Visit the Museo de la Revolución in central Havana, and two things about the museum’s photo displays will immediately capture your attention. First, it’s clear that the battle to control Cuba in the late 1950s was ultimately won by the cool guys. Young, bearded and ruggedly handsome, the rebel warriors of Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement look like Beat hipsters and rock stars—Fidel tall and imposing in his fatigues; Camillo Cienfuegos grinning under his broad-brimmed cowboy hat; Ernesto “Che” Guevara looking smolderingly photogenic in his black beret. By contrast, the U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista and his cronies look bloated, balding and unquestionably corrupt in their stubby neckties and damp armpits and oversized paunches. Even without reading the captions, it’s easy to discern the heroes from the villains.
Look closer, however, and you’ll notice that the triumphant photos of Fidel and Che are faded and mildewed, their corners curled by age and humidity. The photo captions are spelled out in a clunky die-cast typeset that hasn’t been used in a generation, and contain glowing present-tense references to the magnanimity of the Soviet Union—a country that hasn’t existed since 1991. Despite the grungy glamour of the young men who toppled a tyrant all those years ago, the anachronism and decay of the museum’s exhibits reveal just how tired and toothless Cuba’s revolutionary myths have become in Havana. In many ways, the building is a museum of a museum—a yellowing relic of how the communist regime chose to portray itself in the 1970s.
Step outside the Museo de la Revolución into the humid Havana air, and the glamorous sheen of the bygone Cuban revolution seems to have been distilled into a single image—Alberto Korda’s famous 1960 photo of a bearded Che Guevara looking steely and determined in his beret. In a city where few buildings outside the restored Habana Vieja district have seen a new coat of paint in half a century, freshly retouched renderings of Che’s mug adorn countless walls and billboards. Moreover, in a country largely devoid of public advertising and religious iconography, Guevara’s ubiquitous image appears to fill the role of both Jesus Christ and Ronald McDonald—a sainted martyr of unwavering purity who also happens to promote a meticulously standardized (if not particularly nutritious) political menu.
Study the life of Che Guevara and a complicated portrait emerges. Raised by old-money bohemian parents in Argentina, young Ernesto struggled with asthma, read voraciously, studied medicine and became inspired to help the world’s poor after vagabonding through the Americas in his early 20s. Falling in with Fidel and Raul Castro in Mexico, he played a heroic role in the Cuban insurgency that eventually brought down one of the most spectacularly corrupt regimes in the history of Latin America. As he worked with Fidel to consolidate the revolution, Che displayed incredible physical and intellectual energy, an unyielding (if rather creepy and totalitarian) idealism and a consistent inability to see any project through to a successful completion. Guevara’s stint as minister of industry and president of the national bank crippled the Cuban economy and resulted in food rationing; his rigid Marxist-Leninist fantasies helped derail the revolution’s original democratic-socialist inclinations and led to Cuba’s dependence on the Soviet Union; his inability to recruit and organize the very peasants he meant to liberate led to a series of disastrous guerrilla adventures in Africa and Latin America, ultimately resulting in his capture and execution in Bolivia. Fortunately for his legacy, he left a beautiful corpse (quite literally, as photographed by his killers), and he’s been an icon of revolutionary romanticism ever since.
Interestingly, Che’s legacy inspires some of the least street-level romanticism within the country he influenced the most. I recently spent a month in Cuba, and—despite the surplus of government-issued Che images along the avenues of Havana—I rarely met Cubans under the age of 40 who regarded Guevara with anything other than ambivalence. Whereas outsiders see Guevara as a symbol of rebellion, two generations of Cuban children have been required to bleat “Seremos como el Che!” (“We will be like Che!”) at the outset of each school day. Most people I spoke with were proud to be Cuban and could intellectualize the historical merits of the revolution (and Guevara’s role in it), but they were less concerned with emulating Che than navigating the absurd challenges of day-to-day life in a repressive, dysfunctional gerontocracy.
Indeed, to get a sense for what it’s like to be 18 and Cuban these days, imagine going to a high school that won a miraculous and inspiring football championship in 1959. The guy that quarterbacked the team some 50 years ago is still wearing the same damned uniform—only now he’s the school principal, and he’s decreed that all academic subjects must be studied within the context of that bygone championship game. Everyone at your school is now an honorary member of the football team—though the stadium is condemned from years of neglect, no actual games have been played in decades and anyone with the temerity to point out this discrepancy is summarily sent to detention. On most school days you’re required to study your principal’s old pass-routes and blocking schemes and tell him how ingenious he was to have devised them. All of which would seem insane were it not for the fact that tourists from wealthier schools—schools with actual, functioning football teams—are constantly visiting your class to marvel over how wonderful it was that your team triumphed 50 years ago, and gush about how proud you must be to have such innovative role models. In this context, it’s easy to understand why young Cubans are underwhelmed by the idea of Che: To them, he’s just another sepia portrait in the trophy case—handsome and intriguing, perhaps, but hardly relevant or revolutionary.