Hasta Siempre Comandante Che Guevara

Seguiremos adelante como junto a ti seguimos y con Cuba te decimos: hasta siempre Comandante.
Aquí se queda la clara, la entrañable transparencia, de tu querida presencia Comandante Che Guevara.

I like El Che because he is my Don Quixote. This is not my line, by the way – I saw it once in an exhibition I’ve seen at the Victoria&Albert about Che as an icon. It was a very enlightening exhibition – I learnt that there was an edition of Magnum ice-cream based on Che Guevara that claimed that the cherries of the ice-cream were being oppressed by the layers of chocolate surrounding them and therefore we had to set them free by eating the said icre-cream. Cherry Guevara, I believe it was called.
This does of course border the ridicule – I’m sure that Che would turn in its noble grave if he had had the opportunity of seeing his name so crudely associated with the selling of candy and the fight for freedom so ridiculed by the comparison with the oppressed cherries. But the ice-cream story does exemplify the commercial icon he has become.
However, his figure and his strong eyes remain as the image of resistance and struggle for what it is right. The Korda photograph (Korda himself bears having his name repeated – he never tried to make money out of his extraordinary photograph because he wanted to honour El Che and only claimed copyright when big corporations like Coca-Cola and Absolut tried to use Guevara’s image to make money) is the image of what happens to you when you have realistic dreams you pursue no matter what. Che Guevara was afflicted by severe asthma and when involved in guerrillas in the middle of nowhere it is extremely hard to find medication to alleviate the cloud that invades your chest and does not let you breathe; still, he persisted. He had children, to whom he wrote letters with the beautiful piece of advice of “do not forget to be good revolutionaries and be kind to your mother”. These are the words of a good man. A man that, when a gun was being pointed at him and death was nigh, said “get on with it, you’re only killing a man”. Ouch.
It is well known that Guevara was not a saint. He was at war. He killed and got killed. But to me that does not change the fact that he was a good man on the right side of history. And I personally get comfort out of knowing there was and are people like that around because when everything else falls apart or fades away (and so many, many things in our life sadly do), this remains - la querida presencia d’el Comandante Che Guevara (and others like him).