Che's Photograph

[Rakhmetov]

I found this wiki-entry fascinating because it is the product of many years of painstaking work and research.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrillero_Heroico#cite_note-58

[mosfeld]

This Che photo is very legendary and extremely iconic in the revolutionary movement. However, I think that it overshadows so many other revolutionaries who could be just as iconic. Excluding the five most obvious ones (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao,) here are two examples of overlooked, and even in some areas unknown, icons of the revolutionary communist movement.

Edith Lagos
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_a-rVdV_6fvY/Sfy4_qWqk2I/AAAAAAAAAS4/tNYEbtuUKFo/s400/edith+lagos.jpg

Edith Lagos was, if I remember correctly, the first martyr of the Peruvian PPW. She had been a guerrilla for 3 years, from 16 to 19, before being murdered. Her funeral was attended by 30000 people, half of the town which it was held in. She was generally the most noticeable and iconic member of the PCP up until Guzman's arrest in 1992, where the focus more or less "shifted" to him and the campaign to free him from isolation. Nevertheless, Edith Lagos is still today a very recognizable figure in Peru and this photo is her most recognizable one. A young, "petite" guerrilla with a mysterious gaze could just as well become "t-shirt material" like Che. Outside of Peru, I know that the MIM gave her some credit and named one of their front organizations "Edith Lagos Brigade".

Ibrahim Kaypakkaya
http://www.kaypakkaya-partizan.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/kaypakkaya6um.jpg

The Turkish martyred Maoist leader Ibrahim Kaypakkaya, or Ibo as he is affectionately known as, identified Kemalism as fascism (when most pseudo-communists upheld Kemal as a great leader), championed Kurdish national liberation and split from revisionists. When he was captured, it has been reported that he was tortured for months before being executed. In Turkey, like Che, his image is often held aloft at protests as a symbolic martyr. I think that this trend should spread wider.

[Roach]

This Che photo is very legendary and extremely iconic in the revolutionary movement. However, I think that it overshadows so many other revolutionaries who could be just as iconic. Excluding the five most obvious ones (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao,).

I kind of agree with you but, Che's picture does not uphold, by itself, a political line, it is nothing more than a simbol of a vague revolutionary communist identity, a simbol that has become part of the popular imagination, we cannot simply run away from history and presume that everyone will forget it along with us.

Perhaps the biggest legacy of Che Guevara to the communist movement is not his ''foco theory'' but a kind of personification of the revolutionary martydom and all the simbolism involving it, that instead of erasing all others sacrifices made by revolutionaries all over the world, gives them a face in that famous picture.