why is Che Guevara so symbolic?

Answer 1

Publicity.

He was really a nasty little dweeb. Not a person you would have wanted to know.
When a martyr was of use, he was conveniently dead.

Answer 2

All good answers. Che Guevara was a Stalinesque murderer and purger. He had "Heroes of the Revolution" shot to keep his hands on the levers of power.

Answer 3

Because he died young and photogenic (at 37), before he would have acculumated a few scandals along the way.

I doubt he would be so famous if he spent his life as the Cuban Minister for Health, with the ravages of age, worries and calories taking its toll on appearance.

Why is James Dean famous today when hardly anybody has seen his films?

Answer 4

He stands for having courage in your convictions, which is an admirable quality, even if you don't necessarily agree with the actions taken to demonstrate that conviction

Answer 5

to us Cubans he is just a sadistic f*** That killed people left and right and died chocking from asthma hiding because he wasn't man enough to face the consequences

Answer 6

Because he was Argentinean!

http://www.che-lives.com/home/

Answer 7

cause he's the one of the best revolutionary hero of all time its like asking why is hitler hated because of what they did

Answer 8

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (June 14, 1928 – October 9, 1967), commonly known as "Che" Guevara or "el Che", was an Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary, political figure, and leader of Cuban and internationalist guerrillas. As a young man studying medicine, Guevara traveled rough throughout Latin America, bringing him into direct contact with the impoverished conditions in which many people lived. His experiences and observations during these trips led him to the conclusion that the region's socioeconomic inequalities could only be remedied by revolution. Guevara's trip through Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador showed him the true conditions of poor people in Latin America. During the final days of December 1953 he arrived in Guatemala where leftist President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán headed a populist government that, through land reform and other initiatives, was attempting to bring an end to the latifundia system. In a contemporaneous letter to his Aunt Beatriz, Guevara explained his motivation for settling down for a time in Guatemala: "In Guatemala", he wrote, "I will perfect myself and accomplish whatever may be necessary in order to become a true revolutionary."
Some time later, Guevara joined Fidel Castro's paramilitary 26th of July Movement, which seized power in Cuba in 1959.
Guevara became a leader among the rebels, a "Comandante" (English translation: Major), respected by his comrades in arms for his courage and military prowess, and feared for what some have described as ruthlessness: He was responsible for the execution of many men accused of being informers, deserters or spies. 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 bloody 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 America" — were negotiating a separate peace with the rebel leader, fled to the Dominican Republic on January 1, 1959.
On February 7, 1959, the victorious 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, and 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" (a unit of the secret police know by its Spanish acronym BRAC). According to José Vilasuso, an attorney who worked under Guevara at La Cabaña preparing indictments, these were lawless proceedings where "the facts were judged without any consideration to general juridical principles" and the findings were pre-determined by Guevara.
Later, Guevara became an official at the National Institute of Agrarian Reform, and President of the National Bank of Cuba (somewhat ironically, as he often condemned money, favored its abolition, and showed his disdain by signing Cuban banknotes with his nickname, "Che").Signature It is sometimes said that Guevara ended up in this position because Fidel Castro asked if there were any economists in the room and Che, thinking Castro had asked for Communists, put his hand up.
During this time his fondness for chess was rekindled, and he attended and participated in most national and international tournaments held in Cuba. He was particularly eager to encourage young Cubans to take up the game, and organized various activities designed to stimulate their interest in it.
Even as early as 1959, Guevara helped organize revolutionary expeditions overseas, all of which failed. The first attempt was made in Panama; another in the Dominican Republic (led by Henry Fuerte, also known as "El Argelino", and Enrique Jiménez Moya) took place on 14 June of that same year.
In 1960 Guevara provided first aid to victims during the La Coubre arms shipment rescue operation that went further awry when a second explosion occurred, resulting in well over a hundred dead. It was at the memorial service for the victims of this explosion that Alberto Korda took the most famous photograph of him. Whether La Coubre was sabotaged or merely exploded by accident is not clear. Those who favour the sabotage theory sometimes attribute this to the Central Intelligence Agency and sometimes name William Alexander Morgan, a former rival of Guevara's in the anti-Batista forces of the central provinces and later a putative CIA agent, as the perpetrator. Cuban exiles have put forth the theory that it was done by Guevara's USSR-loyalist rivals.
