March 5, 1960 — at a funeral rally in Havana, photographer Alberto Korda took a picture destined to become one of the most reproduced images in human history. But the editorial staff of Revolución, where he worked, didn't print it. The portrait of Ernesto Che Guevara became a global symbol not thanks to Cuban propaganda, but despite its indifference — and this story looks more like a chain of accidents than a triumph of revolutionary aesthetics.
The ship La Coubre exploded in Havana harbor on March 4, 1960. It was carrying weapons and ammunition from Belgium for the Cuban army — 75 people died, hundreds wounded. Fidel Castro immediately accused the CIA of sabotage: the Americans had imposed a trade embargo on Cuba, and every cargo ship became a political act. The funeral rally the next day turned into mass mobilization — the platform gathered the entire revolutionary establishment, and even Jean-Paul Sartre with Simone de Beauvoir, visiting the island, came out on the balcony.
Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez, known as Korda, worked as staff photographer for Revolución — a newspaper Castro created while still underground. He was 31 years old, before the revolution he shot fashion and advertising, now he documented the new reality. He had two cameras: a Leica M with a telephoto lens and a backup with a wide-angle. The rally went on for hours, speeches following one after another, Korda methodically recording what happened.
Che Guevara wasn't the center of attention that day. He stood to the side of the platform, periodically left, came back — minister of industry, busy reorganizing the economy. Korda later recalled that Che came into view for just a few seconds, stopped, looked into the distance. The photographer managed to take two frames with the telephoto camera. In one, a palm frond and the silhouette of cameraman Jorge Masetti got into the frame, in the second — someone's head above Che's shoulder; but crop out the extras — and only the face remained: beret with star, disheveled hair, gaze somewhere above the crowd, hard lines at the mouth. The expression is hard to call heroic — more focused, almost grim. Then Che left the platform again, and the shoot continued.
The Revolución editorial office printed photos of the crowd, the platform, Castro with raised fist the next day. The portrait of Che wasn't even considered — too static, too far from the action. The rally demanded mass, emotion, movement. A close-up of a face, no matter whose, didn't fit the task.
Korda developed the film, made contact prints and filed the negatives in the archive. The first public use of the shot happened only in April 1961 — the portrait appeared in a small announcement about a Che Guevara lecture. The format was utilitarian: event announcement, no PR, no enthusiasm. The photograph went back into oblivion.
Korda didn't try to promote the shot. In Cuba he was a well-known photographer, worked with magazine covers, made official portraits of revolution leaders — he had enough assignments. The image of Che in a beret seemed like an ordinary episode, one of hundreds of frames that spring. The very concept of a "personal archive" on the island was blurred: Revolución photographers shot for the cause, not for exhibitions. Negatives were stored at home or in the editorial office, without cataloging, without a tracking system — the revolution was creating visual history in real time, and nobody thought that some shot would outlive the era.
Giangiacomo Feltrinelli came to Cuba in 1967. Italian publisher-millionaire, communist by conviction, adventurer by nature — he was already famous for publishing Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago," smuggled out of the USSR against the will of Soviet authorities. Cuba interested him as a new center of revolutionary thought, and he was building connections with Cuban intellectuals.
Korda met Feltrinelli, who came to the studio with a letter of recommendation from Cuban authorities: the publisher had been sent there looking for a portrait of Che for books and posters. When he saw the portrait of Che, the reaction was instant: that's it. Korda handed him two prints without hesitation — free, without contract, without discussing rights. For the photographer this was a gesture of solidarity: image of a revolutionary for a revolutionary publisher. The question of commerce didn't even come up — Feltrinelli promised to use the shot "for the right purposes," and Korda believed him.
October 9, 1967 — the Bolivian army announced the liquidation of Ernesto Che Guevara. The news exploded across leftist Europe and Latin America — Che transformed from living politician into martyr of the cause. Feltrinelli reacted immediately: he launched mass printing of posters with Korda's portrait. The shot spread through leftist bookstores, student unions, activist groups. By spring 1968, when Paris was gripped by student unrest, Che's face already hung on university walls across Europe.
Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick saw the photograph and created a stylized graphic version based on it — a high-contrast two-color poster, simplified to an icon. Fitzpatrick later claimed he made the image free for non-commercial use in memory of Che. This version spread even wider than the original: it could be easily reproduced by screen printing, stencil, even by hand. Korda's portrait became a matrix for thousands of variations, and with each new iteration the connection to the source frame weakened.
