Che Guevara and My Son By Krista Bremer

A couple weeks ago I traveled to New York City for work. It was my first visit to the city, and on my one free afternoon, I shot out of my hotel room and into the city like a pinball. I popped in and out of stores. I raced up and down streets. I bounced in and out of subway tunnels. I wanted to see it all: the visual assault of Times Square; the carousel at Central Park; the tiny, closet-like cafés in the Soho district; the children skipping through the fountain at Washington Square Park. I was so busy shopping I didn't even have time to buy anything. In the evening, as I made my way back to my room, I passed a street vendor selling t-shirts for children printed with images of pop icons. The shirts seemed like the perfect New York City souvenir for my children: hip, edgy, irreverent. For my six-year old daughter, I chose a purple shirt with Einstein sticking his tongue out for the camera. For my two-year old son, a bright blue shirt with Che Guevara's chiseled profile set against a red background.

I was pleased with my purchases, and so were my kids. The first morning after I returned, I dressed them in their new shirts. On the drive to my son's Spanish immersion daycare, my daughter amused herself in the back seat by teaching her brother to say the name of the man on his shirt. He caught on quickly. Over and over in the car, she pointed to his shirt and asked, "Who's that?" And he responded proudly: "Shay Gebaba," and all three of us giggled. When we arrived at his classroom, he ran up to his teacher, a soft-spoken Cuban woman who never failed to greet him with a hug. He pointed to his chest and squealed: "Shay Gebaba!"

Her eyes widened when she saw his shirt. Her face froze for a moment, and then she seemed to compose herself. She smiled weakly at my son. "Muy bien," she praised him halfheartedly. My Libyan husband told me that when he picked our son up that afternoon, his teacher pulled him aside. She was earnest. She struggled to find the right words. It was clear she had something important to say. In broken English, she told him Guevara was a very bad man – as brutal to the Cubans as Qaddaffi is to the Libyans. It was a vivid comparison for my husband, who had moved halfway around the world to escape Qaddaffi's brutal oppression.

Later that night, when my husband told me about this exchange, I was shocked. Searching through my mind, I had to admit I knew very little about Guevara. I thought of him as a symbol of rebellion against oppression and a voice for the poor. I'm embarrassed to say that I also thought of him as a very handsome guy, one that looked great on a motorcycle -- at least in the movie I had seen. Had I really dressed my plump-cheeked, curly-headed, innocent boy in the image of a brutal oppressor?

The next day, I pulled his teacher aside. In broken Spanish, I apologized for my ignorance and asked her to tell me more. Her eyes moistened as she told me about a dear family friend who had been tortured and executed by Che Guevara. She said that seeing my son in that t-shirt felt to her like I might feel to see a beautiful, innocent child wearing the image of Bin Laden. She graciously reassured me that it was not my fault; I had just been misled by all the American propaganda about Che Guevara.

Her last statement made me feel like a pastry chef who has just been told the cream is rancid. I thought I knew how to pick out propaganda. After all, I have a degree in journalism. I have spent countless hours in undergraduate and graduate school classes deconstructing media messages. I work for the independent press. My daughter and I play a game where we count the number of subtle lies we can identify in advertisements. Moi? A victim of propaganda? There must be some mistake! I wanted to exclaim.

One Google search confirmed my ignorance: "murder" and "Che Guevara" brought 390,000 hits. I read about the atrocities Guevara committed as Castro's right hand man, after the overthrow of President Batista of Cuba. I learned that his plan to "liberate the people" included the extermination of his opposition – including Cuba's intellectuals and upper classes. I read about his infamous prison, La Cabana, in which several thousand political prisoners were tortured and executed.

Marx was right: capitalism ultimately consumes anything that tries to oppose it. It is a great irony that while Guevara fought his whole life against capitalism and the United States, his image is now being sold back to us as a commodity, a twisted icon of rebellion. Looking at my son's shirt once more, I could now see eerie similarities to the images of Qaddaffi that seemed to tower over me everywhere I went during my recent visit to Libya: the low perspective of his face that made him look omnipotent. The military dress. The stoic expression. The airbrushed, exaggeratedly handsome features. How could I not have noticed these things before? I won't let my son wear clothing branded with Disney characters, because I don't want him to be a walking billboard for corporations, but I had unknowingly dressed him in the image of a murderer.

My son's brand-new Guevara shirt is going straight into the trash. Now, whenever I see Einstein's playful face plastered across my daughter's round tummy, I wonder what dark secrets he carried underneath his wild mop of grey hair. I wonder when someone will pull me aside and make me realize how little I knew about Einstein after all.

Krista Bremer lives in North Carolina with her Libyan husband, their curly-haired boy, and his precocious big sister. She loves long runs in the woods, loitering at her local library, and hearing her children laugh.

Want to talk about it? Check out the hipmama.com forums.