Guevara later served as Minister of Industries, in which post he helped formulate Cuban socialism, and became one of the country's most prominent figures. In his book "Guerrilla Warfare", he advocated replicating the Cuban model of revolution initiated by a small group (foco) of guerrillas without the need for broad organizations to precede armed insurrection. His essay "El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba" (1965) (Man and Socialism in Cuba) advocates the need to shape a "new man" (hombre nuevo) in conjunction with a socialist state. Some saw Guevara as the simultaneously glamorous and austere model of that "new man."
During the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion Guevara did not participate in the fighting, having been ordered by Castro to a command post in Cuba's westernmost Pinar del Río province where he was involved in fending off a decoy force. He did, however, suffer a bullet wound to the face during this deployment, which he said had been caused by the accidental discharge of his own gun.
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.
After serving in various important posts in the new government 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 CIA/ U.S. Army Special Forces-organized military operation. Guevara was summarily executed by the Bolivian Army in La Higuera near Vallegrande on October 9, 1967.
After his death, Guevara became an icon of socialist revolutionary movements worldwide. An Alberto Korda photo of him shown has received wide distribution and modification. The Maryland Institute College of Art called this picture "the most famous photograph in the world and a symbol of the 20th century."
With such a life (and such a death), Ernesto Guevara became the hero of all the communists parties in the world and, most of all, of the left movements across Europe, which saw him as a freedom fighter, a man who sacrificed his life to set the third world free from the oppression of military dictatures (which was often supported by the United States for their strong repression of communism, a strategic value in Cold War's era).
While pictures of Guevara's dead body were being circulated and the circumstances of his death debated, his legend began to spread. Demonstrations in protest against his execution occurred throughout the world, and articles, tributes, songs and poems were written about his life and death. Latin America specialists advising the U.S. State Department immediately recognized the importance of the demise of “the most glamorous and reportedly most successful revolutionary”, noting that Guevara would be eulogized by communists and other leftists as “the model revolutionary who met a heroic death”.
Such predictions gained increasing credibility as Guevara became a potent symbol of rebellion and revolution during the global student protests of the late 1960s. Left wing activists responded to Guevara's apparent indifference to rewards and glory, and concurred with Guevara's sanctioning of violence as a necessity to instill socialist ideals. The slogan 'Che lives!' began to appear on walls throughout the west, while Jean-Paul Sartre, a leading figure in the movement, encouraged the adulation by describing Guevara as "the most complete human being of our age".
Typically, responses to Guevara's legacy followed partisan lines. The US State Department was advised that his death would come as a relief to non-leftist Latin Americans, who had feared possible insurgencies in their own countries. Subsequent analysts have also shed light on aspects of cruelty in Guevara’s methods, and analysed what Fidel Castro described as Guevara’s “excessively aggressive quality”. Studies addressing problematic characteristics of Guevara's life have cited his principal role in setting up Cuba's first post-revolutionary labor camps, his unsympathetic treatment of captured fighters during various guerrilla campaigns, and his frequent humiliations of those deemed his intellectual inferiors. Though much opposition to Guevara's methods has come from the political right, critical evaluation has also come from groups such as anarchists and civil libertarians, some of whom consider Guevara an authoritarian, anti-working-class Stalinist, whose legacy was the creation of a more bureaucratic, authoritarian regime. Detractors have also theorized that in much of Latin America, Che-inspired revolutions had the practical result of reinforcing brutal militarism for many years.
As you can see, everyone analized Guevara's figure from his own point of view: I think that Guevara was a freedom fighter who became an oppressor himself when he was corrupted by the true power. It's the destiny of all the revolutionary in history, from Robespierre to Lenin, from Cromwell to Castro.