By Pablo Daniel Magee *
I was a rather young teenager when I first bought a poster of the Che Guevara. As a French high school rebel in my own right, and, as it was the case for many of my friends back then, exhibiting the figure of this iconic revolutionary seemed appropriate to confirm to anyone who wouldn’t have realized it already, that I was against every value the capitalist system stands for. Of course, at the time, I knew very little about the face hanging on my wall, and much less about the broader meaning of the star showing on his hat. But having him there just seemed like the cool thing to do. In fact, my revolutionary writer of a mother owned two books written about the Che. One was by Jorge G. Castañeda titled The life and death of Che Guevara, and the other by renowned French historian Pierre Kalfon, was soberly called Che. Reading those gave me a much better idea of who the myth was, and somehow comforted me in my choice of a hero, despite all the many disturbing facts I had also read about the Cuban revolution, which caused Jean-Paul Sartre to distance himself from the island, and I did my best to turn a blind eye to. After all: war is war (sic). In my mind back then, the cool thing to do became the right thing to do.