The Quintessential Rebel

The other day, I was watching news about a pro-democracy rally in Hong Kong on the BBC. One of the demonstrators who was ranting and raving through a megaphone caught my eye - not because he had something interesting to say, but because he was wearing a T-shirt with a giant image of Che Guevara.

I'm not sure if the particular demonstrator was fighting for the same ideals that Cuban rebel Che Guevara was. But that black-and-white image of an unshaven youth with wind-swept hair, searching eyes and tilted beret has become a symbol of rebellion and revolution since the sixties. I remember a couple of years back, the photographer who took that picture of Che Guevara finally managed to win back copyright protection of the image which had over the years been considered public domain, and had even been used in a Smirnoff vodka advertisement.

Ernesto Guevara, known affectionately as "Che", was an Argentine doctor who joined Fidel Castro in the overthrow of the American-backed dictator General Batista in Cuba. The movie Havana directed by Sidney Pollack, starring Robert Redford and Lena Olin is set against the backdrop of this revolution. Though universally panned by the critics as a poor immitation of Casablanca, it is one of my favourite movies mainly because it has a good soundtrack and also because - OK I admit - I am a hopeless romantic. There is a scene in the movie where Lena Olin and Robert Redford were confronted by a group of guerilla rebels - not sure if it was intended: one of the rebels was made up to look unmistakably like Che Guevara. Or perhaps it's just that Che's image of a rebel has completely coloured our perception of what a rebel should be like.

Che Guevara became part of Fidel Castro's communist regime and was called by Time Magazine as "Castro's Brain". He was later to help guerilla fighters in other parts of Latin American and even Africa. And like all romantic rebels, he died young at the age of 39 while fighting with the guerillas in Bolivia in the sixties.

Thus his image still lives with us today, together with James Dean and Lord Byron as symbols of youthful idealism and rebellion. That iconic black-and-white image was my only "knowledge" of Che Guevara until I stumbled upon his book, The Motorcycle Diaries a few years back in Singapore. And surprise - it wasn't about politics or revolution but about travelling on a motorcycle, riding up the South American continent for 7 months after his graduation from the university. What a delightful read it was: one is able to share the experiences of a young Che Guevara, bumming around the different countries of South America like a Latin Jack Kerouac.

Never mind that Che was a communist; as the HK demonstrator showed, it is the spirit of rebellion that matters, even if you are demonstrating against Communist China. In his book The Rebel: An Essay of Man in Revolt, the French existentialist writer Albert Camus proclaimed:" I rebel, therefore I am". And no one personifies the spirit more than Che Guevara, the quintessential rebel.