Avaliação: Aesthetics and Immiseration – A New Man from the past. The imagery of the guerrillero heroico as amalgation of revolutionary hope and veild traditions

Beards, cigars and military uniforms are icons not necessarily associated with immiseration, but – taken by their own – evoke topoi like elderly wisdom, bourgeois wealth and power. Tough, if this triptych of enlightened authority is mingled into a single image a surprising change happens in one’s mind. Brought together, from this trinity as if by magic arises a figure that is like no other linked to the rebellion against immiseration during the 20th century: the guerrillero heroico.
The somehow antiquated emblems, already present in the very first press accounts on Fidel Castro’s fight in the Sierra Maestra published in 1957, became the aesthetic trademarks of the Cuban Revolution. During the 1960s they appeared to be the iconographic representations for an eschatological hope for radical change and the emergence of the New Man of the 21st century, embodied by no one else like Ernesto Guevara. Decorated with patriarchal symbols of a social order declared outdated, he ironically arose as the idol of a revolution mainly fueled – as contemporary observers like Jean-Paul Sartre put it – by its youthfulness.
The paper seeks to analyze the imagery of the guerrillero heroico, whose aesthetic representation allowed both western intellectuals as well as Fanons Wretched of the Earth to receive it as a universal symbol for liberation. At the same time the anachronistic accessory that characterized his appearance, indicates that the New Man was fused with past traditions.

• Aesthetics
• Intellectual History
• Philosophy