Clara Anine Svane Olesen

Branding of a Revolutionary

Che Guevarra is a symbol of Revolution, youth, non-conformity, anti-capitalism and anti- imperialism. He was cleverly and strategically branded by Cuba and other Communist states. The symbol has afterwards been used to brand all sorts of products. How is it possible that a picture of a revolutionair obtain such a big global spreading- and to products far away from what he originally stood for?

Che Guevarra was originally a guerilla leader from Argentina who participated in the Cuban revolution, and afterwards became an insider of the Cubanian government. Here he became in charge of the La Cabana Prison. It is estimated that between 156 and 550 people were executed on Guevara´s extra-judicial orders.

He was the architect behind the Government of Cubas close ties to USSR, and it was him that persuated the sovjetic government to place nuclear weapons on Cuba soil. In 1965 he left Cuba to fight in other revolutions, and he was captured and executed by CIA in 1967. http://www.biography.com/people/che-guevara-9322774#meeting-fidel- castrohttp://imaginations.csj.ualberta.ca/?p=2916

When you read Che Guevarras biography, is it certain that he supported violence, and in many ways was a representative for positions and values, that today will be charctezised as terrorism. Therefore it becomes a mystery, how the brand have become an worldwide spread icon. It is an interesting question to understand how this proces has evolved.

Personal Branding

Guillaume Van der Stighelen writes in his book ”Brand Heroes”, what is needed for a person to be branded as a hero; ”… first you need to DO something special. Something that MEANS something to one or more people (…) Apart from doing something MEANINGFUL, you need to have a NAME, you need to be easily RECOGNIZABLE, and you need the RIGHT WORDS, so people can tell your story to impress their friends. http://www.slideshare.net/GuillaumeVdS/hero-brand-summary

Dependent on view, Che Guevara fulfill most of these criterias; he has done something special, which for good or for bad has meant a lot to many people. He has a name which is recognizable, he has a dramatic life history, and artists worked on making a picture which could say ”more than a thousand words”.

”Guerrillero Heroico” as an aestetic product In the analysis of the two most famous pictures of Che Guvara, I will place them in a cultural contect; namely in the 1970’ ies more or less revolutionary movements around the world, with an emphasis on the western part of the world. Furthermore I will attempt to analyze formel aspects of the picture and focus on meaning line, surface, form, light and shadow, colors and composition.

Guerillero Herorico, Che Guevara 1960 Havana.

The above photo is shot by the photographer Alberto Korda, and was after a cropping, where Che Guevara became the only person in the picture, the visual start of the iconography of him. It was released internationaly, when Feltrinelli in 1968, the same year Guevara died, published his diary ”Bolivian Biaries” The picture became the cover of the book.

The picture ”Guerilero Heroico” is the most multiplyed and published image in the world. Time magazine placed Che Guevara at the very top of the 100 most influential persons in the 20th century.

The photo shows a broad shouldered man, who looks with a serious gaze out into the future, away from the photographer. There is something military about his positioning, the clothing, not forgetting the military hat with the star, that represents the communist fight. It´s a guerilla fighter that look good, even though his hair is wild and his beard is unshaved.

The photo has been called ”Guerilero Heroico” and has a special story attatched to it, as being smugled out of Cuba, and transported to Europe, where it was published in revolutionary magazines and used as propaganda for marxist revolutions. Since then the distribution of the image has exploded worldwide. The journalists Larson and Lizardo observes that, “The New York Times repeatedly connected Che to Marxist social movements in Europe and the Americas) around this period”(Larson & Lizardo, årstal p428. In the 1960s, a bedroom “without a poster of Che Guevara was hardly furnished at all” (Storey 88). More or less revolutionary marxist movements against imperialist dominance and battles for social development ran into a common river, where Korda´s photo became the symbol of the international solidarity.

It was however not only Korda´s photo that represented this melting pot of social unrest and aspiration of solidarity.

The Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick made in 1968 an art piece by editing the photo taken by Alberto Korda. The image shows Che Guevara in an easily readable fashion. Jim Fitzpatrick has produced this image by minimalising the colors, using symbolism intensionally, and made the contrast bigger. Thereby he has created an easily reconizable icon.

When you look at what makes a good brand, it needs elements, that goes beyond the time it´s made in. Color and form must be timeless, and not a product of the trend, that is going on while the image was made.

Jim Fitzpatricks edition Korda´s photo is so strong, because he manages to strengthen its symbolic values. The colors emphasize the history of the picture, the background is a pure red, the marxistic color. The revolutionary hero is significantly contrasted black, with the face in white. It could symbolize his pure dedication. The colors in his name underline this assumption, because the first name, the personal, is white, while the surmane, the revolutionary, is in black. The red color assosiates suspense, energy, passion, lust, desire, movement, speed, strengh, health, power, warm, love, intensity, aggression, danger, fire, blood, war, violence, revolution, excite. All words,that can be connected to Che Guevara.

