Photography and the Myth of the Life and Death of Ernesto "Che" Guevara

As a young man, Ernesto Guevara left his home and his family on a motorbike and never came back.

The Cuban photographer Alberto Korda Gutierrez (1928-2001) was the author of what is possibly the most powerful photographic icon of the Cuban revolution. He took the portrait photo of Che Guevara that has since become synonymous with revolutionary idealism in 1960. At the time, he was working as staff photographer for the Cuban newspaper “Revolucion," and had been assigned to cover the ceremony marking the sinking by saboteurs of the Belgian arms transport “La Coubre” in Havana harbour. He was to cover the remembrance ceremony that followed, with guests that included Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. As he was busy shooting pictures of the guests, Guevara made a brief appearance onstage and Korda obtained two head shots of him.

Although the editor of "Revolucion" eventually selected pictures of Fidel for the article, Korda liked the Che pictures and put one of them on the wall in his Havana-studio. Years later, in 1967, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli the Italian publisher renowned in Europe for smuggling the "Dr. Zhivago" manuscript out of The Soviet Union came to Cuba from Bolivia, where he had been negotiating the release of Regis Debray around the time Che Guevara died at the hands of a CIA trained Bolivian army unit. Referred to Korda by the Cuban government, he visited his studio searching for photos of the revolution. Feltrinelli liked the picture of Che Korda had on the wall and asked for copies. As a result, you could buy big posters of Korda’s image of Che Guevara all over the world almost from the time of his death. Korda himself once mentioned that in half a year, Feltrinelli sold 2,ooo,ooo posters, of which he never saw a penny in copyright fees.

Since then the image has been used and abused all over the world, feeding the myth of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, but the world-famous photo by Korda was not the first image of Guevara to appear in the media. Photos and film footage of Fidel, Guevara and some of the other members of the guerrilla battalion of the Sierra Maestra had been distributed by the media before. Together with recordings of their radio transmissions and other memorabilia and objects such as “Granma” the boat that brought Fidel from Mexico to Cuba, which is currently on permanent exhibition in Havana, such images underpin the epic story of the Cuban Revolution.

Korda's picture marks the emergence of a media-myth, a complex icon with the potential to defeat the “preventive medicine” of military repression prescribed at the time by the US government for those South American nations in danger of following Cuba in the path of Marxist revolution.

A myth created by a photo necessitated another photo to be destroyed, or so it was believed at the time. Through Korda's photo, the mythical body of Che Guevara that was firmly branded in the imagination of the left wing politicians and revolutionaries, the “young idealists” of Salvador Allende and so many others, and it could only be defeated by a similarly myth-breaking image, or so it was thought

This was to be the role of the series of photos recording the autopsy of Ernesto “Che” Guevara: to kill the myth by establishing and circulating the fact and details of his death using the same medium.

The photos of the dead body of Guevara, his eyes still open, surrounded by Bolivian rangers and Cuban-American CIA agents.

Among the people surrounding his corpse are forensic experts from Argentina, called in to make death masks, taking dental imprints and cut off his hands in order to establish his identity. These photos sought to provide evidence that “Che” Guevara was dead, killed by the Bolivian government and military forces, with the United States lurking in the shadows.

Did they succeed?

No.

The myth of Che Guevara is still alive and well. Perhaps a little overweight from abuse of marketing, but for true believers, and of these there are many, his bearded figure marches on, together with Bolivar, Manuel Rodriguez, Marti and so many others who once believed, and died. In Cuba, also,the mythical figure of Che Guevara is revered, perhaps more so than that of Fidel, who is near the end of his days, worn out by life and ilness. As a form of narrative, a myth is a story, but a story told about someone who is not there. Fidel Castro is not revered in the same way simply because he is there, but also because he has been there for over 60 years.

In the 1960’s, the CIA tried to kill a photo with a photo, but failed to take into account the sheer power of the myth surrounding the images.

They thought they could reproduce the impact of the heroic image of a man that circulated by word of mouth and through the media among people culturally accustomed to historical icons, founding fathers and popular heroes ("caudillos").

Latin America is a world of images, of lights and shadows, of heroes and villains, of pain and suffering, of joy and music. In such a context, images and word-of-mouth narratives largely define people's sense of what is real and what is not. This tendency towards the visual, even in spoken language, permeates the creole cultures of post-colonial nations not only in Latin America but in Africa and Asia where ruling classes and oligarchs mimic the culture of former colonial masters who despise them, while the true culture of these countries thrives in the margins of society, kept conveniently at bay by both.

Spanish culture and Catholicism were imposed on Native American cultures through the power of images; through exemplars and their local translations, through the destruction and substitution of icons and languages. As a result Latin America, a profoundly Catholic continent is also the heir to a vast tradition of localized Christian imagery in connection with the myth of the death and re-birth of Jesus Christ.

The emergence of the media myth of Che Guevara was largely due to the deployment of a particular image showing his heroic profile. The CIA made a failed attempt to destroy the myth by exposing the stark reality of the death of Guevara’s body through a new series of photos of the events surrounding his capture, execution and autopsy.

One possible explanation for this failure is that, from a strictly formal point of view, the images they used inadvertently touched upon an infinitely more powerful myth: the story of the death of Jesus Christ at the hands of the Roman soldiers.

In the Catholic "hearts and minds" of the people of Latin America this earlier myth far outshone the fabricated myth of the death of Comandante "Che" Guevara and its deployment by US military and political interests.

Korda’s photo and the media images published at the time of the death of Guevara mark the beginning and the end of the life-journey of a mythical hero in the hearts and minds of the people, a myth that is largely defined by the production and circulation of photographic images.

The failed attempt at providing photographic "evidence" of the circumstances surrounding the end of his life's journey failed first of all because the journey has not ended, and secondly because the people saw through the contrived props and parphernalia, recognizing and embracing the hero.

P.B.