image and that of his faction of the Peronist Party.

One should not put the Kirchners in the same camp as the junta that ruled through the Argentine “Dirty War” – Nestor and Cristina have built some of their own image-building strategy on pushing through human rights trial against the “repressors” of that era. But their regime’s legitimacy faces a similar image management problem.

One can think of Alfonsin as the equivalent of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo during the dictatorship. The courageous Mothers, who held weekly vigils in Buenos Aires’s most important public space, sowed the seeds of the generals’ eventual downfall with a ritual that shamed the dictatorship, drew international support for their cause and inspired other Argentines to overcome their fear, until then the military’s most effective weapon. Their genius lay in the aesthetics of the gesture: the Mothers’ white head scarves and peaceful circling of the monument offered an image of honesty and longed-for simplicity - that of a mother in search of her child - and it contrasted starkly with the heartless violence of the generals. It’s this same idea – a clash of symbols – that now bedevils the Kirchners.

Ironically, Hebe Bonafini, the leader of a vociferously left-wing faction of the Mothers is now a key Kirchner ally who shows a remarkable capacity for running against the grain of popular sentiment. She is one of the very few people to have openly criticized Alfonsín since his death and did nothing to boost her public image by doing so. With or without the fiery tongue of Bonafini, and with the Argentine economy sliding into recession, it’s hard to see how the Kirchners can restore their public image-brand in a way that counteracts the differentiating power of their new competitor: the Alfonsin brand.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

By Zanzibar Buck-Buck McFate (Hat tip: Dr. Seuss)

I feel Mrs. McCave’s pain. Even more so, I can relate to her twenty-three sons, each of whom bears the name Dave and whose mother, Dr. Seuss tells us, wishes she’d instead called one of them Bodkin Van Horn, one Hoos-Foos, one Snimm, one Hot-Shot, one Sunny Jim, and so on.

I too carry a fairly common name and have run into identity confusion as a result. This wouldn’t be a problem if I weren’t now trying to establish myself as THE Michael Casey, the one and only author of Che’s Afterlife. I now want to be known as the guy with those unique things to say about how human beings habitually build their own distinctive, personal brands to compete in the information economy. Yet a simple Amazon search will quickly diminish the uniqueness of my own brand, confusing it with those of other writers – with Michael Casey the American poet, for example, or Michael Casey the Australian monk and theologian, or Michael Casey the expert on building codes.

Growing up in Perth, Australia, I thought I merely had an all-round regular name, common enough but far from the ubiquity of, say, “John Smith.” When I moved to Indonesia to live among people called Bambang or Wiwit, this naive view was reinforced. But a move to New York in the mid-1990s changed everything.

It began one day when a colleague at AFX News handed me a list of fund managers as prospective interviewees for a story. And there I saw my name! What’s more, someone had misspelled it. I called the number and from then on a friendship and professional relationship grew, such that I ultimately forgave Micheal Casey, then of Federated Investors, for transposing the ‘a’ and the ‘e’ in our name. I also eventually got over the uncomfortable feeling that I was quoting myself whenever I cited him in my stories.

Then, when I jumped to Dow Jones Newswires, I was told I couldn’t have the standard “name.surname” format for my email address. Another Michael Casey at Dow Jones was using it. The techies added my middle initial to my name, but that didn’t entirely avoid confusion, partly because the other M.C. also has my middle name, John. My namesake, an accountant, would from time to time receive emails either praising him or attacking him for stories he’d never written. Meanwhile, I would occasionally receive financial information I wasn’t supposed to see. I once received a check for $7 million!

Then, one day a letter addressed to Michael Casey from American Express arrived on my desk. I opened the envelope, assuming it was regarding my own Amex card, only to realize too late that it wasn’t meant for Michael Casey of Dow Jones on the 6th floor of the Harborside Center but for Michael Casey of a shipping company on the 4th floor. I called its switch and when I was transferred to Michael Casey I was greeted with an Aussie accent. Where was he from? Perth. My hometown!

The accumulation of namesakes didn’t stop when I moved to Argentina in 2003. I started receiving emails from people I’d known in Indonesia, congratulating me on my stories about the Asian tsunami and wondering when I’d moved back to Jakarta. That’s how I learned that another Michael Casey was writing for the Associated Press, the same agency with whom Dow Jones shared an office in Jakarta.

Then, a year ago, a Dublin radio station called to ask for an interview about an article I’d written. Assuming they were referring to an Op-Ed on Cuba I’d written for The Wall Street Journal, I agreed, only to soon discover they had the wrong guy. My caller was looking for the former governor of the Irish Central Bank, who had penned a critique of Wall Street’s faltering banks for The Irish Times.

