CHICAGO-On 5 March 1960, Alberto Korda Diez was standing near the corner of 23rd and 12th streets in Havana, taking photos for the Cuban daily newspaper Revolucion. The ceremony being held there was in honor of the 75 people that had been killed in Havana harbor the day before. The French freighter La Coubre, carrying arms purchased from Belgium, exploded, killing most aboard and injuring over two hundred people.

"Patria o Muerto [homeland or death]," Fidel Castro exclaimed atop a platform filled with some of the most important leaders of the Cuban revolution. Just as Korda noticed one important figure was missing, the man suddenly appeared from behind the crowded platform, giving Korda enough time to snap off what might be considered one of the most widely reproduced images of the sixties: Che Guevara.

The picture Korda captured can be found everywhere, from album covers to watches, from snowboards to cigars. Che's face can even be found on a can of beer. The nineties have shown that anything or anybody can be of use in the sale of a product, including a man who once referred to money as a "fucking fetish". But despite Che's political and moral convictions, he still makes an excellent salesman, regardless of the product or the market. The very government who ordered his death thirty years ago tried to keep his remains in Vallegrande [Bolivia]--after being discovered under an airstrip there last summer--for a proposed museum.

What has turned this great revolutionary, a man whom philosopher Jean Paul Sartre described as "the most complete human being of our time" into a pop icon, a useful tool to pull in another dollar?

Maybe it is because of such undaunting traits, the very ones that make Che the ultimate "fuck you" hero, coupled with the fact that he died a violent death at a young age, that allow kids to walk down a street with Ernesto Guevara pasted on their thirty-dollar concert shirts without even a vague concept of who the man was.

Or maybe it is because companies can use the likeness of Che in order to somehow separate themselves from other mainstream products that America's youth might consider to be "too commercial" or "played-out. " After all, counter-cultural figures, from Abbie Hoffman to Sub-comandante Marcos, are often born and killed in the lucrative youth market.

Still it is, even in the midst of all this, a pleasant sight to see Che, the great imperialist antagonist, displayed on the bodies of 1950's American children's children.

Biographer John Lee Anderson described Kordas' depiction of Che as ". . . the ultimate revolutionary icon, his eyes seeming to stare boldly into the future, his very face symbolizing a virile embodiment of outrage at social injustice. " But is this description of Kordas' picture still relevant today?

Does Che's stare still represent the same revolutionary values that were an inspiration to millions from Cuba to Cambridge after Guevara's death? Can it represent these values despite the extensive and sometimes-ridiculous uses of this image--including my own desire to permanently etch this image into my right forearm?

Without question. Claro que sí.

For a picture to endure three decades of pop culture status, eight presidents-one Cuba!--and still maintain its original impact, is a testimony not only to the life of Che Guevara, but to the very people who remember the ideas for which he was readily willing to sacrifice his life. These people recognize in Che a still-relevant example of courage and self-sacrifice for one ideal: human dignity.

"I feel the pain, the misery, any pain, any misery profoundly," Che said, always maintaining that "A revolutionary is motivated by love and not by hate. "

Down in the Vallegrande post office--written on its wall, some fifty yards from where he was summarily executed--lies a summation, perhaps adequate.

It reads: "Che, alive as they never wanted you to be. "

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