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Ernesto goes to the movies: The Motorcycle Diaries, brought to the screen by Robert Redford, shows us the young, pre-revolutionary Guevara. Call it soft socialist realism.

Article Excerpt
HE WAS, PER JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, "the most complete human being of our age." Not to be outdone, Susan Sontag eulogized him as "the clearest, most unequivocal image of the humanity of the world-wide revolutionary struggle unfolding today." He, of course, is Ernesto "Che" Guevara, although the key word in Sontag's formulation is neither "humanity" nor "revolutionary" but "image."

You could find that image at the heart of the Montreal Museum of Fine Art's recent show Global Village: The 1960s, on the wall of a room provocatively called "Disorder." The image graced the posters used to advertise the show, and it was reproduced ad infinitum in the museum gift shop, amply (and ironically?) stocked with all manner of Che Guevara tchotchkes. Is it Che who gives the lost world and failed aspirations of the 1960s a human face?

Che Guevara's posthumous role as an icon and fashion statement has now lasted twice as long as his political career. Born to a left-wing, upper-middle-class family in Rosario, Argentina, in 1928 (the same year as international icon Mickey Mouse and ultimate iconographer Andy Warhol), he was an international political celebrity before he turned 32, slyly smiling on the cover of Time magazine in August 1960, flanked by subsidiary images of powerhouses Nikita Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung. That same summer, Cuban photographer Alberto Korda snapped a more flattering portrait of El Che, long hair topped by a perfectly placed black beret and flowing in the winds of change, gaze...

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