We are an eclectic bunch, we Michael Casey’s. And we’ve left our mark on the world. One of us is a senior executive at Starbucks. We include an Irish sculptor reputed to be a favorite of Bill and Hilary Clinton as well as a professor at Dartmouth College who composes and teaches music. A Google search on “Michael Casey” will find a magician in North Carolina, a nature photographer in Oregon, a realtor in Connecticut and the owner of an exercise and training equipment company who fell into a rather messy lawsuit with a client. The name belongs to both a well-known fashion designer in New York and an orthopedic surgeon in Knoxville, Tennessee who specializes in sports medicine. It’s borne by one of the world’s leading experts in library science and, at Tarrawarra Abbey in Australia, by a Benedictine monk who lectures on monastic spirituality and is a prolific producer of essays on the subject.

I’m not the only one of us to have picked up on this.

One day, out of the blue, Michael Casey of Winnipeg, Canada, contacted me via Facebook. Intrigued, I befriend him. Immediately, he invited me to join his “Michael Casey’s of the World, World Domination Tour” group. That’s how I came to belong to a 55-strong association of Michael Caseys from far-flung parts of the Irish diaspora – places like Belfast, Melbourne, London, Ottawa and Seoul. The initial flurry of hookups confused the hell out of my other friends, whose news feeds started repeatedly announcing that “Michael Casey and Michael Casey are now friends.” Was it a glitch or had I finally lost my marbles? Perhaps, some mused, I was splitting my personalities, creating different accounts under each and then sharing the mutual affection to artificially boost my self-esteem.

I later discovered that there are various other such Facebook groups — like the one my WSJ colleague Mike Williams belongs to. This phenemenon - that of total strangers discovering and creating international networks of namesakes - is uniquely a function of the Internet age. Only the Net can make us so aware of how widely our names are shared.

This is mostly a good thing, a reminder of how big the world is and how small we are within it. Knowing that there are many, many other Michael Casey’s out there helps keep my inflation-susceptible ego in check.

There is a downside, of course. In sharing my name with a vast virtual community, I am posed with a competitive challenge. As a writer seeking to promote my book, my ideas, myself – in effect, to develop a personal brand – I would clearly be better off with a less common name, one that creates a distinctive, memorable and marketable identity. But I don’t - as I was reminded when I went looking for a domain name and realized early on that Michaelcasey.com was taken long ago. It’s one reason why this blog is called theimagemirror.com.

Still, when I peruse the list of my Facebook “brothers” from the Michael Casey World Domination Tour group, this imagined community gives me a strange sense of empowerment. I see a lot of different faces doing many different things, which simply reinforces the impression of a large, predictably diverse extended family. It’s all in good fun, but sometimes there’s some bonding going on. We close ranks, for example, when outsiders – jealous types, we all agree – post messages on our wall describing our group as “dumb” or worse. We are a tribe, one not so much formed around blood ties but on something that’s potentially as powerful.

After all, the standard answer to the basic self identity question of“Who are you?” is your name. I am Michael Casey. So too are my Facebook friends. Just imagine if we could convert this common belonging into a political or economic force, a new marker of shared identity to replace race, religion, nationalities, football teams and all the other worn-out signifiers of difference and sameness. Then we Michael Casey’s could truly dominate the world.

WALL STREET JOURNAL VIDEO - ARGENTINA

A video a made for The Wall Street Journal’s online site from file footage leftover from some work I did for the Chevolution documentary (see below.) It deals with the opinions of Argentines toward Che. It attracted so many dueling comments from pro- and anti-Che respondents that it became the fourth-most discussed WSJ film on the net.

CHEVOLUTION

The trailer for Trisha Ziff and Luis Lopez’s fabulous documentary. I briefly appear at the very end of the clip. The film includes interviews with better-known commentators who’ve had varying types of associations with the Korda image and the Che phenomenon. These include Antonio Banderas, Gael García Bernal, Gerry Adams, Jon Lee Anderson, Tom Morrell and Shepard Fairey.

PERSONAL CHE

I was not involved in Personal Che, but its filmmakers and I found our paths crossing as we sought out the Che image around the world. It’s another great film, one that captures the rich cultural complexity of the Korda Che icon.

KORDAVISION

Kordavision, Hector Sandoval’s sleek bio on Alberto Korda includes some of the last footage of him before he died, as well as a unique interview with Fidel Castro alongside Korda and three other legends of the Cuban Revolution corps of photographers.

BBC correspondent Daniel Schweimler’s radio piece on Che’s continued influence on Latin American culture for which he interviewed me.

 
The original photo by Alberto Korda, March 5, 1960, showing the profile of Argentine journalist Jorge Massetti to the left and the fronds of a Cuban palm tree to the right. © Estate of Alberto Korda

…Cropped by Korda, the image loses it historical and geographical markers, and becomes El Guerrillero Heroico. © Estate of Alberto Korda

 
…In 1968, Jim Fitzpatrick traces the outline of Korda’s photo. Image courtesy of the artist; © Jim Fitzpatrick, 1968

…Later, in various colored forms but especially in red, Fitzpatrick’s image becomes a hit among protesters in Paris and other hot spots of resistance in the late 1960s. © Jim Fitzpatrick, 1968

…Fitzpatrick’s image becomes the template for countless other knockoffs, including “The Warhol Che”. But Andy did not make this commonly reproduced image. No one knows who did it.

