Yet another Che Guevara sighting in an Obama Texas campaign office.

Makes you go, “Hmm….”

Who was Che Guevara?

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (June 14, 1928 – October 9, 1967), commonly known as Che Guevara, El Che or just Che was an Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary, international political figure, author, military theorist, social philosopher, medical physician, and leader of Cuban and internationalist guerrillas.

As a young man studying medicine, Guevara traveled throughout South America (by motorcycle, boat, horse, and hitchhiking), bringing him into direct contact with the impoverished conditions in which many people (particularly the indigenous peasantry) and some lepers lived. His experiences and observations during these trips led him to the conclusion that the region’s socio-economic inequalities were a result of capitalism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, and imperialism and thus could only be remedied by socialism through revolution; prompting him to intensify his study of Marxism and travel to Guatemala to learn about the reforms being implemented there by President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán.

in 1956, Guevara joined Fidel Castro’s revolutionary 26th of July Movement, which fought a guerrilla war and ultimately seized power from the regime of the U.S. supported Cuban dictator General Fulgencio Batista in 1959. For a few months after the success of the revolution, Guevara was assigned the role of “supreme prosecutor”, overseeing the public “revolutionary tribunals” and executions of between 55 and a few hundred suspected war criminals associated with the previous regime. For his part Jon Lee Anderson author of the biography ‘Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life’ has stated that: “Those persons executed by Guevara or on his orders were condemned for the usual crimes punishable by death at times of war or in its aftermath: desertion, treason, rape, torture, or murder.”

After his death, Guevara became an icon of socialist revolutionary movements and a cultural icon worldwide. An Alberto Korda photo of him has received wide distribution and modification, appearing on countless numbers of t-shirts, consumer products, protest banners, and in many other formats. This fact lead Chilean novelist Ariel Dorfman to espouse that: “Deep inside that T-shirt where we have tried to trap him, the eyes of Che Guevara are still burning with impatience.” Showing the image’s ubiquitous nature and wide appeal, the Maryland Institute College of Art called this picture “the most famous photograph in the world and a symbol of the 20th century.” Further displaying his influence, Time Magazine in 1999 named Ernesto “Che” Guevara one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century under the heading of “heroes and icons.”

After serving in various important posts in the new government, touring the world and meeting with leaders on behalf of Cuban socialism, and writing a number of articles and books on the theory and practice of guerrilla warfare, Guevara left Cuba in 1965 with the intention of fomenting revolutions first in Congo-Kinshasa, and then in Bolivia, where he was captured in a military operation supported by the CIA and the U.S. Army Special Forces. Guevara was summarily executed by the Bolivian Army in the town of La Higuera near Vallegrande on October 9, 1967.

Guevara became a leader among the rebels, a Comandante (English translation: Major), respected by his comrades in arms for his courage and military prowess, he gained a reputation for bravery and military prowess second only to Fidel Castro himself.” During the guerrilla campaign, Guevara was also feared for his ruthlessness, and was responsible for the execution of a number of men accused of being informers, deserters or spies. In March 1958, Guevara was tasked with directing a training camp for new volunteers high in the Sierra Maestra at Minas del Frío, one of a number of military schools set up by the 26th of July Movement. Though wishing to push the battlefront forward and frustrated by his more stationary role, Guevara spent the period developing contacts with sympathetic locals. He also conducted a brief relationship with eighteen-year-old Zoila Rodríguez, the daughter of a local guajiro.

As the war extended throughout eastern Cuba, Guevara and a new column of fighters were dispatched west for the final push towards Havana. In the final days of December 1958, he directed his “suicide squad” (which undertook the most dangerous tasks in the rebel army) in the attack on Santa Clara that turned out to be one of the decisive events of the revolution, although the series of ambushes first during la ofensiva in the heights of the Sierra Maestra, then at Guisa—and the whole Cauto Plains campaign that followed—probably had more military significance. Batista, upon learning that his generals — especially General Cantillo, who had visited Castro at the inactive sugar mill, Central Oriente — were negotiating a separate peace with the rebel leader, fled to the Dominican Republic on January 1, 1959.

On February 7, 1959, the government proclaimed Guevara “a Cuban citizen by birth” in recognition of his role in the triumph of the revolutionary forces. Shortly thereafter, he initiated divorce proceedings to put a formal end to his marriage with Gadea, from whom he had been separated since before leaving Mexico on the Granma. On June 2, 1959, he married Aleida, a Cuban-born member of the 26th of July movement with whom he had been living since late 1958.

He was appointed commander of the La Cabaña Fortress prison, and during his five-month tenure in that post (January 2 through June 12, 1959), he oversaw the trial and execution of many people, among whom were former Batista regime officials and members of the “Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities” (BRAC), a unit of the secret police known by its Spanish acronym. José Vilasuso, an attorney who worked under Guevara at La Cabaña preparing indictments, said that these were lawless proceedings where “the facts were judged without any consideration to general juridical principles” and the findings were pre-determined by Guevara. It is estimated that between 156 and 550 people were executed on Guevara’s extra-judicial orders during this time.

Later, Guevara became an official at the National Institute of Agrarian Reform,INRA and President of the National Bank of Cuba. He signed all Cuban banknotes issued during his fourteen-month presidency with his nickname, “Che”. Throughout his time in the Cuban government, Guevara refused his due salaries of office, insisting on drawing only his meager wages as army commandante in order to set a “revolutionary example”.

Guevara played a key role in bringing to Cuba the Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles that precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. During an interview with the British newspaper Daily Worker some weeks later, he stated that, if the missiles had been under Cuban control, they would have fired them against major U.S. cities.

As revealed in his last speech in Algiers, he had come to view the Northern Hemisphere, led by the U.S. in the West and the Soviet Union in the East, as the exploiter of the Southern Hemisphere. He strongly supported Communist North Vietnam and the Viet Cong in the Vietnam War, and urged the peoples of other developing countries to take up arms and create “100 Vietnams”.

Barack Obama has flags of Che Guevara hanging in his campaign offices. Just think about it.