Che Guevara CD case pulled from shelves Fri Dec 22, 2006 8:53 PM ET
By Michele Gershberg
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Target Corp said on Friday it had pulled a CD carrying case bearing Ernesto "Che" Guevara's image after an outcry by critics who label the Marxist revolutionary a murderer and totalitarian symbol.
Target had touted a music disc carrying case for Che admirers emblazoned with the Argentine-born guerrilla's iconic 1960 portrait by Alberto Diaz, or "Korda." A set of small earphones was superimposed on the image, suggesting he was tuned in to an iPod or other music player.
"It is never our intent to offend any of our guests through the merchandise we carry," Target said in a statement. "We have made the decision to remove this item from our shelves and we sincerely apologize for any discomfort this situation may have caused our guests."
Some business columnists had decried the product, sold under Target's brand, saying the trendy discount chain was giving in to a misguided fashion craze while ignoring Guevara's role in bringing Fidel Castro's Communist rule to Cuba.
"What next? Hitler backpacks? Pol Pot cookware? Pinochet pantyhose?" wrote Investor's Business Daily in an editorial earlier this month, citing the Guevara case as a model of "tyrant-chic".
Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O'Grady said Target made an "admirable decision" to correct the actions of some company employees who "allowed Target to become a target itself of the Che myth."
In a rare moment of accord, some social activists said they were not sorry to see Guevara taken off Target's shelves, but on different grounds.
"Che would just be rolling in his grave if he knew his face was making money for Target," said Nell Greenberg, spokeswoman for San Francisco-based Global Exchange. "Everyone who does support that legacy of social justice is certainly not going to be opposed to stopping Target from using that tool."
Guevara's image is literally stamped into the capitalist consumer society that he died fighting to overturn. His portrait adorns everything from schoolbags to T-shirts and women's lingerie.
The picture of a stern-faced Guevara sporting a beret with a single star was popularized on posters after his 1967 execution in Bolivia, where he tried to foment a Communist uprising. Its place as a symbol of idealistic revolt has held strong in the decades since, from students rioting in Paris in 1968 to Palestinians launching an uprising against Israel in 2000.
For people gift-shopping, Guevara's image is part of a motley of symbols of retro cool that populate flea market stalls and chic designer boutiques.
It has also been used by globally recognized brands. Swatch put Guevara on a wristwatch and Smirnoff vodka featured the picture in an advertising campaign.
Guevara's own family aims to end the industry of Che merchandise, seeking lawsuits against companies they believe exploit his image and undermine his political philosophy.
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Wall Street Journal - December 22, 2006
THE AMERICAS Che, Cuba and Christmas By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
Until yesterday Christmas shoppers at Target department stores could purchase a 24-CD carrying case decorated with the image of Che Guevara. When I heard about it, I wondered why the retailer would want to promote the memory of a mass murderer. What's next, I asked, when I spoke with a representative of the company on Wednesday, Pol Pot pajamas?
Late Wednesday evening Target sent me this statement: "It is never our intent to offend any of our guests through the merchandise we carry. We have made the decision to remove this item from our shelves and we sincerely apologize for any discomfort this situation may have caused our guests."
The fact that it took only a day for Target to make that admirable decision suggests that at least someone at the company knows who Guevara was and what Cuba is today thanks in part to him. The misstep, though, probably occurred because others at the company allowed Target to become a target itself of the Che myth.
Guevara is not just a dead white guy from a well-to-do family who terrorized a racially mixed nation and executed hundreds of innocents in the late 1950s and 1960s. He is also a symbol of the totalitarian regime that persists in Cuba, which still practices his ideology of intolerance, hatred and repression. It is not the torture and killing alone that make the tragedy. That only describes the methodology. Guevara's wider goal -- to forcibly strip a population of its soul and spirit -- is what is truly frightening and deplorable. Christians, who celebrate the birth of their Savior on Monday, have particularly suffered under Guevara's dream of revolution, which has lasted since 1959.
The fear under which Cubans have lived for 48 years was fathered by the merciless Che Guevara. The unhappy Argentine Marxist met Fidel Castro in Mexico in 1955 and later became a rebel commander. "The Black Book of Communism," published in 1999 by Harvard University Press, notes that early in his career Guevara earned a "reputation for ruthlessness; a child in his guerrilla unit who had stolen a little food was immediately shot without trial." In his will, the book says, "this graduate of the school of terror praised the 'extremely useful hatred that turns men into effective, violent, merciless and cold killing machines.'"
Peruvian-born Alvaro Vargas Llosa penned his own book this year titled "The Che Guevara Myth." Mr. Vargas Llosa documents a twisted life, such as when Che shot a comrade and made the following entry in his diary: "I ended the problem with a .32 caliber pistol, in the right side of his brain. . . . His belongings were now mine." After that, Mr. Vargas Llosa says, Guevara shot "a peasant who expressed the desire to leave whenever the rebels moved on." Guevara also liked to simulate executions, as a form of torture. "At every stage of his adult life, his megalomania manifested itself in the predatory urge to take over other people's lives and property, and to abolish their free will."
Guevara was an architect of Cuba's forced labor camps, which by 1965 were transformed into concentration camps for dissidents, homosexuals, people with AIDS, Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Cubans of other religious sects.
All independent thought that refused to worship the communist state was an affront to Guevara. Christians were an especially difficult lot. From the earliest days after Castro took power, Che sent hundreds of men to face firing squads at the Havana prison known as La Cabaña. His victims could be heard at dawn loudly crying "Long live Christ the King, down with communism," just before the rifle shots rang out.
Thousands of Cubans have perished in daring attempts to get off the island because they preferred the risks of flight to a life in which Christianity has been forbidden, children are the property of the state, thought is policed and spying on your neighbor is one of the few ways to earn a living. During the Mariel boat lift in 1980, witnesses told of families arriving at the pier together only to be separated by Cuban guards who enjoyed watching their misery. Weeping mothers faced the point of a gun while their distraught sons and daughters were forced to board ships. This Christmas thousands of Cuban-Americans will remember their loved ones who didn't make it out or died trying.
Defenders of Guevara can't even claim that his cruelty brought about equality. Today state policy makes it a crime for the raggedly dressed, malnourished and mostly black Cuban people to visit the beaches, museums and amply stocked stores of their own country, while well-fed tourists in fashionable cruise-wear go where they like. This amounts to de facto apartheid.
Amazingly, hope is still alive in Cuba. One reason is because although Guevara was able to kill a lot of Christians, neither he nor his successors succeeded in wiping out Christianity. The struggling Christian community, which takes seriously the religious teaching to reject fear in the face of evil, is playing a key role in the island's dissident movement.
An icon of the Christian resistance is Oscar Elias Biscet, a black physician who is serving a 25-year sentence for his peaceful activism against the regime. He has been arrested more than 26 times since he began to express his dissent; he has been beaten, tortured and locked in tiny windowless cells for days on end. Hundreds of other prisoners of conscience are in jail, under atrocious conditions; many are also devout Christians.
The Christian faith has survived Che and Fidel and decades of brainwashing. It is battered but has not been defeated. Raul Castro fears it -- which is why he takes Bibles away from his unbreakable prisoners. The moral of the story seems to be that even the all- powerful regime cannot stop Christmas from coming to Cuba.