Jim Fitzpatrick has written about his art piece "I deliberately designed it to breed like rabbits," his way of doing this was to remove the original photograph's shadows and volume to create a stark and emblematic graphic portrait” http://www.jimfitzpatrick.com/che/

The use of ”Guerrillero Heroico” as a deliberate branding-strategy

After the Cuban revolution, Che´s face became synonym with the revolution; he became the communistic hero,that saved Cuba from imperalism. Michael Casey writes in his book ”Che´s Afterlise: The Legacy of an Image” that “Korda´s image launched into public consciousness in Cuba, where it was in effect employed as a logo or brand for Castro’s PR campaign” (93) he points out that, the presence of Cuban doctors in Bolivia in 2006 can be seen as a “re-brand[ing]” effort to portray Cuba “as a source of medicine and education services worldwide” (189).

When the Cuban regime began to use Guerilleo Heroico as a brand, Korda didn´t make copyright of the photo. It was for him against the communistic idea, that everything should be shared equally with no profit motive. Nobody at that time had any idea of how destributed the image eventually would become.

When a brand is commercialiced, it risks repeal it self In 1997 the New York Time publish the article ”From Rebel to Pop Icon”, it seeks to understand and explain what happened to Guerillero Herorico. The spokesperson for the Cuban Mission José Borges says; “We have always been against any commercial use of his image…one thing is to promote his image and his example, and another thing is to use it as a way to get more money” (New York Times C11). In the same article Jim Fleischer of Fischer Skis is interviewed. The Company has used Che Guevarra commercially as part of their brand. He says; “We felt that the Che image – just the icon and not the man’s doings –represented what we wanted: revolution, extreme change” (New York Times C11).

Guerillero Heroico is used in the western part of the world to brand a variation of things. Larson and Lizardo write “Most commentators agree that Che has become a general symbol of various causes and political movements, but here exists wide disagreement and confusion in the literature as to what exactly his image has become a symbol of” (Larson & Lizardo 433) The image has been used in so many curcumstances that nobody is fully able to consume the brand potential of the image.V & A Magazine writes “Since the 1990s, Korda´s Che has been adopted as a style icon. Madonna strikes a Che pose in a beret for the cover of her American Life album (created by trendy Paris design team M/M) They conclude “No one seriously imagines they are attempting to bring about the downfall of capitalism”. (V & A Magazine: 39

When Smirnoff vodka in 2011 launched a Che Guevara vodka, it became too much for the communistic photographer Alberto Korda. He sewed Smirnoff for the use of Guerillero Heroico on the emballage of the vodka and won an out-of-court settlement of about $50,000 which he donated to the cuban medical system.

Branding of a douptfull hero

We can conclude that the brand Che Guevara is a strong aesthetic icon, which simultanious is completely washed out for it´s use as a ideologic symbol for the fight against capitalism and imperalistic supression. Robert Massari, who is an Italian publisher and head of his country’s “Che Guevara Foundation” says; “There are probably forty million in the world who have that image. And if you ask them what it means to them, they’d all have a different answer” (Casey, årstal p336).

A possible explanation for this, is that we WANT heroes. Showing Che Guevara as an attractive, well speaking, young revolutionary, that fought for change was a succes. The use of Che in brand has succeded so amazingly well, because Korda´s strong image, and Jim Fitzpatricks graphic editing, succeded in communicate a clear story about determaínation and engagement. When simplyfing Che Guevaras image they succeded to create an icon, without any gray tones.

In an article in The Guardian in 2006, by Richard Gott, he is problematizing the branding of Che Guevara in all sorts of products; ”Most of those who spot the Che Guevara logo today forget that he was the Osama bin Laden of his time. He believed the US to be the principal menace in the world, and he thought it was the duty of revolutionaries to encompass its destruction”

So the question left is: Is it possible to brand everything? Can Islamic State in 20 years have a branded Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, just because western artists take the image, and distribute it?

If I should publish this article I would send it to http://www.designboom.com.

Litterratur liste:

http://www.on-curating.org/index.php/issue-22-43/aesthetics-of-terror-94.html http://www.information.dk/314893 http://americanaejournal.hu/vol10no1/roberts http://politiken.dk/debat/profiler/christofferemil/ECE1932283/fiduskunst-i-terrorens-tidsalder/ http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/07/cuba

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/12/06/when-conservatives-branded-nelson- mandela-a-terrorist/ http://www.southafrica.info/mandela/46664.htm http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/may/20/nelsonmandela http://www.donvalley.co.za/what-makes-the-nelson-mandela-brand-so-enduring/ http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/12/18/mandela-the-man- isgonebutthefightforhisbrandliveson.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/the-man-and-brand-that-is-nelson-mandela- 8650247.html http://fortune.com/2013/12/06/nelson-mandela-and-the-evolution-of-great-leaders/ http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/01/business/selling-mandela-from-t-shirts-tv/ http://www.denstoredanske.dk/Geografi_og_historie/Afrika/Sydlige_Afrika/Nelson_Rolihlahla_M andela

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7028598.stm http://www.jimfitzpatrick.com/che/ http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/che/brand.htm http://www.slideshare.net/GuillaumeVdS/hero-brand-summary

https://books.google.nl/books?id=ofbbBQAAQBAJ&pg=PT43&lpg=PT43&dq=carlos+latuff+che+ guevara+art&source=bl&ots=bkygtfdY2_&sig=UIYVNI1Pn-knsqTfiUvMAxV- FrM&hl=da&sa=X&ved=0CFIQ6AEwC2oVChMI7- TM2vL2yAIVxrQPCh13dAvo#v=onepage&q&f=false