Korda learned about the international popularity of the shot by accident — through acquaintances who returned from Europe. They told him Che's face hung in London, Paris, Milan, but the scale of the phenomenon remained abstract. Cuba was cut off from the capitalist world by trade embargo, Western magazines and newspapers arrived with delay or didn't arrive at all. The photographer continued working on the island: shot sugar cane, new factories, athletes, pioneers.
In Cuba there was no developed copyright law in the Western sense — intellectual property was considered a bourgeois relic. This didn't mean authors had no rights: their names were credited in publications, they were paid salaries or fees for work. But the idea of licensing, royalties, international control over use seemed alien. Korda was known on the island, his work was printed in newspapers and magazines — he didn't feel robbed because he didn't perceive the shot as private property. Che's image served the revolution, and that was more important than money.
The Western press later created a myth about the "poor Cuban photographer robbed by capitalism." Reality was more complex. Korda wasn't destitute: he had status, an apartment, a studio. He didn't chase payments because he lived in a system where art was financed by the state, not the market. The question of authorship only arose when Che's portrait began selling not as a political symbol, but as a commercial product — and this boundary turned out to be fundamental for Korda.
In 2000 British advertising agency Lowe Lintas launched a campaign for Smirnoff vodka. The creative was built on playing with images: Che with hammer and sickle, in which the sickle is replaced by a red chili pepper — revolution as spice for vodka. The agency got the photograph from Rex Features — a British photo agency that had a copy of Korda's shot in its archive but didn't have rights for its commercial use.
Korda saw the ad in a European magazine. The reaction was instant and furious. He didn't object to political posters, student prints, even graffiti — all that was part of the leftist movement. But using Che's image to sell alcohol crossed the line. Che didn't drink, was an ascetic, dedicated his life to fighting imperialism — and now his face was selling a transnational corporation's product.
Korda filed suit against Rex Features and Lowe Lintas. The case didn't reach trial: the agency agreed to out-of-court settlement. The official sum wasn't announced, but the press estimated it around $50,000. Korda didn't keep the money — he gave it to the Cuban healthcare system. Western media interpreted this gesture as "the nobility of a poor artist." In reality it was a political act: Korda was defending not his pocket, but the meaning of the image.
The legal precedent was more important than the payout. Korda publicly stated he wouldn't pursue non-commercial use of the photograph — activists, students, leftist organizations could print the portrait freely. But commercial exploitation required permission and payment. This position was a compromise between Cuban collectivism and Western copyright — Korda created his own ethical license, in which money served as a filter of intentions.
Che's portrait became capitalism's most paradoxical commercial product. The face of an Argentine revolutionary, killed at 39 in the Bolivian mountains, turned into a universal symbol of protest — so universal it lost concrete meaning. By the early 2000s the image was printed on T-shirts, mugs, lighters, bikinis, mouse pads. Manufacturers didn't know who was depicted in the shot, buyers weren't interested in the biography. Che became a rebellion-as-a-lifestyle brand — a marker of belonging to a counterculture that had long since turned into a consumer niche.
Jim Fitzpatrick in a 2007 interview admitted he regrets the free distribution of his graphic version. He wanted to help the leftist movement, but created a template for global commercialization. But stopping the process was impossible: the image multiplied virally, before the internet appeared — through offset printing, stencils, pirate runs. Copyright works when there's centralized control over production. Che's portrait spread like a folk song: anyone could sing their version, and nobody remembered who wrote the melody.
Korda died in 2001, a few months after the Smirnoff case. His heirs continued defending rights to the shot — no longer from ideological, but from legal considerations. The photograph was valued by art critics as one of the most important portraits of the 20th century, on par with Steve McCurry's "Afghan Girl" and Robert Doisneau's "Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville." But unlike them, Che's portrait existed in two parallel realities: museum artifact and street merch.
Today the image lives outside the context of March 5, 1960. Few of those wearing a T-shirt with Che know about the La Coubre explosion, about Feltrinelli, about Korda. The shot became what it didn't plan to be: visual noise, space filler, decorative element. The revolution Che wanted to make lost to the global market. But the portrait that was supposed to immortalize it won — by turning into the best-selling image of anti-capitalist resistance in the history of capitalism.