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Parallel to the current flood of essays, articles and newspaper and television reports from all sectors of the political spectrum that insist on the immanent demise of a hobbled Cuban Revolution, there has been the equally hard to miss return of the image of the revolution's heroic martyr: Che Guevara. This time Guevara does not return hanging on the wall of a college dorm or painted onto a wall of an inner city mural, but as a grunge hipster ghost and motorcycle-riding Madison Avenue shill. In this incarnation, his bereted and bearded visage-an artifact of a by-gone idealistic, but certainly naively wrongheaded era-is appearing on everything from wristwatches to TV commercials. Since the ceaseless fin de siecle mass media declarations of the total defeat of twentieth-century world socialism that began with the globalizing free market push of the mid '90s, no fewer than two dozen books on or by Guevara have appeared in English. Moreover, Guevara and the Cuban Revolution have become upscale icons for the aging baby boomer market. Aside from the new "coffee table" edition of the Communist Manifesto, there have been endless special issues on the new "dollar Cuba" in glossy magazines from Cigar Aficionado to The New Yorker and a marketing explosion of Afro-Cuban music as corporate record labels manufacture the latest world music craze-"Dancing with the Enemy"-for those aging liberal arts grads still looking for the real thing. For the more lumpen, there is Guevara's new look as a bereted, talking Chihuahua endorsing fast food tacos or peering out from the faces of low-cost designer "Commie-sheik" watches. This kind of pop appropriation coupled with the return of other iconography of past revolutions is now visible in many American advertising campaigns in the 1990s, working to equate socialist revolutionary iconography with consumer freedom. Youth, idealistic rebellion and participation in the good life of adventure take on the proportion of political propaganda when "infotainment" becomes mixed with current events. A recent Newsweek featured a photo essay of a young and dashing Fidel Castro bounding about the globe as comfortable in tweeds in Central Park as he was in uniform in the cane fields of Oriente, hanging out with Papa Hemingway and a gorgeous long-haired Guevara. How sad it is, the accompanying text...