The Argentine doctor turned Marxist guerrilla who helped Fidel Castro win the Cuban Revolution, served in its new government and oversaw the revolutionary tribunals and executions at La Cabaña, theorized armed revolution for the whole Third World, died trying to spread it in Bolivia in 1967, and was reborn as one of the most reproduced photographs of the twentieth century — a face that means rebellion to millions, ruthlessness to many others, and money to the companies that sell it.
Che Guevara is the revolutionary who became a T-shirt. An Argentine doctor, he gave up a comfortable life to make revolution across three continents. He helped Fidel Castro seize Cuba, then oversaw the revolutionary tribunals at La Cabaña, where he confirmed the death sentences that sent prisoners to the firing squad. Restless, he left to spread the fight abroad, and in 1967 the Bolivian army, aided by CIA advisers, captured him, and a Bolivian soldier then executed him. Then his face went up on a billion posters and shirts, stripped of his politics, sold for profit. To millions he is a hero and a martyr who died for the world's poor. To many others he was a hardliner who believed in revolutionary violence and built nothing free. Both pictures point at the same man, and the argument between them has never settled.