…Cuban artists took to the image with abandon, cranking out Che pop art posters. Whether intentional or not, it’s an association that links Che, the armed warrior, with the freewheeling, free-love spirit of the hippy peace movement. Painting by Raúl Martínez. Collection of El Museo Nacional de Bella Artes, Havana. Image courtesy of the Center for Cuban Studies, New York

…Also by Raúl Martínez, this one typifies many artists’ fixation on different elements of Korda’s image, in this case El Comandante’s star on his beret. Collection of El Museo Nacional de Bella Artes, Havana. Image courtesy of David Kunzle.

…Or, in this one, the focus is on Che’s hair, a classic 60s symbol of freedom. La Boina del Che (Che’s Beret), Rubén Alpizar and Reinerio Tamayo. Image reproduced courtesy of the artists. Photo by Michael Casey

…Artist Paul Davis produced what is thought to be the first reproduction of the image in the United States, in this case for the cover of the political journal Evergreen. Its mimicry of Italian Christian art marks the beginning of another strain of Che art, that which deifies him. Image courtesy of the artist; © Paul Davis

…A later example: this 1996 cover of German magazine, Der Spiegel. Image courtesy of David Kunzle.

…Or for another twist, there’s this reversal of the same idea – comparing Christ to Che – in a U.K. church advertising campaign poster. Image courtesy of The Churches Advertising Network.

…And as the idealized myth of Che becomes distant from the daily reality of a country that is communist in name but which is, for better or worse, increasingly integrated into the global capitalist economy, Cuban artists can’t resist using the image as a commentary on that society. This riff on Warhol and government propaganda is by Cuban Alfredo Manzo Cedeño. From Michael Casey’s personal collection.

A hand-painted “piquetero” flag among political banners at a rally organized by supporters of President Nestor Kirchner in Argentina, May 2006. Photo by Michael Casey

The ubiquitous red Che flag at a March 2007 rally to commemorate the Argentine military coup of 1976. Photo by Michael Casey

The same flag at the same March 2007 rally accompanies a sheet of photos and names of Argentina’s “disappeared” carried by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Photo by Michael Casey

Murga dance troupe leader Gustavo Alonso shows his allegiance to Che. The words on his drum are taken from a famous Guevara phrase: “Trembling with indignation over any injustice committed.” Photo by Michael Casey

Activist youths from Argentina’s Jovenes de Pie movement. The banners contains another famous Che phrase: “I am not a liberator; liberators do not exist. It is the people who liberate themselves.” Photo by Natalie Brady; © Natalie Brady/Faction Films

Boy in an Buenos Aires slum, one of the Jovenes de Pie banners behind him. Photo by Natalie Brady; © Natalie Brady/Faction Films

Visitors from around Latin America attended a rally in Vallegrande, Bolivia, on October 9, 2007 for the 40th anniversary of Che’s death in nearby La Higuera. Photo by Josefina Tommasi.

Cuban doctors seconded to Bolivia at the annual October 8 Che anniversary in La Higuera. Photo by Michael Casey

For some people, the expression “Be Like Che” applies to the physical appearance, too. Like Elvis impersonators flocking to Graceland, Che lookalikes can be found at the annual anniversary of Guevara’s death in La Higuera.

Plastic flower arrangement and calling card for a Che Guevara cultural center for children in Samaipata, Bolivia, are placed on the Vallegrande hospital laundry room wash basin. It’s the site where Che’s body lay after he was executed on October 9, 1967. Photo by Josefina Tommasi.

A Che stencil alongside those of Bolivian President Evo Morale (right) and unidentified politician (center) on a political mural in La Paz, Bolivia. Photo by Michael Casey

A Venezuelan woman at a rally in favor of President Hugo Chavez, Caracas. Her “Fantastic Four of the Revolution” T-shirt shows the images of Símon Bolivar, Chavez, Che and Fidel Castro. Photo by Michael Casey

The idealized myth of Che Guevara and his unwavering commitment to a cause translate variously into different fields of endeavor, where the icon simply connotes endurance and determination. Here, a mountain climber at the summit of Mt. Fuji, Japan, wears the image on his sleeve. Photo by Pablo Bertorello Rodriguez.

For others, Che is a straight symbol of rebellion and freedom. Perhaps that’s why the image appears on this motorcycle in Mauritius. Photo by Anton Bowker-Douglass.

Packaging for a Che Guevara wig sold in Buenos Aires. Photo by Michael Casey.

Condom. Image courtesy of the exhibition “Revolution and Commerce: Portrait of Che Guevara by Alberto Korda,” curator Trisha Ziff.