Origin of the most famous   photo of  Che

That boy that listened to the radio at the end of the fifties and shivered With the confusing news coming in from Cuba, where a handful of Insurrectionists had fought against Fulgencio Batista's régime. A decade later, he learned that the same Sierra Maestra's bearded and dirty men had imposed a new system on the island to which they struggled to maintain its Independence from the mighty of the North.

Alberto Korda

By: MANUEL TALENS

In 1968, during the French May, one of the legendary passengers of the Granma was executed in the Bolivian forest, and he had reached the range of universal myth until then awarded only to the stars of Hollywood. He became a lay saint to the incantation of " thousands of youth" who claimed his image for the streets of Paris, showing a picture in that austere face, framed by wind blown hair and a black beret with the star of Comandante. He looked to the infinite, Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, Argentinean doctor and Cuban soldier by adoption, better known as Che Guevara.

It was that same year, in Geneva, when I got the French translation of two books which left me wide print: Passages of the revolutionary war, where the galeno described with precise lines the vicissitudes of that terrible war, and his friend's passionate biographer Ricardo Rojo. In the cover of the last book that I still save; there was the same portrait, paraphrasing John Lennon, was already more famous than the one of Jesus Christ. The characteristics of this picture which inspired the imaginary collectiveness of an entire generation, are something singular. It was taken by a native photographer from Havana named Alberto Korda. Until the revolutionary victory, he had earned his living illustrating the mob and intellectual night life of the Cuban capital.

In 1960 Korda assumed the new ideological reality, becoming a historical illustrator of some facts that the world, the cold war and the planetary politics were modeling. Because Korda never had any merchant like mentality of his art, he gave Che's photograph to an Italian publisher -Gian Giacomo Feltrinelli - who reproduced it to poster size. He then earned millions from the sale of it. Nevertheless, he did not forget to give credit to the author. Time, however, has taken charge of putting things in their place and Alberto Korda is today an internationally respected figure.

Some years ago I saw him at José Luis Balbín Key, talking about Che to García Santesmases, Gary Prado (the Bolivian military man who captured the guerilla fighter) and to a patriot from Miami whose name I can't remember.

Korda impressed me for his easy dialectical style and for his unchanged attachments to some principles that he had put in a corner at the present time after the fall of the USSR.

He would had said to me (the turns that the world gives), that the boy who used to listen to the radio, the confusing news coming in from Cuba in the fifties was some days ago drinking a beer in a bar of Valencia. 

The same AlbertoKorda had come here, on his way to Pesaro, to receive the prize that the Cartelera Turia has granted him. 

And he spoke to me for a while of Che Guevara, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone of Beauvoir, Régis Debray and García Márquez. 

There are people that, like fermented wine, improve with aging. Alberto Korda belongs to one of them.