Thirty-eight years after Ernesto "Che" Guevara's death, the revolutionary and his familiar black beret, solemn face and burning eyes remain a surprisingly resilient fashion statement, reports the New Jersey Record.
Guevara's image, as drawn by illustrator Alberto Korda, still appears on caps, T-shirts, posters, key rings, books and documentaries. But his status as a cultural icon has grown even bigger after the release of the 2004 film about a young Guevara: "The Motorcycle Diaries."
Which is perplexing to those who knew the man - or simply know what he did.
In contrast with the image of the idealistic Latin American revolutionary leader, the Argentine guerrilla fighter was a cold-blooded killer - the man who ran Fidel Castro's firing squads.
"There is something wrong with a society in which people wear shirts with the image of someone who preached hatred and enjoyed killing," Armando Alvarez, a Cuban exile who now resides in West New York, told the paper.
Increasingly, when young people wear clothes bearing Guevara's image, the paper reports, Cuban Americans who survived dictator Fidel Castro's revolution get angry - and tell the fashionistas exactly what they think of Che Guevara.
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One example is 73-year-old Carlos Barberia, who recounts waiting for a bus in New Jersey when he spotted a Guevara T-shirt on a sidewalk rack. He bought the shirt - and promptly set it on fire with a burning newspaper.
"Che Guevara killed my father," he told a police officer, explaining his outburst. "He had my father shot by a firing squad in Cuba."
Thankfully, the officer seemed to understand and let Barberia go, he says.
Cuban exile Teresa Dovalpage, a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, wrote an entire book - "A Girl Like Che Guevara -to "exorcise the omnipresent Che ghost." When she arrived in the United States in 1996, she remembers being perplexed by the Che's ubiquitous image on college campuses, trendy city streets and elsewhere.
But even writing the book produced no real answers to explain the Che phenomenon. "What makes a 37-year-dead Argentine guerrilla so appealing to today's Americans?" she asked in a recent opinion piece. "Frankly, I don't get it."
Jorge Posadas, a Mexican American owner of a trendy New Jersey boutique that sells Guevara paraphernalia, dismisses the controversy, saying most young people wear the shirts for their fashion value - not the political message.
"They tell me he was an assassin and I tell them that was his problem and I don't care," he says. "I tell them this is a store, not a political party or a government, and that I sell whatever people want to buy."
He even told The Record that if his clients were interested in Osama bin Laden shirts, he would sell them, too.
When the paper asked Cuban Americans about the Guevara fans, many of the older exiles described them as "useful fools" - a Communist term describing gullible people who conveniently fall for the romantic appeal of leftist propaganda.
"It's like wearing a Hitler shirt," said Alvarez. "Che always said that to be a good revolutionary, you had to hate. And so when they wear the image of Che, they wear the image of hatred."
Carlos Barberia, a popular bandleader in Cuba and in the U.S., told the paper about how he came to hate Guevara. It happened the day he was invited to watch the guerrilla's firing squads shoot four "counter-revolutionaries" while he and Guevara chomped on steaks.
"They brought four guys out, but when they shot the first one, I got up and I walked away," he told The Record.
Weeks later, when Barberia was warned by a friend that Guevara's people were investigating him, the musician went into hiding. "He knew I was against the regime and he was going to have me arrested," Barberia said.
"When they couldn't find me, they took my father and had him shot."
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